Yuri Lotman

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Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman (also Juri, Jüri, Jurij) (Russian: Юрий Михайлович Лотман) (28 February 1922 in Petrograd, Russia - 28 October 1993 in Tartu, Estonia) - a prominent Russian formalist critic, semiotician, culturologist. He was the founder of structural semiotics in culturology and is considered as the first Soviet structuralist by writing his book On the Delimitation of Linguistic and Philological Concepts of Structure (1963). The number of his printed works exceeds 800 titles, and his archive of letters now kept in the scientific library of Tartu university who wrote with a number of Russian intelectuals is immense.

Yuri Lotman was born into a Jewish intellectual family of lawyer Mikhail Lotman and Sorbonne-educated dentist Aleksandra Lotman. His bigger sister Ina Abraztcova graduated Leningrad Conservatory and became compositor and lecturer of musical theory, his younger sister Victoria Lotman was a prominent cardiolog, and his third sister Lidia Lotman was a Ph D., a specialist in Russian literature of the second half of 19 century, a scientific collaborator in Pushkin's home.

He graduated from secondary school in 1939 with excellent marks and was admitted to Leningrad State University without having to pass any exams. There he studied philology, which was a choice he made due Lidia Lotman's university friends (actually he attended lectures in philology while still being in secondary school). His professors at university were the renown lecturers and academicians - Gaukovsky, Azadovsky, Orlov, Tolstoy, and in his first work Lotman wrote about Propp. He was enlisted in 1940 and served during the World War II as a radio operator in the artillery. Demobilized from army in 1946 he returned to his studies in the university and received his diploma in 1950 with excellent remarks. Yuri Lotman published his first research papers on Russian literary and social thought of the 18th and 19th century.

Unable to find an academic position in Russia due to anti-Semitism (he was unable to apply for Ph D.), Lotman went to Estonia in 1950 and from 1954 began his work as a lecturer at the Department of Russian language and literature of the pedagogical Tartu University, and later he became a head of it. In Tartu he set up his own school known as the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School. Among the other members of this school was such names as Boris Uspensky, Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov, Vladimir Toporov, Mikhail Gasparov, Pyatigorsky, Revzin, Lesskis, etc. This school is widely known for its journal Sign Systems Studies published formerly in Russian as Trudy po znakovym systemam - currently the oldest semiotics journal worldwide (established in 1964). Lotman studied the theory of culture, Russian literature, history, semiotics and semiology (general theories of signs and sign systems), semiotics of cinema, arts, literature, robotics, etc. In these fields, Lotman has been one of the most widely cited authors. His major study in Russian literature was dedicated to Pushikin, among his most influetial works in semiotics and structuralism are «Semiotics of Cinema», «Analysis of the Poetic Text», «The Structure of the Artistic Text». Lotman coined the term semiosphere.

Mihhail Lotman, Yuri Lotman's son is a well-known publicist, academic, and an independent right-wing politician (member of Riigikogu for Res Publica).

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