The Soviet Empire of Signs

This book examines the history of Yuri Lotman's Tartu (or Moscow-Tartu) School of Semiotics which was active in the Soviet Union in the 1960s-1980s and combines a comparative perspective on the Tartu paradigm with close attention to its social context. Comparing Tartu with other major idioms in cultural theory from Russian Formalism to (post-) structuralism this study reconstructs its evolution from the early ideal of exact science to a variety of conceptual frameworks which combined an emphasis on the autonomy of cultural texts with elaborate analysis of the social and intellectual environment of their production and reception. Working from life history interviews archival research and textual analysis the book demonstrates how this evolution reflected and refracted the intellectuals' changing strategies of negotiating personal and professional autonomy and authority within Soviet academia. The Tartu School serves as a window into the distinctive character of intellectual production and the phenomenon of an unofficial public sphere in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union and challenges still dominant Cold War assumptions about the nature of Soviet science culture and society.