States, and Japan.9 His reputation steadily grew over the years, and by 1988 he had become a TV star, presenting his study of the culture of the nobility in a series of televised lectures. When he died on October 28, 1993, Estonian president Lennart Meri interrupted his state visit to Germany to deliver an oration after the funeral: the Jewish scholar who had been hired to assist in russifying the Republic had become a pillar of Estonian national pride.10
Since then, Estonian and Russian academic circles have engaged in a lively and spirited reevaluation of Lotman’s legacy. While his colleagues and former students at Tartu continued to work broadly within his conceptual frameworks, two different lines of succession coalesced institutionally and methodologically. Work on semiotics proceeded apace in the Department of Semiotics at the University of Tartu, while work on Russian cultural history was carried forward in the Department of Slavic Studies. This division reflected a breakdown of the unique synthesis between history and theory Lotman had attempted, as literary and cultural historians in the 1990s and 2000s in Russia engaged in much more empiricist, text- and archive-based, and theory-adverse studies. Lotman’s semiotic legacy found a home on the pages of Sign Systems Studies, a journal Lotman had founded in 1964 under the title of Trudy po znakovym systemam and which was rebranded as an English-language semiotics journal in 1998.11 The work in literary and cultural history by Lotman’s former students and colleagues was dispersed across various journals, but came together in the four thick issues of the Lotman Volume [Lotmanovskii sbornik].12 Meanwhile, the history of the Tartu-Moscow school became a contested site, with various participants making contradictory claims about its emergence and development.13 Nonetheless a series of recurring major conferences—the yearly “Lotman Seminars” in Tartu; the “International Lotman Congresses” in 2002 and 2012, also in Tartu; the “Annual Lotman Conference” in Tallinn; and the “Lotman Readings” [Lotmanovskie chteniia] in Moscow, which had their 26th occurrence in 2018—testify to Lotman’s continuing relevance, even if not all the works presented at these meetings are directly indebted to his methodologies. In the last ten years, the Estonian Semiotics Repository Foundation, which holds Lotman’s personal archive, has enabled the publication of archival texts and the incipient exploration of Lotman’s yet unstudied international networks.14
In parallel with these scholarly developments, Lotman’s public posture and ethical stance also began to attract scrutiny. Lotman’s own self-fashioning strategies came into view, which helped debunk some of the partly self-forged mythology that surrounded his public aura. Andrey Zorin analyzed how Lotman’s work on Karamzin was inflected by his carefully honed stance of stoic, if not heroic, disengagement from public affairs, while projecting a front of scrupulous moral integrity and commitment to preserving high culture’s historical legacy for future benefit.15 Some people tried, perhaps not quite successfully, to impugn this image of moral probity. Somewhat scabrous anecdotes about Lotman’s everyday behavior at Tartu reached the pages of an elitist glossy magazine in 1998.16 More recently, the publication of Faina Sonkina’s memoirs revealed that from 1968 until his death, while married to Zara Mints, а fine scholar of the Silver Age, Lotman conducted an intense, if geographically distanced amorous relationship with Sonkina, one interlaced with earnest and agonizing reflections on morality.17 From a sociological perspective, Maxim Waldstein drew an interesting if somewhat overwrought portrait of Lotman as a savvy operator working existing institutions and networks to carve out a position of power and relative freedom, in contrast to his more widespread image as a victim of state ostracization and as a heroic defender of core humanist values.18
During the 1970s and 1980s, Lotman’s works and those of other Soviet semioticians became broadly influential in American and West European academia; next to Mikhail Bakhtin, Lotman was the most widely read and translated theorist of the former Soviet Union.19 He spoke to an astonishing range of disciplines and authors: the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, new historicist Stephen Greenblatt, semiotician Umberto Eco, reception theorist Wolfgang Iser, feminist critic Julia Kristeva, and marxist critic Frederic Jameson, to name a few, have productively used Lotman’s concepts. Nonetheless, his brand of semiotics never became as prominent in the English-speaking world as did French Structuralism, and Lotman received his most intense hearing in Germany and Italy, rather than in the United States or the United Kingdom. There are many reasons for this state of affairs, ranging from the fact that mainstream book-length translations of his works appeared after the structuralist wave had already swept over the United States, to his unique blending of theory with (Russian) history, which rendered access to his scholarship more difficult and less urgent to a non-Russianist.20
In the 1980s Lotman began to develop a theory of culture no longer based on the Saussurean distinction between code and utterance, but rather on how messages are embedded in a fluid semiotic environment from which they draw their meaning. Lotman calls this semiotic environment the semiosphere, a concept he developed in English translation in Universe of the Mind, a volume published in 1990. Internationally, however, Lotman’s reputation was wedded to that of structuralist semiotics, and as a result, his later works have not found the audience they deserve. Most scholars continue to reference primarily his earlier pieces.21 Yet, after the English publication of Culture and Explosion in 2009 and of The Unpredictable Workings of Culture in 2014, and with the republication of some sections from Universe of the Mind in semiotics anthologies, there are some signs that this is beginning to change.
Universe of the Mind presents a theory of cultural dynamics that results from interactions between non-homologous, that is, mutually untranslatable languages within a contentious field of discourses aspiring to move from the periphery to the center. Lotman’s notion of the semiosphere, the semiotic environment in which communication occurs and from which it derives its codes, holds great interdisciplinary appeal. It tends to supersede the binary categories left over from structuralism (and sometimes retained in deconstruction) and to provide an underlying foundation for the local investigations undertaken by cultural studies. It emphasizes shifting boundaries and hierarchies, permutations between the center and the periphery, mediations and translations, isomorphic relations between events on the micro and macro levels, and unity through diversity. In that sense, the concept of the semiosphere is close to what Galin Tihanov has called “marginocentricity,” defined as a regime in which “centre and periphery become fluid, mobile, and provisional, prone to swapping their places and exchanging cultural valences.”22 The organicist metaphor of the semiosphere serves not to essentialize discourse, but to restore to it a sense of unceasing life, of the continuous metabolic exchanges discourses undergo when they are thrown into the world.23 In that sense, Lotman’s semiosphere stands in sharp contrast with the notions of world literature developed by Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova, for whom it is invariably at the center of culture that innovation happens, while the peripheries are confined to assimilating the forms imported from it.24
One of the attractive and unique dimensions of Lotman’s theory is that it offers a way to conceptualize change and innovation, both on the individual and historical scales, but without lapsing into antiquated humanist or Romantic assumptions. Culture and Explosion explores two different types of change: continuous evolution and abrupt, unpredictable transformation (that is, “explosion”) that turns a culture, especially a binary one, upside down. The existence of explosive changes throws an element of creativity and chance into history, thus calling into question meta-narratives that presume to encapsulate history’s unfolding. Lotman thought that he was witnessing such a period of transformative change in the early 1990s, just as he was working on this book. Indeed, he ended this study on a plea to avoid “the historical catastrophe” that would result from missing the opportunity to abandon Russia’s binaries and to join the more supple ternary system he ascribed to European culture. From the current perspective of rabid polarization between Russia and the notional “West,” fostered by demagogues on both sides, Lotman’s poignant hope highlights the extent to which he saw himself as a scion of European culture, not unlike the Russian noble elite he described in some of his later works.
For a reader accustomed, say, to French cultural theory,
