The Soviet Empire of Signs

This book examines the history of Yuri Lotman's Tartu(or Moscow-Tartu) School of Semiotics, which wasactive in the Soviet Union in the 1960s-1980s, andcombines a comparative perspective on the Tartuparadigm with close attention to its social context. Comparing Tartu with other major idioms in culturaltheory from Russian Formalism to (post-)structuralism, this study reconstructs its evolutionfrom the early ideal of "exact science" to a varietyof conceptual frameworks which combined an emphasison the autonomy of cultural texts with elaborateanalysis of the social and intellectual environmentof their production and reception. Working from lifehistory interviews, archival research and textualanalysis, the book demonstrates how this evolutionreflected and refracted the intellectuals' changingstrategies of negotiating personal and professionalautonomy and authority within Soviet academia. TheTartu School serves as a window into the distinctivecharacter of intellectual production and thephenomenon of an unofficial public sphere in thepost-Stalinist Soviet Union, and challenges stilldominant Cold War assumptions about the nature ofSoviet science, culture and society.