Lotman’s Universe: Text as Fate

Abstract

The article reviews Yu. Lotman’s Universe. It develops such notions as the life as a text, the text as a destiny, the biography as an art and creative life, decodes signs in the scholar’s semiosphere. The authors quote the examples where painters and writers have literally created their artistic destinies: from the construction of life by the Symbolists, the life strategies of Proletkult (Proletarian) artists and the Futurists to Dmitry A. Prigov’s cultural project that is named after him. The authors contend that Yu. Lotman’s life path has been predestined by the birthplace, i. e., the house on Nevsky Prospect that belonged to Admiral Cornelius Cruys, a companion of Peter the Great, as well as by the studies at Petrischule. The main components of his scholarly destiny relate to Karamzin and Pushkin texts and, subsequently, Petersburg text reflecting his interest in the ideology of Peter the Great epoch and urban semiotics. The development of scholarly personality during his student years experienced the influence of the interwoven threads of the epoch’s communicative fabric — the political and social pathos of that time and St. Petersburg’s philology with the perceptions of the Russian Formalists about literature as a system. After World War II YurMikh has created his own behavioral text and biography, thereby, becoming a YurMyth. The interconnectivity, mutual determinedness and propensity for dialogue — a dialogue in general time with the contemporaries M.M. Bakhtin and A.F. Losev — are typical of his scholarly and private biography, personal life and creative activities, ideas and texts.