Yuri Lotman and the Moscow-Tartu School of Semiotics: Contemporary Epistemic and Social Contexts

This chapter discusses the crucial ideas and legacy of Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman (1922–1993), a Russian-Estonian philologist, semiotician, and historian of literature and culture. Lotman was the main founder of the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics. I briefly survey the evolution, structure, and the principal intellectual topics debated by this school. Lotman never rejected the idea of true knowledge in his later work, because, in his early work, his concept of structure was never static or dogmatic to begin with. His idea of structure is characterized by dynamic features and openness, and includes the mechanisms of the transition of boundaries, which manifest themselves in the processes related to the function of the “semiosphere.” In conclusion, I present a brief overview of contemporary scholarship that grew out of Lotman’s and the Moscow-Tartu school’s interdisciplinary projects.