a favorite genre of many scholars has been articles with titles like “An Unknown Poet of the Twelfth Century” or “Another Forgotten Author of the Enlightenment,” and so on. Where does this unlimited store of the “unknowns” and the “forgotten” come from? These are the ones who in their own era had slipped in among the “nonexistent” and were ignored by science, since its point of view had fallen in line with the normative views of the era. But points of view shift—and the “unknowns” are suddenly revealed. People remember that the “unknown philosopher” Louis Claude de Saint-Martin was already thirty-five in the year that Voltaire died; that Nicolas-Edme Rétif iv wrote over 200 volumes that continue to stump historians of literature when they call their author now “a minor Rousseau,” now “the Balzac of the eighteenth century”; that during the Romantic era in Russia there lived a Vasily Narezhny, who wrote about two dozen novels that went “unnoticed” by his contemporaries, since they already displayed features of Realism.
In this way, a picture of semiotic unification is created on the meta-level, while a diversity of tendencies seethes on the level of the semiotic “reality” it is describing. If the map of the surface layer is painted a uniformly even color, the bottom layer is brightly mottled and has a multitude of intersecting boundaries. When, at the close of the eighth century, Charlemagne raised the cross and sword to the Saxons, and St. Vladimir baptized Kievan Rus a century later, the great barbarian empires of the West and the East turned into Christian states. Their Christianity, however, suited their self-characterization and was situated on a political and religious meta-level, with language traditions and diverse everyday compromises seething beneath it. It could not have been otherwise under the conditions of mass and, at times, forced baptism. The horrifying massacre that Charlemagne inflicted upon the captive pagan Saxons at Verden could hardly foster the propagation of the principles of the Sermon on the Mount among the barbarians.v
And yet it would be wrong to suggest that even a simple change of self-identification held no sway on “lower” levels, that it didn’t foster a transformation of Christianization into Evangelism, that it didn’t unify the cultural space of these states, now at the level of “real semiotics.” In this way, currents of meaning flow not only along the horizontal layers of the semiosphere, but also act along the vertical, forming complex dialogues among its various layers.
Yet the unity of the semiosphere’s semiotic space is achieved not only through metastructural constructions, but, even to a significantly greater degree, through the unity of the relation to the boundary that divides the semiosphere’s inner space from the outer, its in from its out.
THE IDEA OF BOUNDARY
Translated from Iu. M. Lotman, “Poniatie granitsy,” in Semiosfera, 257–268. The notion of the boundary as a site of semiotic translation, rather than obstruction, offers interesting extensions. It bears, of course, on the emergent field of Boundary Studies, which incorporates the study of border areas, but it also applies more broadly to approaches that aim to conceptualize the contact between cultures and the transfer of ideas and values across their borders, such as Transfer Studies, Transnational History, or Histoire croisée. For a good overview and critical discussion of these various approaches, see Sebastian Conrad, What is Global History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). In its emphasis on the transformations that occur in the act of translation, Lotman’s expansive understanding of translation resonates with current debates in Translation Studies and Cultural Anthropology about cultural translation. See, for example, Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
The semiosphere’s inner space is, in a paradoxical way, simultaneously both uneven, asymmetrical, and unified, uniform. Consisting of structures in conflict, it possesses an individuality as well. This space’s self-description implies a first-person pronoun. One of the basic mechanisms of semiotic individuality is the boundary. And one can define this boundary as the feature where periodic form ends. This space is defined as “ours,” “one’s own,” “cultural,” “safe,” “harmoniously organized,” and so forth. It is opposed by that which is “their space,” “foreign,” “enemy,” “dangerous,” “chaotic.”
Any culture begins by dividing the world into inner (“one’s own”) and outer (“their”) space. How this binary separation is interpreted depends on the culture’s typology. Such division itself, however, belongs to universals. The boundary can separate the living from the dead, the settled from the nomadic, the city from the steppe, it can have a governmental, social, national, confessional, or some other character. It is striking how unconnected civilizations find convergent expressions for characterizing the world beyond the boundary. This is how a Kievan monastic chronicler in the eleventh century described the lives of other, still-pagan East Slavic tribes:
… the Drevlyans live in a beastly manner, living brutishly: they kill one another, they eat all in filth, and hold no wedding, but abduct maidens by the water. And the Radimichi, and the Vyatichi, and the Northerns all keep the same custom: they live in the forest like any beast, they eat everything in filth, and speak foul before their fathers and before their daughters-in-law, and there are no wedding feasts among them, but festivities between the villages, they get together for festivities, dancing, and all manner of demonic songs. …1
And here is how, in the eighth century, a Frankish chronicler—a Christian—described the mores of the pagan Saxons: “Vicious by nature, devoted to a demonic cult, enemies of our religion, they respect the laws neither of men, nor of God, what is not permitted they permit themselves.”2
These last words offer a clear expression of how “our” world and “theirs” mirror each other: what is not permitted to us, is permitted to them.
Any existence is possible only in the forms of a given spatial and temporal concreteness. Human history is only a particular instance of this law. A person is immersed in the real, the space that nature has given him. The constants of the earth’s rotation (the sun’s movement across the sky), of the movement of the stars in the heavens, of nature’s transitory cycles—these have an immediate influence on how someone models the world within his own consciousness. No less important are the physical constants of the human body that assign predetermined relations to the world around it. The dimensions of the human body determine the fact that the world of mechanics, of its laws, appears to a person as “natural,” whereas he imagines the world of elementary particles or cosmic spaces only in the abstract, having first committed a certain violence against his own consciousness. The correlation between a person’s average weight, the force of earth’s gravity, and the body’s vertical posture has brought about the opposition of high and low that is universal in all human cultures, with a wide range of substantive interpretations (religious, social, political, moral, or others). One may doubt whether the expression “he reached the summit,” which people understand regardless of culture, would be quite so obvious for a thinking fly or a person born in zero-gravity.i
“High,” “the summit”—these require no explanation. The expression Qui ne vole au sommet tombe au plus bas degré3 (Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, Satires) is just as comprehensible as La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un coeur d’homme. Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux (Albert Camus, Le mythe de Sisyphe).4
Despite the tremendous temporal and spatial distance between Camus and Yan Vyshatich, the commander of the military campaign against the pagans in eleventh-century Rus, they had an identical concept of the semantics of high and low. Before executing their soothsayers (shamans), Yan asked them where their god resides, and (according to the monk-chronicler) he received the following answer: “He rests in the abyss.” To which Yan explained authoritatively: “What kind of god rests in an abyss? That is a demon, for God is in the heavens …”
This turn of phrase delighted the chronicler, and he pressed it into service,
