Culture and Communication

Yuri Lotman was one of the most prominent and influential scholars of the twentieth century working in the Soviet Union. This approachable collection of translations provides a primer to his vast intellectual legacy with a choice of works that address contemporary concerns such as gender, memory, performance, world literature, and urban life.

Andreas Schönle is Professor of Russian at the University of Bristol and Fellow of the British Academy. He is the author of four monographs and three edited volumes. His most recent monograph is On the Periphery of Europe, 1762-1825: The Self-Invention of the Russian Elite (2018), co-authored with Andrei Zorin.Paloff Benjamin :

Benjamin Paloff is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. His books include Lost in the Shadow of the Word: Space, Time, and Freedom in Interwar Eastern Europe and the poetry collections And His Orchestra and The Politics, and he is the translator, most recently, of Dorota Masłowska's Honey, I Killed the Cats.

“Featuring a comprehensive selection of thoughtfully collected, newly translated, and thoroughly commented works by the prominent twentieth-century Russian scholar and thinker Yuri Lotman, this anthology will serve generations of students and researchers. The anthology covers key topics and concepts that gained Lotman his international acclaim: the poetics of everyday behavior; semiotics of boundary, space, and event; urban semiotics; semiotics of predictability and chance. It traces Lotman’s evolution from structuralist to complex system approaches and puts his work in a dialogue with contemporary concerns, such as gender, performance, and memory. Culture and Communication: Signs in Flux reveals that the ideas of semiotic fluidity, disruption, displacement, code-switching, and multivoicedness remained central throughout Lotman’s entire works.”

“This book makes it possible to perceive the deep level of Lotman’s thought, where the roots of its integrity are hidden, as well as its categorial structuring of the world and history, which underlies his semiotics of culture. In Lotman’s system two primary languages are discovered—the natural language used in everyday communication and the structural model of space. In its own cultural space each culture has the means to describe itself, and the richer a culture is, the more it possesses descriptive languages—from everyday speech and rituals to written language and languages of literature, arts, cinema, theatre, music, media, and so forth. Every act of communication in culture can be interpreted at a more general level as autocommunication. Lotman teaches how culture repeats messages, supports memory and self-understanding via textual activity, and guarantees a balance between knowledge, memory and conscience.”

—Peeter Torop, Professor of Semiotics of Culture, University of Tartu