Tamm, Marek , and Peeter Torop , ed. The Companion to Juri Lotman: A Semiotic Theory of Culture.

London: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2021. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 8 Dec. 2024. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350181649>.

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CHAPTER 3
LOTMAN AND RUSSIAN FORMALISM
Mikhail Trunin

In his retrospective notes on the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics (hereafter TMS),

Boris Uspenskij (2016: 699) indicated that the main path of research has always been
‘from form to meaning’. This kind of thinking from Juri Lotman’s close friend and
long-term co-author more or less compels us to seek out Russian formalists among the
precursors of the TMS. Nor are they difficult to find, since the very first steps of the
TMS were characterized by reflection not only on its methods but also on its genesis.
Close attention to the problem of genesis of the TMS was related to their need for self-
legitimation in the field of scholarship, dictated largely by extra-scholarly circumstances.1
In this chapter, I will focus on two main topics; firstly, I will consider the basic points
of interaction between Lotman’s scholarship and that of his formalist predecessors, and
then I will demonstrate the role Lotman assigned to Russian formalists in the genesis of
the TMS.

The beginnings of a career in scholarship

For Lotman, Russian formalism was long synonymous with the Petrograd Society for the
Study of Poetic Language (OPOIaZ). Until the early 1970s, members of the TMS knew
very little about the other important centre of Russian formalism, the Moscow Linguistic
Circle (MLC).
Lotman studied at Leningrad State University’s Faculty of Philology and his instructors
included prominent figures of the formalist school (Boris Eikhenbaum, Vladimir Propp,
Boris Tomashevsky), as well as Grigory Gukovsky who is often considered among
‘junior formalists’ (mladoformalisty). It would be a stretch, however, to construct a direct
scholarly genealogy from Petersburg formalism to Lotman. In fact, by the time Lotman
graduated from the university in 1950, formalism had been doubly defeated, so to speak:
firstly, when Viktor Shklovsky published his penitential newspaper article ‘Pamiatnik
nauchnoi oshibke’ (Monument to a Scientific Error) in 1930 (see Erlich 1965: 118–39),
and then when the Leningrad Faculty of Philology was demolished in 1949 as part of the
so-called campaign against cosmopolitans. The main victims of this campaign were the
professors Gukovsky, Mark Azadovsky, Eikhenbaum and Viktor Zhirmunsky: all four
were fired, and Gukovsky was arrested soon after (he died of a heart attack in prison
before the verdict was announced) (see Druzhinin 2012: 281–473).
Lotman’s research advisor was Nikolai Mordovchenko (1904–51), who came from
a younger generation of scholars than the formalists. Boris Egorov has characterized
the student Lotman’s choice as an unexpected one: ‘he joined the special seminar of the
The Companion to Juri Lotman

outwardly unassuming, inconspicuous associate professor N. I. Mordovchenko’ (Egorov

1999: 39). Lotman estimated Mordovchenko for his style of scholarship. In his works,
Mordovchenko paid most attention to diligent fact-hunting, not to Marxist clichéd
‘eloquence’. Thus, he was an antipode to the revolutionary Formalist theories, but also to
orthodox Marxism, the only permitted ‘theory’ in the 1950s. Later, in his own research
of the 1960s and 1970s, Lotman attempted to combine positivist fact-hunting with post-
formalist (i.e. structuralist) conceptual framework.
At least thirteen years passed between Lotman’s first scholarly publication (1949) and
his first structuralist experiments. We might say it was during this period of time that
Lotman, who began his academic career as a traditional literary historian, rediscovered
the legacy both of his university instructors and of other Russian formalists. Lotman’s
voluminous doctoral thesis, A. N. Radishchev v bor’be s obshchestvenno-politicheskimi
vozzreniiami i dvorianskoi estetikoi Karamzina (A. N. Radishchev in the Struggle with
the Social and Political Views and the Bourgeois Aesthetics of Karamzin) (in two
volumes, typewritten), contains not a single reference to works by representatives of
the Russian formalist school. Lotman’s first monograph, Andrei Sergeevich Kaisarov i
literaturno-obshchestvennaia bor’ba ego vremeni (Andrei Sergeevich Kaisarov and the
Literary-Social Struggle of His Time), published in Tartu in 1958 and dedicated to the
memory of Mordovchenko, contains a single, lone reference to a particular historical-
literary remark by Eikhenbaum.
As characterized by Mihhail Lotman, his father ‘experienced an acute creative crisis’
at the turn of the 1960s: ‘the range of problems to which he had devoted his previous
years of research had lost, if not his interest entirely, at least a significant part of its appeal.
His initial dissatisfaction with himself, however, soon turned into an awareness of the
crisis situation in Russian literary scholarship itself ’ (M. Lotman 1998: 675). One means
of solving this crisis was to turn to the legacy of the Russian formalist school.

In search of a method

In the early 1960s, a circle of young linguists in Moscow that had come together around
Vyacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov began developing a structuralist approach
to the study not only of natural language but also of cultural phenomena, including
verbal art. The Moscow circle preferred to call its method ‘semiotic’ (or ‘structural-
semiotic’), effectively using the concepts of ‘semiotics’ and ‘structuralism’ synonymously.
In addition to Saussure, Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss, the Moscow scholars also relied on
the work of OPOIaZ members, whose most important figure for them was Shklovsky.
The published theses of the Symposium on the Structural Study of Sign Systems, held in
Moscow in December 1962, lack any reference to the work of Tynianov or Eikhenbaum,
while Shklovsky appears in the theses of Isaac Revzin, Alexander Zholkovsky and Yuri
Shcheglov, as well as that of Boris Uspenskij.
As we know, Lotman was moving towards structuralism on a parallel course with
the Moscow scholars until 1964. The structural approach attracted Lotman’s interest for

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 Lotman and Russian Formalism

several reasons. Firstly, this approach offered a set of new tools for analysing literary
texts that served as an alternative to those that the official Soviet literary studies could
provide. Secondly, it conveyed an attitude towards a rigorously scientific, systematic and
verifiable method. For Lotman, this was a means of solving the crisis: philology was
transformed from a set of subjective interpretations and/or ideological dogmas into a
serious science, one that was methodologically similar to the exact and natural sciences.
The complex and multibranched terminology of the TMS also worked to ensure that
this new approach acquired a rigorously scientific appearance. Herein lies yet another
convergence between the Soviet structuralists and the Russian formalists, who had also
actively developed a vocabulary of literary studies. For Lotman, who had turned to
structuralism, this connection with formalist method was important, particularly the
connection with OPOIaZ conceptual frameworks.
In order to demonstrate that the trajectory of his references to Russian formalist
works was not, in fact, straight, let us consider two pairs of articles by Lotman that mark
the transition away from his historical-literary studies and on to structuralist ones.
Compare the article ‘K evoliutsii postroeniia kharakterov v romane “Evgenii Onegin”’
(On the Evolution of Character Construction in the Novel Eugene Onegin) (1960) with
the article ‘Khudozhestvennaia struktura “Evgeniia Onegina”’ (The Artistic Structure of
Eugene Onegin) (1966), and the article ‘Ideinaia struktura “Kapitanskoi dochki”’ (The
Structure of Ideas in The Captain’s Daughter) (1962) with the article ‘O razgranichenii
lingvisticheskogo i literaturovedcheskogo poniatiia struktury’ (On Delimitation of
Linguistic and Literary-historical Concepts of Structure) (1963). Both pairs can be
interpreted as attempts to revise his own method. In his first major article on Pushkin’s
novel in verse, Lotman follows Gukovsky and Tomashevsky.2 Its main idea is that
the evolution of Eugene Onegin’s characters is motivated by the ‘Zeitgeist’. The article
references works by Tynianov and Eikhenbaum, but only their historical-literary works,
not their conceptual-theoretical ones (Lotman 1960: 134, 143, 154). In the 1966 article,
Lotman speaks explicitly of revising some of the provisions of his 1960 work. He now sees
Pushkin’s novel in verse as a model constructed according to certain rules, reflecting not
so much the surrounding reality as creating (modelling) its own. Therefore, immanent
analysis of the work as ‘a system [. . .] of heterogeneous structures and elements’ has
now become fundamental (Lotman 1966: 31). By the second page of the article, Lotman
is already explicitly listing scholars whose influence determined his new approach to
Pushkin’s novel:

The author believes that the knowledgeable reader will not miss the connection
between the piece offered to his attention and some of the ideas set forth in the
following works: Yu. Tynianov, The Problem of Verse Language, L[eningrad],
‘Academia’, 1924; M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevskii’s Poetics, second ed.,
M[oscow], S[ovetskii] P[isatel’], 1963; V. Shklovsky, ‘Eugene Onegin (Pushkin
and Stern)’, in Essays on Pushkin’s Poetics, Berlin, ‘Epokha’, 1923; G. Vinokur,
Word and Verse in Eugene Onegin (‘Pushkin’, collection of articles, M[oscow],
G[osudarstvennoe] I[zdatel’stvo] Kh[udozhesvennoi] L[iteratury], 1941). The

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lecture on Eugene Onegin delivered by N. I. Mordovchenko in his course on the

history of Russian literature at Leningrad State University’s Faculty of Philology
exerted a great influence on the course of the author’s thought. Mordovchenko had
intended to use the idea expressed here of a ‘taxonomic structure’ of characters
as the basis for a book that unfortunately remained unwritten. (Lotman 1966: 6)

This statement is valuable primarily for the history of science, since it is more declarative
than methodological in nature: in the actual text of his article, Lotman references Grigory
Vinokur alone. A paradox is that in search for a solution to the methodological crisis
Lotman combines such different scholars as late Tynianov, early Shklovsky, Bakhtin and
late Vinokur.
‘The Structure of Ideas in The Captain’s Daughter’ is his first article that uses the word
‘structure’ in its title, though even here it serves as a synonym for the word ‘composition’.
As an answer to a topical question for Soviet literary studies – how did Pushkin feel
about the peasant revolt? – Lotman proposes we look not to the sphere of ideology, but
to the very arrangement of Pushkin’s text, which he analyses using traditional literary-
historical methods in combination with analysis of the inner structure of the text (i.e.
poetics). Lotman reconstructs Pushkin’s 1830s world view not on the basis of direct
judgements of the protagonists of The Captain’s Daughter, but on the basis of how these
judgements are combined into a whole, arranged by the author according to certain
rules. In other words, as formulated in 1963: ‘Any characterization of relations among
the elements [. . .] of the whole, the entire sum of these relations, that is, its structure,
affects the semantics of a text’ (Lotman 1963: 51).
For Lotman, it was linguistics that had led to a breakthrough in the humanities
in the 1950s. When approaching a literary text, however, ‘the linguist will inevitably
encounter the inadequacy of purely linguistic methods’ (Lotman 1963: 46). He argues
that the nature of the verbal sign in everyday communication fundamentally differs
from that in a work of fiction: in the former case it is a linguistic structure as such,
while in the latter it is a ‘conceptual’, ‘extra-linguistic structure expressed through
language’ (Lotman 1963: 45, 49, 50). Lotman believes that, in everyday communication,
‘the content of the information transmitted is amorphous; it does not possess its own
internal structure. In an ordinary linguistic act, we are dealing with only one structure:
the structure of the language itself ’ (Lotman 1963: 45). Lotman contrasts scientific
and artistic language with spoken language (as languages that have a content structure
versus a language with an amorphous content shaped and regulated by context).
The specific nature of verbal art lies in the inseparable unity of its content structure
(model of the world) and its expression structure (language). However, Lotman found
it insufficient to base his own discussions of literature and culture on an exclusive
reliance on linguistic tools. This is why he engaged seriously with the legacy of the
Russian Formalist school with its analysis of the immanent structure of artistic texts.
The book Lektsii po struktural’noi poetike (Lectures on Structural Poetics) should be
treated as a milestone.

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Peak interest3

Let us consider how Lotman’s book draws on the work of Russian formalists to develop
and deepen the reasoning that had already appeared in his 1963 article. For example,
consider one paradoxical assertion: Lotman suggests that, ‘while language allows for
different ways of expressing the same content, there is no such possibility in art’ (Lotman
1963: 52). We cannot say, however, that a work of art is so inimitable that different ways
of expressing the same content are unacceptable within it: we need only recall the ‘other
editions and variants’ section of academic editions of classical literature, the variability
of folkloric text, and the role of improvisation in various forms of art (see Pilshchikov,
Poseliagin and Trunin 2018: 9–12). While the 1963 article contains this line of thought
in an attempt to criticize Hjelmslev’s thesis that content is an ‘amorphous continuum
on which the formative action of languages has laid its borders’ (Lotman 1963: 52), it
appears in Lectures on Structural Poetics in the context of a dispute with Shklovsky:

There is a profound difference between the linguistic and the literary-historical

[literaturovedcheskoe] understanding of text. The language text allows for different
expressions for the same content [. . .]. The text of a literary work is, in principle,
individual. It is created for a given content and, due to the aforementioned specifics
of the relation of content to expression in a literary text, it cannot be replaced by
any equivalent expression without changing the plan of content. The connection
between content and expression in a literary text is so strong that translation into
another system of notation is, in essence, also not indifferent to content [. . .]. It
is in a literary work that the word ‘text’ justifies its etymology (textum from texto:
woven, interlaced). For it is the full wealth of oppositions of the plan of expression
becoming differentiating features of the plan of content that gives the text both its
extraordinary depth of meaning and an individuality irreducible to the mechanical
sum of all the thoughts separately extracted from the plan of content.
The definition of device follows from all the above. The device is above all
meaningful [soderzhatelen]: it is a sign of content [soderzhanie]. But this is
a special kind of meaningfulness: a work of art does not consist of devices the
way a syntactic unit, according to certain rules, consists of lexical ones. Devices
relate to the content not directly but indirectly, through the totality of the text.
Furthermore, the device does not exist at all outside of its relation to the totality
of the text. But nor is the text the highest level. It is mediated by numerous extra-
textual relationships. (Lotman 1964: 159–60)

In this passage, Lotman is criticizing Shklovsky’s concept of ‘device’ (priyom) and the
mechanistic model of a literary work as a ‘sum-total of devices’ (Shklovsky 1921: 8).
By the very first pages of his Lektsii, Lotman is already contrasting this ‘mechanistic-
inventorial’ approach with Tynianov’s functional approach, Gukovsky’s historical-
typological approach and Propp’s protostructuralist approach: ‘The main flaw of the
so-called “formal method” is that it often led the scholars to the view of literature as

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a sum-total of devices, a mechanical conglomerate. A genuine study of a work of art

is possible only if we approach the work as a single, multidimensional, functioning
structure’ (Lotman 1964: 13).
In his polemic with Shklovsky, Lotman delivered a hypothesis that made a highly
favourable impression on readers of Lektsii, namely that an artistic work is not exhausted
by its text. Through his book, and particularly in its final chapter, ‘Textual and Extratextual
Structures’, Lotman repeatedly emphasizes the importance of ‘separating relationships
into intratextual and extratextual’ (Lotman 1964: 155). Nor does this pertain only to
the language of poetic texts: Lotman is already at the cusp of interpreting all cultural
phenomena as fundamentally textual. In this respect, the literary text turns out to be
comparable with the theatrical or visual text, with a set of generally known (for a given
culture) facts, forms of behaviour (behavioural texts), and so forth. Lotman’s conceptual
framework suggests that extratextual relationships involve both the relationship of text
to extratextual (extralinguistic) reality and the relationship of text to other texts that
establish the horizon of readers’ expectations. In constructing both the former and latter
types of relationship, ‘it is not only what is depicted, but also what is not depicted, that
plays a major role’ (Lotman 1964: 25). This thesis, stated at the beginning of the book,
develops into a polemic with Shklovsky, who ‘saw the purpose of the device “in having
us perceive things [. . .] as artistic”. However, the history of art knows of aesthetic systems
and eras in the history of art when it was precisely the rejection of “artistry” that was
perceived as the highest artistic achievement’ (Lotman 1964: 160). The text cannot be
understood without our knowing what is intentionally absent from it. Lotman gives this
phenomenon a name: ‘minus-device’. The term ‘device’ was obviously suggested by the
formalists, and one source of Lotman’s conceptual framework is Tynianov’s argument
about the effectiveness of the ‘minus sign’ (otritsatel’nyi priznak), as opposed to the
‘polished device’ (sglazhennyi priyom):

In some historical periods, the ‘bared’ device becomes automatized like any other,
which naturally gives rise to the need for a dialectically opposed ‘polished’ device.
Under these conditions, a ‘polished’ device will be more dynamic than one that is
bared, as it will shift, and thereby accentuate, the habituated relationship between
the constructive principle and its material. The ‘minus sign’ in front of a ‘polished’
device comes into force in cases where the ‘plus sign’ of a bared device has been
automatized. (Tynianov [1924] 2019: 157)

Here we arrive at the moment where Lotman distinguishes Tynianov’s conceptual

framework from that of other OPOIaZ members, defining it not as ‘formalism’ but as
‘the attempt at transitioning to a representation of the functional nature of the artistic
system’ (Lotman 1964: 13). In other words, functionalism.
Tynianov’s works turned out to harmonize with the structuralist-Saussurean spirit of
Lektsii: ‘Art is always functional, always a relationship’ (Lotman 1964: 22). By analogy
with linguistic elements, elements of an artistic structure are defined not by their
substantial properties, but by their relations among one another and by their functions

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in an overall system. Mikhail Gasparov considered this thesis the main achievement of
structuralist poetics: ‘The most important and difficult thing in [Lotman’s] theory of
poetry is relativity. The poetics of structuralism is not a poetics of an artistic system’s
isolated elements, but of the relations among them’ (Gasparov 1994: 12).
The opposition between the ‘dynamic’ Tynianov and the ‘mechanistic’ Shklovsky was
the focal point around which Lotman built his understanding of Russian formalism in the
late 1960s. We can see this clearly in an article written shortly after Lektsii, known by the
title ‘Literaturovedenie dolzhno byt’ naukoi’ (The Study of Literature Must be a Science).
This title has often been interpreted as the motto of the TMS in the late 1960s, though
it came not from Lotman but from the editorial board of the journal Voprosy literatury,
where the article was published in early 1967. The author had another title in mind – ‘O
printsipakh strukturalizma v literaturovedenii’ (On the Principles of Structuralism in
Literary Studies) – and its first completed version was dated 1 August 1965 (Lotman
2018: 65–97). Since Lotman’s article was published as a response to polemics about
structuralism, roughly one-third of it is occupied by the polemics themselves. The other
two-thirds, however, are devoted to presenting the basic principles of structuralism in
literary studies.
Lotman’s first argument already refers to the opposition described earlier: structuralism
is not mechanistic, and ‘one of structuralism’s basic principles is its rejection of analysis
based on a mechanical list of features: a work of art is not the sum of its features, but
a functioning system, a structure’ (Lotman 1967: 93–4; 2018: 71). His next argument
states: ‘Structuralism is not the enemy of historicism.’ Studying any functioning system
or structure presumes analysing it synchronically. However, the contrast between
synchrony and diachrony is ‘not fundamental, but heuristic in nature’ (Lotman 1967:
94; 2018: 72). This issue had first been raised in an argument by Tynianov and Jakobson
in their article ‘Problems in the Study of Language and Literature’, in which the co-
authors announce their revision both of Saussure’s ‘synchronic conception’ and of the
early works of their own OPOIaZ colleagues (primarily Shklovsky): ‘Pure synchronism
is now revealed to be an illusion: each synchronic system has its own past and future as
integral structural elements of the system’ (Tynianov and Jakobson [1928] 2019: 280; see
Pilshchikov and Trunin 2016: 375–7).
The year after the publication of these arguments, the section about the relationship
between synchronic and diachronic approaches was included and expanded in section 1b
of the Theses of the Prague Linguistic Circle (PLC; see Cercle Linguistique de Prague
1929), which was prepared by Jakobson. Also in 1929, in a newspaper article on the First
International Congress of Slavists, Jakobson applied the term ‘structuralism’ borrowed
from psychology to his new methodology for studying language and literature. The
passage devoted to structuralism (Jakobson 1929: 11) was later quoted in English in a
‘Retrospect’ to the second volume of Jakobson’s Selected Writings:

Were we to comprise the leading idea of present-day science in its most various
manifestations, we could hardly find a more appropriate designation than
structuralism. Any set of phenomena examined by contemporary science is

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treated not as a mechanical agglomeration but as a structural whole, and the basic
task is to reveal the inner, whether static or developmental, laws of this system.
(Jakobson 1971: 711)

As we can see, Jakobson and Tynianov already considered ‘structure’ (rather than form)
the central concept of the humanities by the late 1920s. Though Lotman does not refer
to these works in his Lektsii nor in his article published in Voprosy literatury, he saw in
Tynianov and Jakobson the pioneers of the structural-functional approach to literature
(see also Chapter 4).
Asserting the connection between structuralism and historicism is important not
only from a methodological point of view but also from the point of view of the genesis
of the TMS. One of Lotman’s overarching thoughts in the late 1960s is to reclaim the
tradition of the 1920s and to use it as a basis for creating new directions for scholarly
research. Synchronic formalist methods dominated literary studies in the 1920s; they
were supplanted by diachronic, historical-literary methods in the 1930s. For Lotman,
the late 1960s were a time of synthesis. Later, whenever Lotman proposed different ways
of describing the genesis of the TMS, he would invariably interpret the development
of literary theory in terms of the Hegelian ‘thesis–antithesis–synthesis’ triad. The role
of thesis was always played by OPOIaZ and the role of synthesis by the TMS, whereas
the role of antithesis depended on which directions in scholarship Lotman and his
associates considered most relevant at a particular time. They were the schools and
scholars who focused on semantics without losing attention to form, such as the late
Gukovsky’s version of stadial literary evolution (as a neo-Hegelian antidote to official
Marxism), successively, Marrist (predominantly, Olga Freidenberg’s) paleontological
semantics, the Prague School’s (first and foremost, Mukařovský’s) functionalist literary
structuralism and semiotic aesthetics (with Tynianov as the main forerunner of Prague
functionalism), and, eventually, Bakhtin’s dialogism (see Pilshchikov, Poseliagin and
Trunin 2018: 45–6).

Further development

In the late 1960s, Lotman became acquainted with the scholarly work of Jan Mukařovský,
one of the founders of Czech structuralism, whose selected works he intended to publish
in Russian (see Pilshchikov and Trunin 2018). In an introductory article to the then-
failed publication of Mukařovský, Lotman wrote:

Only the kind of critique of formalists that complimented analysis of the

syntagmatic structure with a semantic one, that regarded the entirety of the artistic
construction as a mutual tension between these two principles of organization,
could be fruitful. Critique that simply tossed aside the very problem of syntagmatic
analysis of a text’s internal structure was a step backwards. (Lotman [1970] 1994:
13; 2018: 363)

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The PLC develops OPOIaZ ideas to the point of denying some of its original, ‘mechanistic’
postulates. It was the Prague School, Lotman says, that ‘managed to carry out constructive
criticism of formalism, unwittingly confirming Y. N. Tynianov’s proposition that there
were no more dangerous critics in the field of culture than one’s direct successors’ (1994:
14; 2018: 365). Tynianov’s appearance in these arguments is not by chance. As we saw
earlier, Lotman singled out Tynianov among the formalists as the scholar with the
greatest interest in the semantics of artistic form.4
Volume four of Trudy po znakovym sistemam was dedicated to the memory of
Tynianov. In his introduction, Lotman summarized Tynianov’s research hypostases and
his role in the genesis of the TMS:

On the one hand, [Tynianov] was interested in overall questions of cultural evolution
throughout his life. That said, the general trends [zakonomernosti] advanced were
so abstract in nature that both artistic and ideological, philosophical, and political
texts acted only as special cases of their realization [. . .]. The connection with
the St. Petersburg school of studying Russian social thought [. . .] manifested in
Tynianov’s scholarly work as a persistent interest in history as a mobile and regular
[zakonomernyi] process and in the problems of correlating an artistic order [riad]
with the social, philosophical, and political orders external to it.
On the other hand, Tynianov was a researcher who clearly gravitated towards a
linguistic method of analysis. He distinctly imagined that the internal organization
of a text’s structure can and should be the focus of completely independent
research. [. . .] The combination of these two approaches defined the perspective
that works of art are a system of functions rather than inventory of ‘artistic devices’.
This fruitful idea served as the basis for many subsequent structuralist works. The
idea of ‘functionalism’, which is fully consistent with the general spirit of twentieth-
century science, allows us to eliminate the antinomy between the dynamism of the
object of study and the staticity of descriptive research. (Lotman 1969b: 5)

In addition to the characterization discussed earlier, another appears here that is both
important and, at the same time, the most problematic: the dynamics (dynamism) of the
object of study (Pilshchikov 2019a: 50; 2019b: 218–9). Lotman’s article ‘O nekotorykh
printsipal’nykh trudnostiakh v strukturnom opisanii teksta’ (On Some Principal
Difficulties in the Structural Description of a Text), published in the same volume, begins
with a well-known quotation from Tynianov’s book The Problem of Verse Language:
‘The form of a literary work should be understood as dynamic’. Lotman is apparently
interpreting this Tynianov quote in the sense of historical variability as opposed to
achronic staticity. Later, he says that ‘in specific descriptions of texts [. . .] it is static
modes that come to the fore’, suggesting the following heuristic solution:

the dynamic structure would be built as a number of static models (a minimum of

two) in a certain mobile relationship. From this it follows that static descriptions
are not only something that, in themselves, are not faulty, but that on the contrary

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represent a necessary stage, without which functionally mobile constructions are

also impossible. (Lotman 1969a: 478–9)

Lotman would later discuss the fact that dynamics can be described as a series of static
states and diachrony as a set of successive synchronic snapshots in ‘The Dynamic Model
of a Semiotic System’ (1974).

Side interest: Tynianov as historical novelist

Lotman’s ideas described earlier about the genesis of the TMS and the role of Russian
formalists in that genesis became canonical fairly quickly. This is, for example,
precisely the same trajectory of scholarly thought Lotman outlined in his introduction
to the book Analysis of the Poetic Text (Lotman 1972: 16–17). Fifteen years later, Boris
Uspenskij would construct the genesis of the TMS the same way, explicitly naming
OPOIaZ, the MLC and the PLC as its most significant precursors (Uspenskij 1987:
19–21).
Lotman’s later research in the field of cultural typology and semiotics developed
the ideas formulated in his structuralist works. Beginning in the mid-1970s, Lotman
became increasingly interested in the culturological aspects of structural research
and worked at developing an expansive theory of semiotics of culture. He began
interpreting the philological term ‘text’ more and more broadly: from the setting
down of a work of art (which need not be verbal), it became a particular action or
phenomenon endowed with meaning, be it a text of literature, cinema, material culture
or even everyday behaviour. It was this idea that synchronic analysis of text could
be supplemented by diachronic analysis of its functioning in a changing historical
context that allowed Lotman to compare artistic sign systems with non-artistic and
pseudo-artistic ones, such as aestheticized or ideologically loaded behaviour. It is
characteristic that, in this case, Lotman speaks not of ‘semiotics’ of behaviour but of
‘poetics’, perhaps in recollection of the Russian formalists (the idea itself goes back to
Vinokur and Tomashevsky). It is also indicative that, in his series of articles devoted
to everyday behaviour as an aesthetic phenomenon, references to general theoretical
works of formalists were supplanted by references to formalist case studies (see Lotman
1975: 42–3), while references to the primary sources under analysis prevail in the next
article from his cycle of behavioural studies, ‘The Poetics of Everyday Behaviour in
Eighteenth-Century Russian culture’ (1977).
In his articles on behaviour, Lotman talks about the projection of fiction into reality.
The opposite trend, the transformation of reality into fiction, is represented by the
genre of historical novel. Here we find a place for another of Tynianov’s hypostases, the
historical novelist. Lotman did not leave behind any major works on the historical novel,
but his thoughts about it have been found in a number of marginal texts from the 1980s.
On 9 October 1982, in response to a request from the Estonian writer Jaan Kross to share
his thoughts on the historical novel, Lotman wrote:

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Tynianov made himself a novelist, I am convinced of this, because he literally

suffered from the impossibility of understanding documents on the basis of these
documents alone. For example, so little documentary data about Griboedov has
come down to us that we are powerless to use it for unravelling the motives of
his behaviour and the mystery of his personality. Tynianov creates a ‘myth of
Griboedov’ through which he deciphers historical facts.
Tynianov spent his whole life thinking about Pushkin as a person, but the
material crumbled in his hands. He invented a fictional story: his whole life,
Pushkin was in love with [Ekaterina] Karamzina and bore this tragic, hidden
love with him for all his years. Proving this idea was impossible, and so
Tynianov, after trying to write an article on the subject that was completely
unconvincing as scholarship, began writing a novel where he could explain
Pushkin, freely creating a myth of Pushkin. That the novel turned out, it seems
to me, unsuccessful is another matter [. . .]. But the principle of it is very clear.
(Trunin 2013: 227)

Thus, Tynianov combined two hypostases in himself: the scholar-philologist and the
historical novelist who claimed, ‘Where the document ends is where I begin’ (see
Gasparov 1990). Here, though, was a problem for Lotman that he never fully solved. On
the one hand, Lotman mostly praised Tynianov’s courage in print (compare, however,
the share of criticism in Lotman 1987: 13), as in the afterword to the Estonian translation
of his novel Pushkin:

Tynianov took a step of enormous scientific courage and honesty: he objectified

his scientific intuition and showed the reader Pushkin from two points of view:
saying in his scholarly articles, ‘Here he is, Pushkin; this is the way he is because
that is how the documents I am analyzing depict him’, and saying in his novel,
‘This is the way he is because I am convinced that he was; I have studied him all
my life, I have grown accustomed to him, and I can imagine him even in situations
where no documents tell us anything. Furthermore, it is this belief of mine that
will illuminate for you, explain and bind together the disparate documents that are
mute without that belief ’. (Lotman 1985: 461)5

Meanwhile, he was privately criticizing Tynianov for effectively the same thing: his bold
treatment of historical facts that often approached taking direct liberties. In a letter to
Boris Egorov dated 31 July 1984, he wrote, ‘In a certain sense, Tynianov is like Bakhtin:
his specific ideas are often false and his conceptual frameworks are biased [. . .]. But the
overall orientation is extremely fruitful and fecund [. . .]. He was still a genius, although
he was, I’d agree, unpleasant in many ways’ (Lotman 1997: 331). Or in a 24 April
1986 letter to Boris Uspenskij: ‘I’m currently studying Griboedov. What a man! And
how shamelessly Tynianov lied about him in his novel and his scholarship’ (Lotman and
Uspenskij 2016: 591). Unfortunately, Lotman’s studies of Griboedov did not translate
into full-fledged publications, so we cannot know what exactly Tynianov’s ‘lies’ included.

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Something else is important here, however: Lotman had passed the peak of his interest
in the legacy of Russian formalists around the turn of the 1960s–1970s.

Late Lotman

In the 1980s, Lotman coined the term ‘semiosphere’, a semiotic space in which all the texts
of a particular culture are created and function. Since Lotman believed that the human
being always dwells within culture and cannot go past its borders, semiotics would soon
transform for Lotman into a universal science of human being. It is here that biological
and natural science models prevailed over literary and textual models: firstly, Vladimir
Vernadsky’s theory of the noosphere, and then Ilya Prigogine’s theory of explosion.
Similarly, in his books Universe of the Mind (1990) and Culture and Explosion (1992),
Lotman refers to the works of Tynianov or Tomashevsky only in relation to particular
issues. However, the genesis of Lotman’s path as a scholar that we have described in this
chapter did not escape the perceptive eye of Umberto Eco, who wrote the introduction to
Universe of the Mind and placed the Tartu-Moscow school within a broader transnational
context:

During the Sixties, two disturbing words erupted into the calm waters of the
European academic world: semiotics (or semiology) and structuralism. [. . .]
Interest in structural studies of language had led (particularly through the influence
of Roman Jakobson) to an interest in the works of the Prague School, and at the
same time to the rediscovery of the Russian Formalists of the Twenties [. . .].
Alongside this growth of interest in Russian Formalism, during the early Sixties
scholars in Italy and France were beginning to discover the semioticians at work
during this period in Russia – principally in Moscow and Tartu [. . .]. However,
at the centre of this new field of research, as both link and fulcrum (through the
series Trudy po znakovym sistemam [. . .] produced in Tartu) stood the figure of
Yuri Lotman. (Eco 1990: vii–viii)6

Notes

1. Lotman’s academic career as a structuralist began with polemics in which his opponents
allowed themselves such arguments as ‘modern followers of OPOIaZ are reviving its worst
aspects’, which, in Soviet reality, resembled political accusations of ‘formalism’. For a detailed
description of these polemics, see Shukman 1977: 200–4; Seyffert 1985: 172–253; Pilshchikov,
Poseliagin and Trunin 2018: 20–40.
2. In this article, Lotman relies on Tomashevsky as a textologist and scholar of Pushkin.
Tomashevsky (the author of the formalist handbook Theory of Literature (Poetics)) distanced
himself from formalism in the early 1930s. At the same time, Tomashevsky’s seminal
‘Literature and Biography’ (1923) was, together with Tynianov’s works, the main inspiration
for Lotman’s poetics of everyday behaviour.

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3. This section is based on the works co-authored with Igor Pilshchikov; see Pilshchikov and
Trunin 2016; Pilshchikov, Poseliagin and Trunin 2018.
4. A discussion of the concept of the ‘dominant’, which developed as a result of the productive
interaction of Russian formalism and Czech structuralism, and which was subsequently
adopted by Lotman and the TMS, is behind the scope of this chapter. For more on the
dominant, see Pilshchikov 2016: 210–27; Pilshchikov, Poseliagin and Trunin 2018: 57–60;
Pilshchikov 2019a: 52–9; 2019b: 219–20.
5. Published in Estonian, translated here from the Russian original, which is held at the Juri
Lotman Semiotics Repository (Tallinn University).
6. This chapter was written with the support of the Estonian Research Council (PRG319).
Translated from Russian by Brad Damaré. The author is grateful to Igor Pilshchikov for his
help and critical comments.

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