Background
Lotman, Urii Mikhailovich was born in 1922 in Petrograd.
esthetician semiotician cultural historian
Lotman, Urii Mikhailovich was born in 1922 in Petrograd.
Leningrad State diversity.
Taught at artu Teachers Institute (1950-1954). Artu University (1954-1993).
Lotman was the leading theoretician in the Moscow-Tartu group of semioticians who apply structural-semiotic analysis to the study of the arts and to culture in general. Although criticized by doctrinaire Marxist-Lcninists in their homeland before the breakup of the Soviet Union, the group’s work has attracted much interest in Europe and America, particularly among literary theorists. Lotman, viewing the natural languages as ‘modelling systems’—structures of signs whose meanings ‘model’ the world they refer to—argues that art, like myth and religion, is a ‘secondary modelling system’, or more complex language superimposed upon natural language. A work of art, then, is a text with multiple levels and orders of meanings—a communicative structure joining artist and public through the shared languages of a particular culture. In his later years Lotman and his colleagues broadened their focus from the fields of literature and the other arts to the structural-semiotic study of the broader cultural context of communication. In his last theoretical monograph. Universe of the Mind (1990), he introduced the term ‘scmiosphcre’ as a name for the highly complex and dynamic but at the same time unified semiotic universe of a culture.