Excerpts from universe of the mind

a semiotic theory of culture

pp. 191-214

in: Donald Favareau, Essential readings in biosemiotics, Berlin, Springer, 2009

Abstract

By the time that Thomas A. Sebeok ventured into the Soviet-held city of Tartu, Estonia to meet with the émigré Russian semiotician Juri Lotman in 1970, a rich half-century's worth of semiotic scholarship had been steadily accruing behind the Iron Curtain" under conditions that would have been barely imaginable to Lotman's academic counterparts in the West. Born five years after the Bolshevik revolution in Petrograd, Russia on February 28, 1922, Lotman entered Leningrad State University in 1939 to study "philology" under the renowned literary analysts Boris Eichenbaum (1886–1959) and Vladimir Propp (1895–1970). Eichenbaum and Propp had come from a long tradition of Russian "formalist" literary analysis whose interest in pre-Revolutionary texts and folklore, and whose belief that literary structure was not strictly the product of Marxist historical dialectic, was officially outlawed under Stalin's reign. Indeed, to the extent that the tenets of Literary Formalism were incompatible with those of Soviet Realism, avocation of the former "was a heresy that could lead to deportation to Siberia" (Liukkonen 2008: o.l.).