Foucault were engaged in a sustained critique of prevailing ideologies, which they exposed in seemingly ordinary cultural formations and social processes, for example, in mass culture (Barthes) and clinical practice (Foucault), Lotman endeavored first and foremost to recover and protect the rich layeredness of high culture. There is a larger context to this, and to understand what is at stake we can draw on the productive opposition Caryl Emerson has proposed between the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” a term coined by Paul Ricoeur, and the “hermeneutics of recovery of meaning,” which Emerson identifies as a premise shared by Russian thinkers as diverse as Lotman, Bakhtin, Lev Vygotsky, and Lydia Ginzburg.25 Whereas French theory took its impetus from the effort to unmask the false consciousness at work in cultural production (“suspecting” the ways it conceals the iniquities of the underlying system of economic production and of prevailing power relations), Emerson contends that what unifies these scholars is the belief that the word can change the world, and hence that culture is invested with a forward-looking responsibility to model desirable and morally sustainable behavior. For Lotman, this implicitly entailed foregrounding the world-making powers of prominent luminaries from the past, such as Karamzin, Pushkin, and the Decembrists (or their wives). Accordingly, Lotman’s most innovative “move” in his treatment of literature consisted in analysing the ways in which it disseminates codes of behavior, as well as models of feelings, which can easily cross cultural and national boundaries and thus demonstrate their porousness (for an example, see his piece “A Woman’s World” in this volume). In so doing, Lotman laid one of the foundations for the emotional turn in Russian history and culture.26 His faith in the creative, that is, constructivist powers of high culture arose in the highly ideologized atmosphere of Soviet cultural politics, which tightly controlled innovative cultural production and, in particular, restricted how aristocratic culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries could be received and understood. It thus acquired a tacit oppositional valence, which, however, could never become explicit or militant. While Lotman maintained an outward front of political aloofness, his concept of the semiosphere rests on a semiotic understanding of power: the discourses that vie for a position at the center shape our consciousness and constitute our reality. They exert, rather than transmit, power.27
Whereas Barthes was primarily interested in ideology, Lotman undertook the study of culture as a meaning-producing mechanism. There exists some superficial terminological overlap between Barthes and Lotman, which scholars have recently begun to explore, notably the notion of a “secondary modeling system,” the ideological, artistic, or religious constructs that build on natural language as the primary system.28 An important difference between the two semioticians lies in the fact that in his treatment of ideology, Barthes tended to assume a fairly homogenous and hierarchical discursive landscape, while Lotman foregrounded the interactions and exchanges between at least two heterogenous and intersecting systems. As Daniele Monticelli has usefully highlighted, when Barthes refers to culture, he means tradition and ideological conformity, while for Lotman culture is a dynamic landscape pervaded with languages that compete for ascendancy and whose seething activity is the very mechanism that enables the creation of (new) meaning.29 The geological metaphors Lotman deploys to describe the semiosphere—a seething sun, layering in strata, cataclysmic events, the interaction between the mineral and the organic—describe a high-octane energetic framework that stands in sharp contrast with the stagnant political culture of the Brezhnev era during which he developed his theories. While Barthes was somewhat quicker than Lotman to “explode” the bounded and stable systems he described in his structuralist phase—for example, by introducing the difference between the self-contained “work” and the unpredictably limitless “text” in his famous article “From Work to Text” in 197130—even in his earlier structuralist period, Lotman’s understanding of the artistic text was always that of a dynamic system of inter-related binary oppositions, whose complex multi-layeredness enabled a degree of openness and variability that was subject to actualization by the readers in accordance with their own frames of reference.31
* * * * *
The present collection of texts by Lotman aims to achieve several things. Firstly, it provides handy access to a broad range of his scholarly contributions, grouped under the two headings of Semiotics and Cultural History, thus presenting a self-standing overview of his works. In selecting texts for translation, emphasis was placed on his later, post-structuralist period, which is more attuned to contemporary concerns, although some earlier texts were also included, both to provide a fuller view of his intellectual development and because they have been influential. Secondly, it offers first or new translations of his works in a contemporary idiom that sought to remain faithful to the inflections of his syntactic cadences and to his metaphors, while conveying his thoughts through an approachable, non-scientist lexicon. We took the opportunity to bring heretofore untranslated works into the English-speaking world, but we also included well-known seminal pieces in a new translation, as consistency of terminology and style across various texts is key to enabling an adequate understanding of Lotman’s scholarly legacy. This collection thus represents a stand-alone primer of his works. We should say that our decision to retranslate some pieces should not be read as a rebuke to our predecessors. We had initially considered including some existing translations into the volume, but the steep copyrights demanded by publishers quickly ruled this out, while consistency in the translation emerged as an important objective. Thirdly, the collection is aimed at an English-speaking audience of undergraduate and graduate students from a variety of disciplines, rather than at the narrow world of professional Russianists, so, to the extent possible, we chose texts that are accessible and do not require an extensive background in semiotics or in Russian literary history. Finally, this collection intends partly to bring Lotman into the orbit of contemporary concerns and debates such as gender, memory, performance, world literature, and urban studies. While Lotman approaches these themes from a standpoint and in a language that at first glance may feel alien and dated, we believe that his works still shed a distinctive light and thus continue to contribute to a pluralistic, multidisciplinary debate around these themes.
Lotman’s gendered language triggered a lively exchange of views between us about the proper way to translate it. While Lotman clearly thought, with some justification, that his piece “A Woman’s World,” included in his Conversations on Russian Culture, was ground-breaking by the standards of Soviet historiography, given the latter’s disregard for the life of the nobility and for the life of women in particular, it is also true that in it he deployed a language that is markedly gendered. References to zhenshchina, that is, “woman” in the singular, as a generic term applicable to all women, sound dangerously essentializing. Yet, the piece itself makes a constructivist argument, aimed at showing that women of the time were forged in their character and identities by the literature they read and thus changed profoundly over the period in question. Historians will be quick to point out that a substantial corpus of Lotman’s evidence relies on literature itself, thus becoming circular, though in fairness he also draws on memoirs and biographies. The main interest of this essay lies precisely in the way it models the relationship between literature and the political and social behavior of its readers, along with their mental and emotional worlds. But Lotman also anchors his analysis of the identities and behavioral patterns of (noble) women in a more essentializing premise that men are more subject to social pressure than women, as the latter are more able to extricate themselves from social conventions due to their intimate ties with ahistorical dimensions of life, such as nature, processes of becoming, and emotions, an idea he draws from Leo Tolstoy and that looms large in Russian culture. This notion also explains, in his view, why women are quicker to respond to cultural solicitations than men and therefore can serve as a bellwether of intellectual and cultural change for the historian. In the final paragraphs of his article, Lotman raises what he sees as a distinctive mental perspective into some sort of anthropological and semiotic constant that supersedes actual gender differences: “women’s culture is not merely the culture of women. It is a particular view of culture, an indispensable element of its multi-voicedness,” pointing out that Pushkin identified himself with this perspective. Hence, this view of culture is no longer gendered, narrowly speaking, but a voice within the normal heteroglossia of culture to which men contribute as well. Indeed, in reading his glowing description of the fearless moral
