The Moscow–Tartu Semiotic School and Soviet Art History

Abstract

Although the problems of art history did not form the core of the Moscow–Tartu semiotic school’s interests, its members often turned to the material of visual art within the framework of general and specific studies of sign systems. In turn, Soviet art history in general did not show interest in semiotics. Meanwhile, the selection of problems and the approach to them in art history (mainly of the Moscow school) indicated that the reflections of art historians and philologists starting from a certain time (in the late 1960s and into the 1970s) began to develop in parallel veins. The present article provides an overview of the main problems of visual art in the works of representatives of the Moscow–Tartu school (Lotman, Uspenskij, Ivanov, Toporov and others), as well as of the adepts of semiotics from the side of art history (Paperny, Daniel, Zlydneva). In addition, the article shows how despite not accepting the semiotic mode of thinking, in their texts art historians approached the semiotic problematics of art raised by philologists (in particular, interest in the problem of the border-zone and marginalia, correlation between a word and an image in visual art, and the poetics of the historical avant-garde, etc.). This antinomic (non-)meeting of semiotics and art history in the realm of Soviet humanities in the 1970s can serve as the manifestation of the power of the unified scientific episteme of the era.