Culture, Memory and History: Essays in Cultural Semiotics 978-3-030-14710-5

Table of contents :
Contents......Page 5
Chapter 1: Introduction: Juri Lotman’s Semiotic Theory of History and Cultural Memory......Page 7
Juri Lotman: Life and Work......Page 8
Culture......Page 11
Memory......Page 14
History......Page 21
References......Page 28
Chapter 2: Translator’s Preface......Page 33
References......Page 36
Part I: Culture......Page 37
Chapter 3: The Phenomenon of Culture......Page 38
References......Page 53
Chapter 4: The “Contract” and “Self-Surrender” as Archetypal Models of Culture......Page 54
References......Page 69
Chapter 5: Toward a Theory of Cultural Interaction: The Semiotic Aspect......Page 71
References......Page 85
Chapter 6: Culture as a Subject and Its Own Object......Page 86
References......Page 96
Chapter 7: On the Dynamics of Culture......Page 97
References......Page 114
Chapter 8: The Role of Art in the Dynamics of Culture......Page 116
References......Page 131
Part II: Memory......Page 132
Chapter 9: Memory in a Culturological Perspective......Page 133
Chapter 10: Cultural Memory......Page 138
References......Page 147
Chapter 11: Some Thoughts on Typologies of Culture......Page 148
References......Page 158
Chapter 12: The Symbol in the System of Culture......Page 159
References......Page 171
Part III: History......Page 172
Chapter 13: Clio at the Crossroads......Page 173
References......Page 183
Chapter 14: A Divine Pronouncement or a Game of Chance? The Law-Governed and the Accidental in the Historical Process......Page 184
References......Page 194
Chapter 15: Technological Progress as a Culturological Problem......Page 195
References......Page 216
Chapter 16: The Time of Troubles as a Cultural Mechanism: Toward a Typology of Russian Cultural History......Page 218
References......Page 236
Chapter 17: Afterword: (Re)constructing the Drafts of Past......Page 237
References......Page 255
Index......Page 258

Citation preview

Culture, Memory and History Essays in Cultural Semiotics Juri Lotman · Marek Tamm

Juri Lotman - Culture, Memory and History

Marek Tamm Editor

Juri Lotman - Culture, Memory and History Essays in Cultural Semiotics

Translated from the Russian by Brian James Baer

Editor Marek Tamm Tallinn University Tallinn, Estonia Translated by Brian James Baer Department of Modern & Classical Language Studies Kent State University Kent, OH, USA ISBN 978-3-030-14709-9    ISBN 978-3-030-14710-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14710-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 Translated from: Iurii Lotman, Izbrannye stat’i. Vol. 1: Stat’i po semiotike i tipologii kul’tury. Tallinn: Aleksandra, 1992. Iurii Lotman, Semiosfera. Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo – SPB, 2000. Iurii Lotman, Istoria i tipologiia russkoi kul’tury. Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo – SPB, 2002. Copyright © Tallinn University, all rights reserved. Published by arrangement with ELKOST Intl. Literary Agency. English translation copyright © 2019 by Brian James Baer. The translator wishes to acknowledge the generous support received from the Cultural Endowment of Estonia and its Traducta translation grant programme. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover design: © eStudioCalamar Cover image: © August Künnapu, ‘Juri Lotman’, Acrylic on Canvas 120 x 100cm, 2013 This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Introduction: Juri Lotman’s Semiotic Theory of History and Cultural Memory  1 Marek Tamm 2 Translator’s Preface 27 Brian James Baer

Part I Culture  31 3 The Phenomenon of Culture 33 4 The “Contract” and “Self-Surrender” as Archetypal Models of Culture 49 5 Toward a Theory of Cultural Interaction: The Semiotic Aspect 67 6 Culture as a Subject and Its Own Object 83 7 On the Dynamics of Culture 95 v

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8 The Role of Art in the Dynamics of Culture115

Part II Memory 131 9 Memory in a Culturological Perspective133 10 Cultural Memory139 11 Some Thoughts on Typologies of Culture149 12 The Symbol in the System of Culture161

Part III History 175 13 Clio at the Crossroads177 14 A Divine Pronouncement or a Game of Chance? The Law-Governed and the Accidental in the Historical Process189 15 Technological Progress as a Culturological Problem201 16 The Time of Troubles as a Cultural Mechanism: Toward a Typology of Russian Cultural History225 17 Afterword: (Re)constructing the Drafts of Past245 Mihhail Lotman Index267

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Juri Lotman’s Semiotic Theory of History and Cultural Memory Marek Tamm

The central aim of this volume is to introduce the work of Juri Lotman (1922–1993) into contemporary debates on cultural history and cultural memory studies. Lotman is widely read and highly renowned in the fields of semiotics and literary studies, but his innovative ideas about history and memory, formulated mostly in the 1980s and 1990s, remain little known among historians, historical theorists and collective memory scholars, especially in the English-speaking world. Thus, for instance, we do not find Lotman’s texts included in English anthologies of memory studies or cultural history. Nor can we find contemporary introductions to memory studies or historical theory that enter into dialogue with his thinking. This volume, which offers English translations of some of the most important articles from the late period of Lotman’s scholarly work, seeks to demonstrate how current discussions in the aforementioned fields would benefit from engaging with Lotman’s writings.

M. Tamm (*) Tallinn University, Tallinn, Estonia © The Author(s) 2019 Juri Lotman - Culture, Memory and History, ed. by M. Tamm https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14710-5_1

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Juri Lotman: Life and Work Juri Lotman was born on 28 February 1922 in a family of Russian intelligentsia of Jewish descent in Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg).1 In 1939, Lotman enrolled in the Faculty of Philology at Leningrad State University. Among his teachers were such prominent scholars as Boris Tomashevsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, Vladimir Propp, and Grigory Gukovsky. After his first academic year, he was drafted into military service due to the outbreak of the Second World War. During the war, Lotman worked as a signal operator in an artillery regiment and reached Berlin with his regiment. After demobilization in 1946, he resumed his studies at the university and began actively to engage in research. In 1950, Lotman graduated from Leningrad State University, but because of the Stalinist anti-Semitic campaign, he was unable to continue his doctoral studies or to find an academic position in his hometown. At the suggestion of his friends, he managed to become a lecturer at the Teachers’ Institute in Tartu, Estonia, in a province far enough from the Soviet center to escape the politics of anti-Semitism. He worked at the institute in the years 1950–1956. However, from the very beginning of his time in Estonia, he established close contacts with the University of Tartu, taught courses in the Department of Russian Literature from 1950 to 1953, then became associate professor and in 1963 was promoted to professor of Russian literature. Lotman began his scholarly life as a historian of eighteenth- and nineteenth-­ century Russian literature and culture. His early academic career is marked by a series of important monographs on nineteenth-­ century Russian literary culture: first, his candidate’s dissertation, defended at Leningrad State University in 1952: A. N. Radishchev in the Struggle with the Social and Political Views and the Bourgeois Aesthetics of N.  M. Karamzin (unpublished, for a summary, see Lotman 1951), second, his first monograph, Andrei Sergeevich Kaysarov and the Literary and Social Struggle of His Time, published in Tartu in 1958 (Lotman 1958), and third, his doctoral dissertation defended at Leningrad State University in 1961, Paths of Development of Russian Literature in the Pre-Decembrist Period (unpublished, for a summary, see Lotman 1961). In 1960, Lotman became the chair of the Department of Russian Literature at the University of Tartu. Two years earlier, he had initiated a new book series, Trudy po russkoi i slavjanskoi filologii (Studies in Russian and Slavic Philology), published by the university’s press, followed

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in 1964 by another series, Trudy po znakovym sistemam (Sign Systems Studies). After his predominantly archival and empirical studies of Russian literature, Lotman began, from the late 1950s onward, to pay more and more attention to theoretical and methodological questions related to the study of literature, especially to structuralist linguistics and literary theory. In 1958 he started to lecture on structural poetics and semiotics, publishing in 1964 his first theoretical monograph, Lectures on Structural Poetics, as the opening volume of the series Trudy po znakovym sistemam (Lotman 1994a [1964]). Under the editorship of Lotman, a total of 25 volumes were published in this series, based partly on the papers delivered at the so-called Semiotics Summer Schools that, from 1964, began to be held annually in the Kääriku Sports Centre of the University of Tartu. Thanks to the location of the University of Tartu on the margins of the USSR, Lotman was able to invite to Tartu and to Kääriku all of the most brilliant semiotically minded Soviet scholars, mostly from Moscow, and also to offer them publishing opportunities. This group of scholars, which included Boris Uspenskij, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Vladimir Toporov, Boris Gasparov, Alexander Piatigorsky, and Isaak Revzin, frequented the semiotics summer schools, and gradually developed what is now known as the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School (see Grishakova and Salupere 2015; Pilshchikov and Trunin 2016). Maxim Waldstein, author of the first history of the Tartu-Moscow School, notes, “Ultimately, Tartu and Estonia appeared to be Lotman’s primary organizational and political resources. An opportunity to meet periodically in a distant place and to publish in a practically uncensored series was more than the Muscovites could wish for at that point” (Waldstein 2008, 36). As a result of their collective work, the Tartu-Moscow scholars established a theoretical framework for the semiotics of culture. In the early 1970s, Lotman published a series of important contributions to the semiotics of literature and culture: The Structure of the Artistic Text (Lotman 1998 [1970], Eng. trans. 1977), Analysis of the Poetic Text (Lotman 1972, Eng. trans. 1976a), Studies in the Typology of Culture (Lotman 2000a [1970]), and Semiotics of Cinema and the Problems of Cinematic Aesthetics (Lotman 1973, Eng. trans. 1976b). However, he never abandoned his historical research on Russian literature, regularly publishing articles on Mikhail Lomonosov, Nikolai Gogol, Pyotr Vyazemsky, Fyodor Tyutchev, Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and many others. In the late 1970s, Lotman wrote three consecutive monographs about Alexander Pushkin, his favorite literary figure: Pushkin’s Novel in Verse Eugene Onegin (Lotman 1975a),

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The Novel Eugene Onegin by A. S. Pushkin: Commentaries (Lotman 1980), and Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin: A Biography (Lotman 1982a). In the 1980s, he devoted himself to the study of Nikolay Karamzin, publishing a new annotated edition of Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveller in 1984 (Karamzin 1984) and a biographical study of Karamzin, Creating Karamzin, in 1987 (Lotman 1987). In 1986, at the invitation of Estonian National Broadcasting, he launched a TV lecture series with the title Conversations about Russian Culture. This consisted of 35 episodes (about 40  minutes each), divided into five thematic units. Lotman later prepared these lectures for print, and the volume appeared shortly after his death in 1994: Conversations about Russian Culture: Life and Traditions of the Russian Nobility (Eighteenth–Beginning of the Nineteenth century) (Lotman 1994b). During the final years of his life, in late 1980s and early 1990s, Lotman immersed himself in elaborating his semiotic theory of culture; some of his most important articles on this subject are made available in English translation in this volume. In 1990, at the request of the publishing house I. B. Tauris, he published an English monograph of his semiotic theory of culture, titled Universe of the Mind (Lotman 1990). But in parallel he was already working on some new book projects, focusing on the dynamic, explosive, and unpredictable mechanisms of culture. In 1992, the last book published during his life, Culture and Explosion (Lotman 1992e, Eng. trans. 2009), appeared; his very last manuscript, The Unpredictable Workings of Culture (written in 1990–1992), was published posthumously only in 2010 (English trans. in 2013). These last books were prepared by dictation, since Lotman’s eyesight was seriously impaired after 1989. Lotman died in Tartu on 28 October 1993 after a long illness. He was buried in the Raadi cemetery next to his wife Zara Mints. Lotman’s written legacy consists of many thousands of pages of academic prose on various topics, including more than 20 books and more than 500 articles. To date, the largest collection of Lotman’s works in Russian includes the nine thematic volumes of his selected works published in Saint Petersburg in 1994–2003. Only a small, albeit substantial, fraction of Lotman’s oeuvre is available in English (see Kull 2011; Kull and Gramigna 2014). The present volume comprises a selection of Lotman’s most important articles in the field of cultural theory, cultural memory studies, and historical theory. Published between 1978 and 1995, these articles provide a comprehensive introduction to Lotman’s theory of cultural memory, presented in the wider framework of his theory of cultural semiotics and semiotics of history. Most of the articles in this volume are appearing for the first time in English.

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In the remainder of this introduction, I will offer a conceptual framework for the essays presented in this volume based on Lotman’s understanding of three key concepts: culture, memory, and history.

Culture Although some observations on the general mechanism of culture can be found in Lotman’s earlier writings from the 1950s and 1960s, the year 1970 may be regarded as an important point after which theoretical analysis of culture becomes the main focus of his research. The first exploratory ideas were published in Studies in the Typology of Culture (1970) and developed more systematically in a subsequent paper written together with Boris Uspenskij, “On the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture” (1971). However, the birth of cultural semiotics as a new discipline can be dated to the year 1973, when the programmatic text “Theses on the Semiotic Study of Cultures” was conceived, on Lotman’s initiative, and in collaboration with other semioticians of the Tartu-Moscow School. Although the main foundations of the semiotic theory of culture were thus established, Lotman continued to elaborate this collectively developed model of analysis, as demonstrated by numerous articles and several books, mentioned above. Lotman’s cultural semiotics proceeds from the basic premise that culture and semiotics are essentially coextensive phenomena—culture is by nature semiotic, and semiotics evolves in a cultural environment. Therefore, semiotics is primarily the semiotics of culture, and the source for other branches of semiotics (Lotman, M. 2013, 262). Lotman’s conception of culture was born in the 1960s, under the rising star of cybernetics and information sciences, which is why he conceives of culture first and foremost as an extensive and elaborate system of processing information. “Semiotics is for Lotman the recognition of the fact that communication and information-­processing are a primary fact of human culture, and that no study of human culture can be undertaken except on the basis of such a recognition,” as Ann Shukman (1977, 179) aptly summarizes the importance of information theory for Lotman. In 1970, Lotman proposes a preliminary definition of culture as “the sum of all nonhereditary information and the means of its organisation and preservation” (Lotman 2000a [1970], 395). Even this early formulation reveals that, from a semiotic perspective, the preservation of information is as important in a culture as its transmission and organization. The view is explicitly stated in 1971, when Lotman and Uspenskij write:

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We understand culture as the nonhereditary memory of the community, a memory expressing itself in a system of constraints and prescriptions. (…) Furthermore, insofar as culture is memory or, in other words, a record in the memory of what the community has experienced, it is, of necessity, connected to past historical experience. Consequently, at the moment of its appearance, culture cannot be recorded as such, for it is only perceived ex post facto. (Lotman and Uspenskij 2000 [1971], 487–488, Eng. trans. 1978, 213–214)

Conceiving of culture as a communication system, Lotman, however, adds an important dimension that is lacking in traditional communication theories but is key to understanding the mnemonic character of culture, namely the ability of autocommunication. In Lotman’s view, autocommunication is the dominant mode of communication in culture, as well as the basis of its mnemonics. Lotman believes culture to have a natural capacity for self-description and self-interpretation at the metalevel (Lotman 2000g [1989], 641, Engl. trans. in this volume, p. 86). Self-­ description enables a culture to construct models of itself and to include in its memory a concept of itself that ensures structural unity of a culture and largely defines its characteristics as a reservoir of information (Lotman 2000a [1970], 420). Lotman emphasizes in particular the great value of self-­models in the workings of cultural memory: “an extremely important role in cultural memory is played by the meta-models (the self-descriptions of culture’s previous experience)” (Lotman 2000b [1977], 567). A distinction relevant in this context is the one Lotman makes between the two main spheres of autocommunication: first, autocommunication of the mnemonic type, which essentially informs itself of what is already known; and second, autocommunication of the type of “discovery” or “inspiration,” where “my informational input correlates with previous information fixed in my memory, organises it, and produces a noteworthy quantitative increase of information as output” (Lotman 2000a [1970], 426). Alongside culture as a system of communication, another characteristic of Lotman’s theory of culture is his conception of culture as a bounded unity.2 Although Lotman saw culture as a complex, heterogeneous, and multilingual phenomenon, he argued that all its elements were mutually isomorphic and made up a coherent unity. This cultural unity was ensured, on the one hand, by the fact that culture was bounded, and on the other, by the isomorphism of its elements. Lotman expresses this idea well in the final paragraph of his Conversations about Russian Culture: “History,

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reflected in one person, in his life and gesture, is isomorphic to the history of mankind. They are reflected in one another and are comprehended through one another” (Lotman 1994b, 389). Elsewhere he describes the individual’s relationship to culture as “at once isomorphic to the whole and necessarily only a part of that whole” (Lotman 2002 [1992], 344; Eng. trans in this volume, p. 192). Lotman’s view of culture as a bounded and organized unity enables him to compare it to the language: “Defining culture as a sign system subjected to structural rules allows us to view it as a language, in the general semiotic sense of the term” (Lotman 2000a [1970], 396). Thus, from a semiotic perspective, culture is a multilingual system in which, side by side with natural languages, there exist cultural languages or secondary modeling systems (secondary to natural language as a primary modeling system) based on the former.3 Lotman splits cultural languages into two main types: discrete and continuous (iconic-spatial). While discrete languages give pride of place to the sign and meanings are created through the sequencing of signs, continuous languages give pride of place to the text and meaning is generated through the text as a whole, into which even the most heterogeneous elements are integrated. The last central characteristic of Lotman’s model of cultural theory to be highlighted is the notion of culture as a text or a sum of texts. A text must, of course, be understood here in the broadest semiotic sense as a message that “has integral meaning and integral function” (Ivanov et al. 2000 [1973], 508, Eng. trans. Uspenskij et al. 1973, 38, cf. Lotman 1998 [1970], 59–66), regardless of whether it is a ritual, a piece of art, or a musical composition. For Lotman, text was the basic element of culture as well as culture itself. The prominence of text proves that Lotman’s model of analysis is spatial by nature, since text refers to the boundedness of the object of analysis and its division into smaller bounded wholes. At the same time, Lotman immediately emphasized that the textual character of culture does not mean that culture is inherently static: “Culture can be presented as an aggregate of texts; however, from the point of view of the researcher, it is more exact to consider culture as a mechanism creating an aggregate of texts and texts as the realization of culture.” (Lotman and Uspenskij 2000 [1971], 492; Eng. trans. 1978, 218) Thus, culture constitutes a kind of giant mechanism of text generation that constantly translates non-cultural messages into cultural texts, thus contributing to the shaping of cultural memory. Lotman himself expressed this principle in more abstract terms: “The translation of a certain part of reality into one

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or another cultural language, its conversion into a text, that is, into ­information fixed in a certain way, and the introduction of this information into collective memory—this is the sphere of everyday cultural activity.” (Lotman 2000a [1970], 397). Lotman’s model of cultural theory also assigns great importance to the distinction between the static and dynamic aspects of culture, based on Saussure’s well-known distinction between synchronic and diachronic aspects of semiotic systems. Whereas from a static point of view, one can study culture as a text (or aggregate of texts) and analyze the inner architectonics of its discrete entities, from a dynamic point of view culture appears as a process and a text-generating mechanism which, due to its continuous character, can only be analyzed as a whole, not in its individual parts. The dynamic aspect of culture becomes increasingly important for Lotman, particularly in his later work, culminating with his views concerning the importance of unpredictable mechanisms and explosive situations in the development of culture (Gherlone 2013, 2015, 2017). And naturally each cultural explosion, that is, the clash of a culture’s “own” and “foreign” cultural languages or texts, brings about a change in collective memory—or a retrospective re-evaluation of the culture’s historical past (Lotman 2000h [1992], 25, Eng. trans. 2009, 16–17; 2002 [1992], 348–349). In the early 1980s, Lotman’s holistic theory of culture evolved into a general model of a semiotic continuum surrounding human society, which he called the semiosphere (by analogy with the term “biosphere” coined by Vladimir Vernadsky): “The semiosphere is that same semiotic space, outside of which semiosis itself cannot exist” (Lotman 1992a [1984], 13, Eng. trans. 2005, 208). In a sense, the semiosphere can be understood as an elaboration of the notion of “culture” to its logical limits, producing an isomorphic chain: text—culture—semiosphere. An important development worth noting, however, is that, when speaking about culture, Lotman had used mostly mechanical metaphors (“apparatus,” “mechanism,” “system,” etc.), whereas he resorts to biological terms, such as “organism,” when describing the semiosphere (for discussion, see Mandelker 1994, 1995; Alexandrov 2000; Torop 2005; Kull 2015; Semenenko 2016).

Memory An important premise of Lotman’s semiotic theory of culture is his classification of the three functions of culture (e.g., Lotman 1990, 11–19). First, there is the communicative function, which secures the adequate

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transmission and reproduction of messages (texts) within a culture. Second, there is the creative function, which performs the task of generating new texts and codes. And finally, there is the mnemonic function, which takes care of recording texts and codes. Yet this distinction, as Lotman stresses, is merely methodological, since in reality all of these functions are inseparably intertwined and unable to operate on their own. Lotman’s major contribution to the development of semiotics consists in highlighting the mnemonic function of culture and placing it at the core of the semiotic analysis of culture. He argued compellingly that memory, both individual and collective, is first and foremost a semiotic phenomenon. What memory records, processes and puts out are signs, not objects. Lotman was one of the first semioticians to see memory as a collective phenomenon directly associated with culture. A programmatic instance of this can be found in “Theses on the Semiotic Study of Cultures”: “If we regard the collective as a more complexly organized individual, culture may be understood by analogy with the individual mechanism of memory as a certain collective mechanism for the storage and processing of information. The semiotic structure of culture and the semiotic structure of memory are functionally uniform phenomena situated on different levels” (Ivanov et  al. 2000 [1973], 516, Eng. trans. Uspenskij et al. 1973, 17).4 Many years later, in 1987, Lotman still wrote in the same spirit: “Just like individual consciousness has its mechanisms of memory, so collective consciousness, upon discovering the need to fix something shared in common by the whole collective, creates the mechanism of collective memory” (Lotman 1992b [1987a], 103, cf. Lotman 1992c [1987b], 199). The term “cultural memory” (in Russian память культуры) first appeared in Lotman’s article “The Role of Dual Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture” (1977), written together with Boris Uspenskij: “The essence of culture is such that the past contained in it does not ‘depart into the past’ as in the natural flow of time; it does not disappear. It becomes fixed in cultural memory, and acquires a permanent, if background, presence” (Lotman and Uspenskij 2002 [1977], 116, Eng. trans. 1985, 65). More specifically, however, Lotman formulated his idea of cultural m ­ emory in two articles written in the mid-1980s, “Memory in a Culturological Perspective” (1985) and “Cultural Memory” (1986), both translated in this volume. While the latter focused mainly on analyzing text generation in cultural memory, the former, shorter but more comprehensive article presented in six theses the general principles of the functioning of culture as memory.

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“Memory in a Culturological Perspective” opens with a thesis that sets forth what I have tried to explain above: From the point of view of semiotics, culture represents collective intelligence and collective memory, that is, a supra-individual mechanism for preserving and transmitting messages (texts) and for creating new ones. In this sense, the field of culture can be defined as a space of shared memory, within which certain common texts are preserved and actualized. Moreover, their actualization occurs within the bounds of a certain conceptual invariant, which allows us to say that a text in the context of a new age preserves its identity to itself in the face of various interpretations. (Lotman 2000e [1985], 673, Eng. trans. in this volume, p. 133)

Next, Lotman suggested a provisional distinction between the two types of cultural memory: “informative memory” on the one hand and “creative memory” on the other. The former is characterized by its focus on recording as precisely as possible the results of knowledge—the final text: “Memory of this kind occupies a plane situated in a single temporal dimension and is subject to the law of chronology. It develops in the same direction as the flow of time and in accordance with that flow” (Lotman 2000e [1985], 673, Eng. trans. in this volume, p. 134). In the second type of memory, however, “an entire cluster of texts turns out to be potentially active;” the result is no more important than the process—the actualization of certain texts—and it is not governed by the formula “the newest is best.” Unlike informative cultural memory, creative cultural memory is not just panchronic, but is even opposed to time: “it resists time, preserving the past as an inhabitant of the present. From the point of view of memory, understood as a mechanism that functions in all its depth, the past is never gone” (Lotman 2000e [1985], 674–675, Eng. trans. in this volume, p. 135). From this, Lotman draws the important epistemological conclusion that traditional literary and cultural history based on the idea of progress is deeply misleading, “as it ignores the active role of memory in the creation of new texts.” (Lotman 2000e [1985], 675, Eng. trans. in this volume, p. 135) Lotman’s distinction between informative and creative cultural memory is quite similar to the distinction made by Aleida and Jan Assmann between storage memory and functional memory, where the task of the former is to record a maximum amount of information in a culture, and of the latter, to create new connections, constellations of these messages, thereby providing them with a new meaning and actuality (Assmann, J. 1995 [1988], 130; Assmann, A. 2011 [1999], 123–132; 2006,

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54–58). A companion to Lotman’s typology is the further distinction made by Aleida Assmann between “cultural working memory” (the canon) and “cultural reference memory” (the archive), where the first type represents the active aspect of cultural memory that records primarily works of art that are meant for recurrent use, while the second type represents the passive aspect that records de-contextualized cultural messages that have lost their original meaning (Assmann, A. 2008). Although Lotman distinguished between two aspects of cultural memory—the informative and the creative—he was convinced that, in principle, cultural memory was both dynamic and creative in character. This conviction runs throughout his work. On the figurative level, the conviction is expressed in his opposition, expressed in numerous articles, to the metaphor of memory as a storehouse. Already in 1970, he emphasized: “Culture, however, is not a storehouse of information. It is an extremely complex mechanism which preserves information while constantly working out the most efficient means to do this; it receives new information, encodes and decodes communications and translates them from one sign system into another.” (Lotman 2000a [1970], 395, Eng. trans. 1976a, 215). And he restated it again, more succinctly, in 1986: “Memory is not a storehouse of information, but a mechanism generating it” (Lotman 2000f [1986], 618, cf. Lotman and Uspenskij 2002 [1977], 116; Eng. trans. 1985, 65; Lotman 2000b [1977], 567; 2000e [1985], 675; 1990, 272). As noted above, Lotman attached particular importance to the view that culture is not subject to the logic of linear time; it is not necessarily orientated from the present toward the future, but frequently toward the past. Together with Uspenskij, he noted: “Culture, united with the past through memory, generates not only its future, but also its past, presenting, in this sense, a mechanism that works against natural time” (Lotman and Uspenskij 2002 [1977], 116; Eng. trans. 1985, 65). The dynamics of cultural memory are understood by Lotman as primarily the interaction of codes and texts: creative memory generates not only new texts but also new ways of interpreting and encoding them. Furthermore, these texts not only record information but are capable of accumulating earlier interpretations of themselves, as well as actualizing certain aspects of the texts at the cost of suppressing others (see Lotman 2002 [1981], 160; 2000d [1981], 583). This allows Lotman to speak about “text memory” as a distinct cultural phenomenon (or even about text as a “thinking unit”).5 He illustrates this with reference to Shakespeare’s

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Hamlet: “Nowadays Hamlet is not just a play by Shakespeare, but it is also the memory of all its interpretations, and what is more, it is also the memory of all those historical events which occurred outside the text but with which Shakespeare’s text can evoke associations” (Lotman 1990, 18–19, cf. 1994a [1964], 242). Rapid cultural changes, as a rule, bring about a reorganization of cultural memory, including the generation of new codes, which allow new meanings to be attributed to old texts: “Under the influence of new codes used to decode texts that were stored within cultural memory long ago, a shift occurs in the elements considered significant and insignificant within the structure of the text” (Lotman 2000e [1985], 675, Eng. trans. in this volume, p. 136). The extent to which cultural memory is transformed depends on the degree of the semiotic shift; cultural history knows several radical turns which Lotman terms “cultural explosions.” The latter can be broadly split into two types: ones caused by an intensive onslaught of new cultural texts (which Lotman illustrates with the example of classical sculpture or Provençal poetry flooding the Italian cultural memory of the late Middle Ages), and others arising from a situation in which new “texts for which the culture’s internal tradition has no adequate codes for deciphering, enter cultural memory” (Lotman 2000e [1985], 675, Eng. trans. in this volume, p. 136). To illustrate the latter, Lotman cites the massive invasion into Russian culture of Christian texts in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and of West European texts after the reign of Peter the Great. The dynamic model of cultural memory clearly demonstrates that forgetting is an integral part of collective remembering. This fact was first highlighted by Lotman in his article “On the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture” (1971), co-authored with Uspenskij, where they distinguished three types of recording in collective memory: first, a quantitative increase in the amount of knowledge; second, a redistribution in the structure of the nodes of the coding system, and third, forgetting. The last type is explained as follows: “The conversion of a chain of facts into a text is invariably accompanied by selection; that is, by fixing certain events which are translatable into elements of the text and forgetting others, marked as nonessential. In this sense every text furthers not only the remembering process, but forgetting as well” (Lotman and Uspenskij 2000 [1971], 489–490; Eng. trans. 1978, 216). Later, Lotman elaborated on the same idea in different terms, focusing more on the dynamic relationship between remembering and forgetting: Every culture defines its own paradigm for what should be remembered, that is, preserved, and what should be relegated to oblivion. The latter is

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erased from the cultural memory and apparently “ceases to exist.” But time changes along with systems of cultural codes and paradigms of remembering/forgetting. That which is declared to be truly essential can turn out to be “somehow non-essential” and subject to forgetting, while the non-essential can become essential and meaningful. (Lotman 2000e [1985], 675, Eng. trans. in this volume, pp. 135–136)

While earlier in his writings Lotman reduced the mechanism of cultural memory to the interaction of codes and texts, in the article “Cultural Memory” he introduced a new category, the symbol, destined to become in his subsequent work the most important element in the unity and dynamism of cultural memory. Although he never explicitly defined the interrelationship of the code, the text, and the symbol, we can presume that he considered the symbol as a kind of “over-semiotized” text that has gained a certain invariant meaning in the culture. He delved into the meaning of symbols in greater detail in the article “The Symbol in the System of Culture,”, published in 1987, where he highlights the symbol as the most stable constituent part of culture and the main guarantee of its coherence: “As an important mechanism of cultural memory, symbols carry over texts, plotlines and other semiotic formations from one cultural stratum to another. An immutable set of symbols passing diachronically through a culture assumes to a significant degree the function of unifying that culture; as a culture’s memory of itself, symbols prevent a culture from disintegrating into isolated temporal strata” (Lotman 1992c [1987b], 192, Eng. trans. in this volume, p. 163). Lotman sees the symbol as having a dual nature: on the one hand, it realizes its invariant nature by cutting across the various layers of culture; on the other, however, it actively correlates with new cultural contexts and in the process of influencing them is itself transformed. “Its invariable essence is realized in its variations,” as Lotman puts it (Lotman 1992c [1987b], 193, Eng. trans. in this volume, p. 164). As a rule, symbols belong to the more archaic, deeper layers of culture, accumulating in themselves old messages that can be discharged in a new shape in each new cultural situation—“coming to life in a new text like a seed falling onto new soil,” to borrow the image from Lotman himself (Lotman 1992c [1987b], 194, Eng. trans. in this volume, p. 165). In summary, it can be said that within the context of cultural memory, the symbol appears as a “semiotic condenser” that plays the role of a mediator between different spheres of semiosis, but also between semiotic and non-semiotic reality and between the synchrony of the text and the culture’s memory.

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The last important distinction in Lotman’s theory of cultural memory concerns the typology of culture; namely, he saw cultural memory as operating in a fundamentally different manner in oral or pre-written, and written cultures (see Lotman 2000b [1977], 567; 2000c [1978]; 1992b [1987a]; Lotman and Mints 2002 [1981], 727–731]. This should not to be seen as a historical distinction, but rather as a typological one—which in Lotman’s view can be ultimately reduced to the bipolar structure of human consciousness. The first of these types Lotman also described as mythological, characterized by iconic-spatial thinking, whereas he calls the second historical, characterized by verbal and linear thinking. The clearest elaboration of this distinction within the theory of cultural memory is presented in his article of 1987, “Some Thoughts on Typologies of Culture.” Having first outlined our habitual attitude toward memory, which presumes that only extraordinary and unexpected events are recorded in a culture, Lotman went on to propose a thought experiment: “But let’s imagine another type of memory, one that aims to preserve information about procedures, not about violations of procedures, about laws, not about exceptions to laws” (Lotman 1992b [1987a], 103, Eng. trans. in this volume, p. 151) and continued: “A culture oriented not toward increasing the total number of texts but toward constantly repeating texts that are given once and for all requires a differently structured collective memory” (ibid.). This type of culture has no use for writing but employs in its stead “mnemonic symbols,” which can be either natural (landmarks, rock formations, stars, etc.) or man-made (idols, burial mounds, buildings, as well as rituals). Oral culture is characterized by a closed and cyclical notion of time and orientation toward the past, whereas written culture relies on a linear-temporal mental paradigm orientated toward the future. Therefore, as Lotman incisively put it: It is necessary to keep in mind that all known mythological texts have reached us as transformations, that is, translations of mythological consciousness into a linear verbal language (a living myth is iconic and spatial and manifests itself semiotically in actions and in the panchronic life of drawings, in which there is no linear order as with etchings on cave walls and rocks) and onto the axis of linear, chronological, historical consciousness. (Lotman 2000c [1978], 571, Eng. trans. in this volume, p. 37)

Written culture produces an increasing mass of texts, is interested in causal relations and the results of actions, and has an increasingly acute sense of time, giving rise to the concept of history. “One could say that

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history is one of the effects of the emergence of writing,” as Lotman noted (1992b [1987a], 103, Eng. trans. in this volume, p. 151). Oral culture, however, is governed by the universal law of “the resemblance of everything to everything,” the main structural relationship being that of homeomorphism (Lotman 2000c [1978], 570, Eng. trans. in this volume, p. 36); in mythical thinking, events that have no counterpart in the mythical world are non-existent and therefore ignored. Contrary to our habitual notion of written cultures being semiotically more complex, Lotman concluded by saying that “writing did not complicate the semiotic structure of society; it simplified it” (Lotman 1992b [1987a], 106, Eng. trans. in this volume, p. 154).

History The last volume (no 25) of the Trudy po znakovym sistemam published in Lotman’s lifetime was entitled “Semiotics and History,” which was a collection of papers of the last Soviet-era Summer School of Semiotics held in Kääriku in 1986. The editorial preface of the volume, written by Lotman, captures his semiotic theory of history quite well: Traditional historical research proceeded from the presumption that history deals with the finite past. Historical matter was placed in the past, the historian in the present, and the reader in the future. History was seen as static or at least something that came to a halt when the historical work was being written. The semiotic approach wants to avoid this conventional halting of the historical process. To achieve this, the historian-semiotician’s own point of view must become one of the objects of his research, as a part of the historical process in its own right. This does not refer to a system of ideological or political prejudices, which, according to Pokrovsky,6 define the very essence of history. The inclusion of the historian’s perspective into the historical process changes the nature of the historical fact. The fact or event becomes the only one possible, unavoidable, causally conditioned and natural. If such a perspective from the past is carried over to the future, the future begins to seem predictable and thus redundant. Hegel’s idea that history ends when he puts it to paper is neither a mistake nor an inconsistency, as has been often contended; on the contrary, it is an absurd consistency which requires the boldness of a great mind. The joining of history and semiotics puts us on the threshold to revise such fundamental concepts as causality. The currently experienced revolution of scholarly thought does not contradict the currently experienced

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social revolution. There is a deep, though not immediately obvious, connection between them. One conclusion from what has been said is that each generation has a language to describe yesterday, but in principle does not have one to describe tomorrow. Therefore, involuntarily, just like the hero of one of the “Roman” poems of Joseph Brodsky, “Turning back, we look but only see old ruins.”7 Meanwhile, new structures are emerging from under the ruins. (Lotman 1992c, 3–4)

True enough, history has not always been at the center of the interests of the Tartu-Moscow School or of Lotman himself. Up to the late 1960s, the main paradigm was structuralism and the emphasis was on synchronic and static aspects of culture. However, since the early 1970s, the dynamic and diachronic aspect of culture became increasingly important for the Tartu-Moscow semioticians in general, and for Lotman in particular, culminating in his views on the importance of unpredictable mechanisms and explosive situations in the development of culture. In 1971, Lotman and Uspenskij postulated the fundamental principle of culture as a dynamic system, connecting it with the dynamism of social life in human society: “The necessity for continual self-renewal, to become different and yet remain the same, constitutes one of the chief working mechanisms of culture” (Lotman and Uspenskij 2000 [1971], 501, Eng. trans. 1978, 226). It is in this context of the dynamic study of cultural semiotics that Lotman and Uspenskij formulated their program for a semiotics of history (see Boyko 2014, 2015; Trunin 2017; Tamm 2017). Both together and separately in the 1970s and 1980s, they wrote an extended series of studies on the semiotics of Russian cultural history, available also in two English-­ language anthologies (Lotman and Uspensky 1984; Nakhimovsky and Nakhimovsky 1985). Retrospectively, Lotman (1993, 41) admitted that “the semiotic movement began from a denial of historical studies,” but immediately added that “abandoning the historical study was necessary in order to return to it later.” In his last book, The Unpredictable Workings of Culture, he explains the argument in more detail: At the inception of semiotic studies, the isolation of the field of culture from the sphere of history was in part necessary and in part polemical in nature. The dissemination of the object of semiotics within the broad field of the science of history has made the very border between semiotics and the world outside it an object of study. At this stage it is possible to define semiotics as

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the study of the theory and history of culture. (Lotman 2010, 37, Engl. trans. 2013, 53)

In 1983, after several unsuccessful attempts, Lotman was able to establish a laboratory of history and semiotics at the University of Tartu. The new laboratory, which existed until 1991, never had a substantial budget and included only a small group of researchers; nevertheless, it reflects the great interest in the semiotics of history felt by Lotman and his colleagues. The initiative to dedicate the following Summer School of Semiotics, held after a long pause in Kääriku in 1986, to history and semiotics again confirms how important the semiotic study of history had become for Tartu-­ Moscow semioticians. Lotman’s preface to the proceedings of the Summer School (Lotman 1992c), quoted above, perfectly captures his hope for a close dialogue between the two disciplines. In the article “Semiotics and the Historical Sciences,” published in English in 1991, Lotman admits that “the transformation of an entire group of the humanities in relation to the establishment of semiotics as an independent discipline has yet to sufficiently impress history as a science,” but adds in the next sentence: “However, the very nature of history makes the introduction of semiotic methods into it particularly important” (Lotman 1991, 165). Lotman’s more specific interest in historical semiotics, as pointed out by Taras Boyko (2014, 63; 2015, 272), arose from his critical discussion of historical sources in the mid-1970s. In a short article “On the Problem of Dealing with Unreliable Sources,” Lotman (1975b) shows that the widely used notion of “reliability” in textual studies is inherently relative, and that even a deliberate forgery can offer valuable information. Some years later, in his discussion with the mathematicians Mikhail Postnikov and Anatoly Fomenko, Lotman (1982b, 44–45) argued in the same vein that historical documents had a potentially varied semiotic nature, and therefore any quantitative account should be preceded by a semiotic analysis of each particular document. In the following years these preliminary reflections were developed into an important epistemological statement: A historian is fated to deal with texts. Standing between an event “as it was” and the historian is a text, which fundamentally alters the scholarly situation. A text is always created by someone and represents a past event translated into another language. One and the same reality differently encoded will yield different—often contradictory—texts. Extracting a fact from a text or an event from a story about an event requires an act of decoding. And so,

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whether this is acknowledged or not, the historian begins with the semiotic manipulation of his initial material—the text. (Lotman 2002 [1992], 342, Eng. trans. in this volume, pp. 189–190)

It follows that “facts” and “events” are not given to historian but are outcomes of textual encoding and decoding: “The idea of what constitutes a historical event is the product of a given type culture and is itself an important typological indicator. And so, when historians pick up a text, they must distinguish between what constitutes an event from their point of view and what was an event worthy of remembering from the point of view of the author of the text and his or her contemporaries” (Lotman 2002 [1992], 343, Eng. trans. in this volume, p. 190). According to Lotman, every historical text is encoded on at least three levels. First, each text is an utterance in a natural language and, as a result, is organized according to the laws structuring a given language. Second, on a super-phrasal level, each text is subjected to the laws of rhetoric and to the logic of narrative. And third, on the highest level, each text must be ideologically encoded: “The laws of the political, religious, and philosophical order, genre codes, and representations of etiquette, which the historian must reconstruct on the basis of those very texts, occasionally falling into a logical vicious circle, all leads to supplemental encoding” (Lotman 2002 [1992], 343, Eng. trans. in this volume, p. 191). In brief, Lotman argued that every historian is by definition also a semiotician, even if unwittingly. Alongside the historian’s dependence on textual mediation, Lotman underlined another important aspect of the historian’s work—its retrospective character: The historian regards an event from a point of view which is oriented from present to past. This view, by its very nature, transforms the object of description. The picture of events, which appears chaotic to the casual observer, leaves the hands of the historian in the form of a secondary organisation. It is natural for the historian to proceed from the inevitability of what has occurred. However, his creative activity is manifested in other ways: from the abundance of facts stored in memory, he constructs a sequential line, leading with the utmost reliability towards this conclusive point. (Lotman 2000h [1992], 25, Eng. trans. 2009, 17)

The retrospective gaze of the historian creates the illusion of a linear and causal stream of time and excludes all unpredictable and random ele-

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ments from the past. “By removing the moment of unpredictability from the historical process, we make it totally redundant,” Lotman contended (Lotman 2000h [1992], 23, Eng. trans. 2009, 14). From the standpoint of the semiotics of history, the event that has occurred is only one of the possible versions; thus, historical research cannot be reduced to merely investigating the circumstances and the inevitability of the historical event. According to Lotman, random events or elements in the historical process can cause unpredictable situations, cultural explosions, that completely change the whole semiotic situation, but these accidental elements can also act as a reserve for future reorganizations of the culture. In this approach, Lotman was greatly inspired by the work of Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, especially by their ideas regarding complex systems, dissipative structures, and irreversible processes in chemistry and physics. Lotman decided to apply some of these ideas to the realm of historical processes as well as to the study of history in general. Particularly important for Lotman is the concept of bifurcation, which is a point of development of a system when it reaches the point of “choice” between two possible scenarios; this is a random process that can be compared with a coin toss (Semenenko 2012, 68). Proceeding from this idea, Lotman proposed a basic assumption that a historical event should be seen as the result of one of multiple alternatives, meaning that, at a certain point (the point of bifurcation), the same circumstances in history might not have unequivocal consequences (Boyko 2014, 66): “History is not a unilineal process but a multi-factored stream. When a point of bifurcation is reached, movement appears to stop so as to permit contemplation over which path to take” (Lotman 1992d [1988], 469, Eng. trans. in this volume, p. 184). The point of bifurcation or the moment of cultural explosion is the moment of unpredictability. As aptly pointed out by Semenenko (2012, 68), the concept of unpredictability has a specific meaning in Lotman’s semiotics. First, it should not be confused with such terms as improbability or indeterminacy used in physics and mathematics, and second, in Lotman’s usage, “unpredictable” should not be confused with “chaotic”: Unpredictability should not, however, be understood as constituting a series of unlimited or undefined possibilities for movement from one state to another. Each moment of explosion has its own collection of equally probable possibilities of movement into a sequential state beyond the limits of which lie only those changes which are flagrantly impossible. (Lotman 2000h [1992], 108, Eng. trans. 2009, 123)

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Lotman noticed that history “stands before us not as a rolled-up ball of endless thread but as a cascade of spontaneous living matter” (Lotman 1992d [1988], 469, Eng. trans. in this volume, p. 184). However, the situation changes immediately under the gaze of the historian: Thus, the moment of explosion creates an unpredictable situation. A very curious process then occurs: the event, once completed, casts a retrospective reflection. In this way, the character of that which has occurred is completely transformed. It should, however, be emphasised here that the view from the past into the future on the one hand and from the future into the past on the other completely changes the object under observation. Looking from the past into the future, we see the present as a complete collection of a series of equally probable possibilities. When we look into the past, reality acquires the status of fact and we are inclined to see it as the only possible realisation. Unrealised possibilities are transformed into possibilities which could not be realised. (Lotman 2000h [1992], 110, Eng. trans. Lotman 2009, 125)

The historian is a prophet who predicts the past, Lotman reminds us, quoting Friedrich Schlegel’s aphorism; that is, the gaze of the historian inevitably transforms the past. In retrospect, that which has occurred is declared uniquely possible, and all other (untaken) paths are declared to be impossible (Semenenko 2012, 72). This allows Lotman to conclude: “Therefore, we can conclude that the necessity of relying on texts leaves the historian unavoidably facing a double distortion. On the one hand, the syntagmatic directionality of the text transforms the event by placing it into a narrative structure while, on the other hand, the contradictory directionality of the historian’s gaze deforms the written object” (Lotman 2002 [1992], 349, Eng. trans. in this volume, p. 198). * * * As we have tried to show, the late thinking of Lotman occurs predominantly within the conceptual triangle of culture, memory, and history. For Lotman, culture is a semiotic phenomenon that is in constant motion, in a continuous process of self-definition and self-remembering. This semiotic model of culture which emphasizes the importance of mnemonic processes and historical (self-) interpretations has not lost its theoretical potential and needs to be integrated into contemporary debates in cultural history and cultural memory studies. Hopefully, this volume makes a small contribution in that direction.

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Acknowledgments  This introduction draws importantly on ideas from my previous two articles (Tamm 2015, 2017). The work on this introduction and on the volume as a whole was supported by Estonian Research Council Grant IUT18–8. I am also very thankful to Estonian Cultural Endowment for supporting this book project, and to Brian James Baer for his great collaboration.

Notes 1. Russian speakers are provided with a good survey of Lotman’s life and work by his close friend and longtime colleague Boris Egorov (1999). A rather good systematic English overview of his views on the semiotics of culture is Semenenko 2012. Shukman 1977 remains a valuable introduction of Lotman’s earlier creative period; also worth noting are the interesting discussion of Andrews (2003), and the two edited volumes dedicated to Lotman (Schönle 2006; Frank et al. 2012). The best insight into the beginnings of the cultural semiotics of Tartu-Moscow School is Salupere, Torop, and Kull 2013. For a recent interesting application of Lotman’s cultural semiotics in the framework of political studies, see Makarychev and Yatsyk 2017. Lotman’s short autobiographical sketches are now also available in English (Lotman 2014). 2. Hence also the clearly spatial character of Lotman’s semiotic model of culture—culture (as well as memory and text) is described by him primarily in spatial categories, allowing him, on the one hand, to underline the importance of the boundary as a semiotic mechanism of translation in culture, and, on the other, to see the relations between center and periphery as a mainspring of cultural dynamics. On this point, see Randviir 2007 and Nöth 2014. 3. More specifically, Lotman distinguishes among three types of secondary modeling systems or cultural languages: First, language as a higher sign system (myth, literature, poetry); second, language as metalanguage or part of metalanguage (art, music, dance, etc.; criticism and history); and third, language as a model or analogue (language of film, dance, music, painting, etc.). See Torop 2012, 290–291. 4. But the same idea appears already in 1970: “Above, culture was defined as the sum of nonhereditary information, the shared memory of mankind or a certain more narrowly bounded collective—a nation, a class, etc.” However, Lotman at once specifies: “Memory is understood here in the same sense as that used in information theory and cybernetics: as the ability of certain systems to record and accumulate information.” (Lotman 2000a [1970], 400). 5. Lotman’s concept of “text memory” is, of course, directly influenced by Bakhtin’s earlier idea of “genre memory,” elaborated by him in the book

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Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1984 [1963], 106): “A genre lives in the present, but always remembers its past, its beginning. Genre is a representative of creative memory in the process of literary development. Precisely for this reason genre is capable of guaranteeing the unity and uninterrupted continuity of this development.” 6. Mikhail Nikolaevich Pokrovsky (1868–1932), a Russian Marxist historian, one the most influential historians in Soviet Russia of the 1920s.—M. T. 7. Joseph Brodsky, “Letter to a Roman friend.” (Kline, George L., trans.), in A Part of Speech, 52–55. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.—M. T.

References Alexandrov, Vladimir E. 2000. “Biology, Semiosis, and Cultural Difference in Lotman’s Semiosphere.” Comparative Literature 52(4): 339–362. Andrews, Edna. 2003. Conversations with Lotman: The Implications of Cultural Semiotics in Language, Literature and Cognition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Assmann, Aleida. 2011 [1999]. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization. Functions, Media, Archives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Assmann, Aleida. 2006. Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik. Munich: C.H. Beck. Assmann, Aleida. 2008. “Canon and Archive.” In Cultural Memory Studies: An Interdisciplinary Handbook, Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (eds), 97–108. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Assmann, Jan. 1995 [1988]. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” John Czaplicka (trans.). New German Critique 65: 125–133. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984 [1963]. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Caryl Emerson (trans.). Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press. Boyko, Taras. 2014. “Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics and History.” Historein 14(2): 51–70. Boyko, Taras. 2015. “Describing the Past: Tartu-Moscow School Ideas on History, Historiography, and the Historian’s Craft.” Sign Systems Studies 43(2/3): 269–280. Egorov, Boris. 1999. Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo Iu. M. Lotmana. Moscow: NLO. Frank, Susi K., Ruhe, Cornelia, and Schmitz, Alexander (eds). 2012. Explosion und Peripherie. Jurij Lotmans Semiotik der kulturellen Dynamik revisited. Bielefeld: transcript. Gherlone, Laura. 2013. “Rhetoric and Ideology: On Post-Soviet Reconstruction in Light of the Euro-Russian Past.” Revista Digilenguas 15: 19–29. Gherlone, Laura. 2015. “Rumo a uma semiótica histórica. O último Lótman: sentido, história, cultura.” Estudos de Religião 29(1): 54–69. Gherlone, Laura. 2017. “Waiting for History: At the Eve of Explosion.” In New Semiotics Between Tradition and Innovation. Proceedings of the 12th World

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Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (IASS/AIS), Sofia, 16–20 September 2014, Kristian Bankov (editor in chief), 97–103, Sofia: NBU Publishing House & IASS Publications. Grishakova, Marina and Salupere, Silvi. 2015. “A School in the Woods: Tartu-­ Moscow Semiotics.” In Theoretical Schools and Circles in the Twentieth-Century Humanities: Literary Theory, History, Philosophy, Marina Grishakova and Silvi Salupere (eds), 173–195, New York: Routledge. Ivanov, V. V, Lotman, Ju. M., Pjatigorskij, A. M., Toporov, V. N. and Uspenskij, B.  A. 2000 [1973]. “Tezisy k semioticheskomu izucheniju kul’tur.” In Iurii Lotman, Semiosfera, 504–525. Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo—SPB. Karamzin, Nikolay. 1984. Pis’ma russkogo puteshestvennika, Ju. M. Lotman, N. A. Martchenko and B. A. Uspenskij (eds). Leningrad: Nauka. Kull, Kalevi. 2011. “Juri Lotman in English: Bibliography.” Sign Systems Studies 39, 343–356. Kull, Kalevi. 2015. “A Semiotic Theory of Life: Lotman’s Principles of the Universe of the Mind.” Green Letters 19(3): 255–266. Kull, Kalevi and Gramigna, Remo. 2014. “Juri Lotman in English: Updates to Bibliography.” Sign Systems Studies 42(4): 549–552. Lotman, Iurii. 1951. A. N. Radishchev v bor’be s obshestvenno-politicheskimi vozzreniiami i dvorianskoi estetikoi Karamzina: avtoreferat […] kandidata filologicheskikh nauk. Tartu: s.n. Lotman, Iurii. 1958. Andrei Sergeevich Kaisarov i literaturno-obshchestvennaia bor’ba ego vremeni. Tartu: Tartusskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet. Lotman, Iurii. 1961. Puti razvitia russkoi literatury preddekabritskogo perioda: avtroferat […] doktora filologicheskikh nauk. Leningrad: Leningradskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet. Lotman, Iurii. 1994a [1964]. Lekcii po struktural’noj poetike. In Iu. M. Lotman i tartusko-moskovskaya semioticheskaya shkola, A.  D. Koshelev (ed.), 11–263. Moskow, Gnozis. Lotman, Iurii. 1998 [1970]. Struktura khudozhestvennogo teksta. In Iurii Lotman, Ob isskustv’e, 14–285. Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo—SPB. Lotman, Iurii. 2000a [1970]. Stat’i po tipologii kul’tury. In Iurii Lotman, Semiosfera, 391–459. Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo—SPB. Lotman, Iurii. 1972. Analiz poeticheskogo teksta: Struktura stikha. Leningrad: Prosveshchenie. Lotman, Iurii. 1973. Semiotika kino i problemy kinoestetiki. Tallinn: Eesti Raamat. Lotman, Iurii 1975a. Roman stikhakh Pushkina “Evgenii Onegin”. Tartu: Tartusskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet. Lotman, Iurii. 1975b. “K probleme raboty s nedostovernymi istochnikami.” Vremennik Pushkinskoj komissii 13: 93–98. Lotman, Yuri M. 1976a. Analysis of the Poetic Text, D. Barton Johnson (ed. and trans.). Ann Arbor: Ardis.

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Lotman, Iurii M. 1976b. Semiotics of Cinema, Mark E. Suino (transl.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. Lotman, Yuri M. 1977. The Structure of the Artistic Text, Ronald Vroon (transl.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Lotman, Iurii. 2000b [1977]. “Kul’tura kak kollektivnyi intellekt i problemy iskusstvennogo razuma.” In Iurii Lotman, Semiosfera, 557–567. Saint Petersburg: Iskkusstvo–SPB. Lotman, Iurii. 2000c [1978]. “Fenomen kul’tury.” In Iurii Lotman, Semiosfera, 568–580. Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo—SPB. Lotman, Iurii. 1980. Roman A. S. Pushkina Evgenii Onegin, kommentarii: Posobie dlia uchitelia. Leningrad: Prosveshchenie. Lotman, Iurii. 2000d [1981]. “Mozg – tekst – kul’tura – iskusstvennyi intellekt.” In Iurii Lotman, Semiosfera, 580–589. Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo–SPB. Lotman, Iurii. 2002 [1981]. “Semiotika kul’tury i poniatie teksta.” In Iurii Lotman, Istoria i tipologia russkoi kul’tury, 158–162. Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo–SPB. Lotman, Iurii. 1982a. Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin: Biografia pisatelia: Posobie dlia uchashchikhsia. Leningrad: Prosveshchenie. Lotman, Iurii. 1982b. “Redaktsionnoe primechanie k stat’e “Novyye metodiki statisticheskogo analiza narrativno-tsifrovogo materiala drevnej istorii”.” Trudy po znakovym sistemam 15: 44–48. Lotman, Iurii. 1992a [1984]. “O semiosfere.” In Iurii Lotman, Izbrannye stat’i. Vol. 1: Stat’i po semiotike i tipologii kul’tury, 11–24. Tallinn: Aleksandra. Lotman, Iurii. 2000e [1985]. “Pamiat’ v kul’turologitcheskom osveshchenii.” In Iurii Lotman, Semiosfera, 673–676. Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo—SPB. Lotman, Iurii. 2000f [1986]. “Pamiat’ kul’tury.” In Iurii Lotman, Semiosfera, 614–621. Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo—SPB. Lotman, Iurii. 1992b [1987a]. “Neskol’ko myslei o tipologii kul’tur.” In Iurii Lotman, Izbrannye stat’i. Vol. 1: Stat’i po semiotike i tipologii kul’tury, 102–109. Tallinn: Aleksandra. Lotman, Iurii. 1992c [1987b]. “Simvol v sisteme kul’tury.” In Iurii Lotman, Izbrannye stat’i. Vol. 1: Stat’i po semiotike i tipologii kul’tury, 191–199. Tallinn: Aleksandra. Lotman, Iurii 1987. Sotvorenie Karamzina. Moscow: Kniga. Lotman, Iurii. 1992d [1988]. “Klio na rasput’e.” In Iurii Lotman, Izbrannye stat’i. Vol. 1: Stat’i po semiotike i tipologii kul’tury, 464–471. Tallinn: Aleksandra. Lotman, Iurii. 2000g [1989]. “Kul’tura kaks sub’ekt i sama-sebe ob’ekt.” In Iurii Lotman, Semiosfera, 639–647. Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo—SPB. Lotman, Yuri M. 1990. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, Ann Shukman (trans.). London and New York: I. B. Tauris & Co. Lotman, Yuri M. 1991. “Semiotics and the Historical Sciences.” In Dialogue and Technology: Art and Knowledge, Bo Göranzon and Magnus Florin (eds), 165–180. London: Springer.

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Lotman, Iurii. 2000h [1992]. Kul’tura i vzryv. In Juri Lotman, Semiosfera, 12–148. Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo—SPB. Lotman, Iurii. 2002 [1992]. “Iz’yavlenie Gospodne ili azartnaia igra? (Zakonomernoe i sluchajnoe v istoricheskom protsesse).” In Iurii Lotman, Istoria i tipologia russkoi kul’tury, 342–349. St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo—SPb. Lotman, Iurii. 1992e. “Ot redkollegii.” Trudy po znakovym sistemam 25: 3–4. Lotman, Iurii. 1993. “Zimnie zametki o letnikh shkolah.” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 3: 40–42. Lotman, Iurii. 1994b. Besedy o russkoi kul’ture: Byt i traditsii russkogo dvorianstva (XVIII–nachalo XIX veka). Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo—SPB. Lotman, Juri 2005. “On the Semiosphere,” Wilma Clark (trans.). Sign Systems Studies 33(1): 205–229. Lotman, Juri 2009. Culture and Explosion, Marina Grishakova (ed.) and Wilma Clark (trans.). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Lotman, Iurii M. 2010. Nepredskazuemye mekhanizmy kul’tury. Tallinn: Tallinn University Press. Lotman, Juri M. 2013. The Unpredictable Workings of Culture, Brian James Baer (trans.). Tallinn: Tallinn University Press. Lotman, Yuri. 2014. Non-Memoirs, Caroline Lemak Brickman (trans.). Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press. Lotman, Iurii and Mints, Zara. 2002 [1981]. “Literatura i mifologiia.” In Iurii Lotman, Istoria i tipologia russkoi kul’tury, 727–743. Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo—SPB. Lotman, Iurii and Uspenskij, Boris. 2000 [1971]. “O semiotitcheskom mekhanisme kul’tury.” In Iurii Lotman, Semiosfera, 485–503. Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo—SPB. Lotman, Iurii and Uspenskij, Boris. 2002 [1977]. “Rol’ dualnykh modelei v dinamike russkoi kul’tury.” In Iurii Lotman, Istoria i tipologia russkoi kul’tury, 88–116. Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPB. Lotman, Iurii M. and Uspenskii, Boris A. 1985. “Binary Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture (To the End of the Eighteenth Century),” Robert Sorenson (trans.). In The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History: Essays by Iurii M. Lotman, Lidiia Ia. Ginsburg, Boris A. Uspenskii, Alexander D. Nakhimovsky and Alice Stone Nakhimovsky (eds)., 30–66. Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press. Lotman, Yu. M. and Uspensky, B.  A. 1978. “On the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture,” George Mihaychuk (trans.). New Literary History 9(2): 211–232. Lotman, Ju. M. and Uspensky, B. A. 1984. The Semiotics of Russian Culture, Ann Shukman (ed. and trans.). Ann Arbor: Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan. Lotman, Mihhail. 2013. “Afterword: Semiotics and Unpredictability.” In Juri M. Lotman, The Unpredictable Workings of Culture, 239–278. Tallinn: Tallinn University Press. Makarychev, Andrey and Yatsyk, Alexandra. 2017. Juri Lotman’s Cultural Semiotics and the Political. London: Rowman & Littlefield.

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Mandelker, Amy 1994. “Semiotizing the Sphere: Organicist Theory in Lotman, Bakhtin, and Vernadsky.” Publications of the Modern Language Association 109(3): 385–396. Mandelker, Amy 1995. “Logosphere and Semiosphere: Bakhtin, Russian Organicism, and the Semiotics of Culture.” In Bakhtin in Contexts Across the Disciplines, Amy Mandelker (ed.), 177–190. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Nakhimovsky, Alexander D. and Nakhimovsky, Alice Stone (eds). 1985. The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History: Essays by Iurii M.  Lotman, Lidiia Ia. Ginsburg, Boris A. Uspenskii. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Nöth, Winfried. 2014. “The Topography of Yuri Lotman’s Semiosphere.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 14(4): 1–17. Pilshchikov, Igor and Trunin, Mikhail. 2016. “The Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics: A Transnational Perspective.” Sign Systems Studies 44(3): 368–401. Randviir, Anti. 2007. “On Spatiality in Tartu–Moscow Cultural Semiotics: The Semiotic Subject.” Sign Systems Studies 35(1/2): 137–159. Salupere, Silvi; Torop, Peeter and Kull, Kalevi (eds.). 2013. Beginnings of the Semiotics of Culture. Tartu: Tartu University Press. Schönle, Andreas (ed.). 2006. Lotman and Cultural Studies: Encounters and Extensions. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Semenenko, Aleksei. 2012. The Texture of Culture: An Introduction to Yuri Lotman’s Semiotic Theory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Semenenko, Aleksei. 2016. “Homo polyglottus: Semiosphere as a Model of Human Cognition.” Sign Systems Studies 44(4): 494–510. Shukman, Ann. 1977. Literature and Semiotics: A Study of the Writings of Yu. M. Lotman. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co. Tamm, Marek. 2015. “Semiotic Theory of Cultural Memory: In the Company of Juri Lotman.” In Ashgate Research Companion to Memory Studies, Siobhan Kattago (ed.), 127–141. Farnham: Ashgate. Tamm, Marek. 2017. “Introduction: Semiotics and History Revisited.” Sign Systems Studies 45(3/4): 211–229. Torop, Peeter 2005. “Semiosphere and/as the Research Object of Semiotics of Culture.” Sign Systems Studies 33(1): 159–173. Torop, Peeter. 2012. “Semiotics of Mediation: Theses.” Sign Systems Studies 40(3/4): 286–295. Trunin, Mikhail. 2017. “Semiosphere and History: Toward the Origins of the Semiotic Approach to History.” Sign Systems Studies 45(3/4): 335–360. Uspenskij, B. A., Ivanov, V. V., Toporov, V. N., Pjatigorskij, A. M. and Lotman, Ju. M. 1973. “Theses on the Semiotic Study of Cultures (as Applied to Slavic Texts).” In Structure of Texts and Semiotics of Culture, J. van Eng (ed.), 1–28. The Hague, Paris: Mouton. Waldstein, Maxim. 2008. The Soviet Empire of Sign: A History of Tartu School of Semiotics. Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller.

CHAPTER 2

Translator’s Preface Brian James Baer

One of the great joys of translating the works of Juri Lotman is having the opportunity to be in such close proximity to a brilliant mind through what Gayatri Spivak has called the “most intimate act of reading,” translation. Of course, it is also an enormous challenge as Lotman’s scholarship represents a triple-threat: built on an encyclopedic knowledge of art, literature and history, his scholarly writing is characterized by highly creative and interdisciplinary modes of argumentation and is presented with the energy and rhetorical prowess of a great storyteller. And so, while presenting Lotman’s arguments in all their complexity, I was also committed to ensuring that these texts “moved,” to use Kornei Chukovsky’s expression, that they had life, and so were able not only to inform but also to engage and inspire Anglophone readers as they have done for countless Russian readers. Another, more specific challenge in translating these texts involves Lotman’s use of scientific and technical terms, such as apparatus, mechanism, structure and device, each having a very specific meaning in the universe of Lotman’s mind (see Salupere 2017). It would be wrong, however, to interpret his use of such terms as reflecting a preference for the hard sciences over the “soft” humanities, or as a humanist’s attempt to lend rigor to the study of culture. On the contrary, in using these terms, Lotman was committed to “softening” the hard sciences by underscoring the important role of chance and unpredictability in domains typically B. J. Baer (*) Kent State University, Kent, USA © The Author(s) 2019 Juri Lotman - Culture, Memory and History, ed. by M. Tamm https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14710-5_2

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presented as law-governed, hence one of his favorite concepts, that of “unpredictable mechanisms.” When I first encountered the phrase in the title of Lotman’s final book-length work, I chafed. How can a mechanism be unpredictable? But, that, of course, was the whole point! Perhaps no thinker since the Enlightenment has felt as comfortable as Lotman in traversing—if not erasing—the distinctions between what C. P. Snow (1959) famously designated as “the two cultures” of our modern age: the sciences and the humanities. As a scholar in the field of Translation Studies, I was intrigued by how central translation is to Lotman’s conceptualization of cultural memory. In fact, the opening essay, “The Phenomenon of Culture,” could be very productively included in any course on translation theory. The essay makes a very useful distinction between two types of translation: translation between equivalent codes and translation between non-equivalent codes. Only the former can perfectly reproduce the initial message. Such translation, however, cannot generate new messages. Only translation between non-equivalent codes, which would include all natural languages, can do that. Indeed, Lotman sees translation between non-equivalent codes as the basis of all creative thought, as embodied in the two asymmetrical hemispheres of the human brain. This explains Lotman’s special fascination with intersemiotic translation, that is, translation between different semiotic systems, such as poetry and painting or novels and film, as well as translation between oral and written cultures. While translation between equivalent codes applies only to artificial languages, the narrow notion of equivalence derived from this model has infected popular understanding of translation between natural languages, at least in the West, supporting a tired discourse of loss, distortion and even untranslatability. In fact, Warren Weaver’s (1949) early essay on machine translation references the Allies’s breaking of the Nazi’s secret code, an artificial language, and Bell’s (1991) influential model of translation was based on Shannon and Weaver’s model of communication (1949), which was itself based on Morse code (see Sin 2002, 33–36), perhaps the best known artificial language there is. Therefore, by clearly distinguishing translation between equivalent codes from translation between non-equivalent codes, Lotman is able to rehabilitate the latter, presenting it not in terms of distortion (in fact, he reserves this term for technical disruptions in the process of translation between equivalent codes) but as absolutely central to the workings of culture. As Lotman

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puts it in the essay “The Role of Art in the Dynamics of Culture” (in this volume, p. 115): “The very essence of culture is opposed to monolingualism.” Moreover, unlike the popular concept of “cultural translation” introduced in the early 1990s, Lotman’s concept of translation, while broadly conceived, includes translation proper, taking into consideration not only the introduction of new words, concepts, texts and authors but also the resemanticization of old ones through the process of translation. Lotman’s essays on cultural memory also make an important contribution to the integration of translation into the study of literature and culture, especially in the essay “Cultural Memory,” where Lotman rejects historical chronologies that treat only “original” writing produced in a given period. Texts and authors from previous times (most often in translation) exist alongside “original” works from that period. As Lotman notes (in this volume, p. 141), “Gogol, without hesitation, placed Walter Scott and Homer side-­by-­side as two of the most important writers for his age.” Moreover, public interest in Homer during Gogol’s time was fueled by new translations of the ancient author’s work. In this way, translation could be said to function as an important mechanism of cultural memory, as well as a side effect of other mechanisms; in other words, a translation can be both a cause, triggering new interest in a text or author of another time, and an effect, itself triggered by renewed interest in a text, author, culture or historical period. Most of the essays in this collection are translated into English for the first time. While three of the essays had already been very ably translated, it was decided to re-translate them in order to give the collection a cohesive style and to ensure consistency in the use of terminology. In these translations, I have used English source texts or authoritative English translations of Russian and French sources wherever possible, replacing the original bibliographic references with the corresponding English references. The many French sources without an available English translation that Lotman himself either translates into Russian or cites from an available Russian translation, I translated directly from the French and, when necessary, replaced the bibliographic reference for the Russian translation with the corresponding French reference. For their help with translations from the French and Old Church Slavonic, respectively, I thank Richard Berrong of Kent State University and Daniel Bunčić of the University of Cologne. For advice on some of the densest passages in these essays and on the translation of Russian poems, I thank Nastia Lakhtikova and Igor Pilshchikov.

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References Bell, Roger T. 1991. Translation and Translating: Theory and Practice. London and New York: Longman. Salupere, Silvi. 2017. O metaiazyke Iuriia Lotmana: Problemy, kontekst, istochniki. Tartu: University of Tartu Press. Sin, King-Kui. 2002. “Myths and Misconceptions in Translation Teaching.” In Teaching Translation and Interpreting 4. Building Bridges, Eva Hung (ed.), 31–43. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Snow, C. P. 1959. The Two Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weaver, Warren. [1949] 1955. “Translation.” In Machine Translation of Languages, William Weaver (ed.), 15–23. Boston: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

PART I

Culture

CHAPTER 3

The Phenomenon of Culture

There are no satisfactory, generally accepted definitions for the concepts of “intelligence” and “intelligent behavior.” Equating “intelligence” (rationality) with “human-like behavior” is no more acceptable than equating it with “logical behavior.” An example of the former would be Turing’s definition, which treats as intelligent those reactions that in the process of extended communication cannot be distinguished from human reactions. An example of the latter might be the endless attempts to construct a model of artificial intelligence by complicating some simple, basic logical acts, such as solving a problem or proving a theorem. Without taking on the task of providing an exhaustive or exact definition of intelligence, but with the limited goal of working out a practical and convenient formulation, we might define intelligence as that which is capable of the following: 1. Storing and transmitting information (by means of communication and memory), possessing language, and formulating correct messages

Originally published as “Fenomen kul’tury,” Trudy po znakovym sistemam 10, 1978: 3–17. The translation here is from Iurii Lotman, Semiosfera, 568–580. Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo—SPB, 2000. J. Lotman (*) University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia © The Author(s) 2019 Juri Lotman - Culture, Memory and History, ed. by M. Tamm https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14710-5_3

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2. Performing algorithmic operations those messages 3. Formulating new messages

to

correctly

transform

Messages formulated according to the operations stipulated under point 2 are not new insofar as they represent nothing more than the regular transformation of source texts in accordance with certain rules. In this sense, all messages received as a result of regular transformations of a given source text can be considered the same text. Therefore, new texts are those that are “irregular” and, from the point of view of established rules, “incorrect.” In a general cultural perspective, however, such texts are useful and necessary. These texts form the basis of future rules for formulating utterances. One can assume that, alongside the creation of texts in accordance with certain established rules, there also takes place the formulation of rules on the basis of certain universal texts. (Such a role might be played by texts that are accidentally created or that come from other cultures, as well as poetic texts.) In this case, we are dealing with “incorrect” or unintelligible texts, which are assumed to be intelligible. Between the cognitive operations described in the first two points above and those referred to in point 3, there is a contradiction. Communicative links are created by the transmission of a certain message into a specific system. The goal of that transmission is to transfer the message from the addresser to the addressee. Such a transfer is considered optimal when, during the process of transmission, no loss or change of meaning occurs so that the text sent is completely identical to the text received. All changes that occur in the text during the process of transmission are interpreted as distortions, the result of technical inadequacy or failure in the transmission channel. The operations of coding and decoding are symmetrical, and so any changes to a text involve only the dimension of form. Operations related to the transformation of a message stipulated in point 2 occur in accordance with defined algorithmic rules. This means that when the direction of the operation is reversed, the initial text is reproduced. Such textual transformations are reversible. To produce a new message requires a fundamentally new type of system. We will define new messages as those that do not arise as the result of simple transformations and, therefore, cannot be automatically produced from an initial text through the application of previously established rules of transformation. A system of the following type:

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Outer text (the text of reality) → Automatically photographing system → Text (photograph)

In our view, such a system cannot produce new messages and, in and of itself, no matter how much it is expanded, it is incapable of modeling the act of thought, even when it is connected to a system of stimulus-response. Only creative consciousness is capable of formulating new thoughts. And, in order to reconstruct the workings of creative consciousness, a fundamentally different kind of model is required. Let us imagine two languages, L1 and L2, that are constructed in fundamentally different ways so that the exact translation from one to the other is generally impossible. Let us suppose that one of these is a language with discrete semantic units having stable meanings and with linear sequencing in its syntagmatic organization of text, while the other is characterized by non-discrete representation and spatial (continuous) organization of elements. Accordingly, the dimension of content in these languages will also be constructed in fundamentally different ways. If we should need to transfer a text in L1 by means of L2, there can be no possibility of exact translation. In the best-case scenario, a text will be produced that, in relation to a specific cultural context, can be considered an adequate representation of the first. L2

L1 Initial Text Translation

Relatively adequate text Translation New Text

Let us suppose we are dealing with translation from a natural language into the non-verbal language of nineteenth-century painting. If we then perform a back-translation into L1, we, of course, will not end up with our initial text. The text produced will be a new message in relation to the initial text.

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The structure of relatively adequate translations cannot be accommodated by either of the simple models of the creative intellectual process. From this, it follows that no cognitive structure can be unistructural and monolingual as it must include within itself linguistically diverse and mutually untranslatable semiotic formations. A necessary condition for any intellectual structure is internal semiotic diversity. A monolingual structure can explain the system of communicative links and the process by which some already formulated messages circulate, but it cannot explain the formation of new messages. To explain the emergence of that regular and expedient irregularity, which is the essence of new messages and of new readings of old messages (which lead to the emergence of a new language), it is necessary to have at least a bilingual structure. This explains the mysterious heterogeneity and polyglossia of human cultures, as well as of any intelligent system. The most universal proof of the structural dualism of human cultures is the coexistence of discrete verbal languages and of non-verbal languages, the different signs of which do not form chains but rather exist in relations of homeomorphism, acting as mutually resembling symbols. (Compare this with the mythological conception of the homeomorphism of the human body, and of the structure of society and the cosmos.) Although one or the other of these universal linguistic systems may at various stages of human history aspire to global dominance and may in fact occupy a global position,1 the bi-axial organization of culture does not disappear but simply assumes more complex and secondary forms. Moreover, at all levels of cognition, from the two hemispheres of the human brain to culture at every structural level, we can observe bipolarity as the minimal structure of semiotic organization. Let us illustrate this with an example. Mythological consciousness is characterized by a closed, cyclical relationship to time. The yearly cycle resembles the daily cycle; human life resembles the growth cycle of plants with the law of birth—death—rebirth ruling over everything. The universal law of such a world is the resemblance of everything to everything else, and the fundamental organizing structural relationship is the relationship of homeomorphism. Autumn ~ evening ~ old age; conception ~ the planting of a seed in the ground ~ every entry into a dark and enclosed space ~ the burial of the dead ~ eating. It follows then that “corpse ~ semen ~ seed” (with the sign “~” meaning “resembles”), and that death is just as essential for resurrection as sowing is for reaping; we can also explain through analogical thinking the idea that torturing a body, cutting it into

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pieces and scattering those pieces across the land—or cutting it up and eating it—is the same as sowing, and therefore facilitates resurrection and rebirth. This powerful likening, which lies at the foundation of a certain type of consciousness, forces us to see in diverse real-world phenomena signs of a single phenomenon, and to see in the diversity of objects of the same class a Single Object. All human conflicts can be reduced to the history of a single binary opposition: Man and Woman. Woman, as a single phenomenon, turns out to be both Mother and Wife to the singular Man. Man cyclically dies in the act of conception and is reborn in the act of birth, in which he turns out to be his own son. It is necessary to keep in mind that all known mythological texts have reached us as transformations, that is, translations of mythological consciousness into a linear verbal language (a living myth is iconic and spatial and manifests itself semiotically in actions and in the panchronic life of drawings, in which there is no linear order as with the etchings on cave walls and rocks) and onto the axis of linear, chronological, historical consciousness. And so our understanding of generations and stages, all the “at firsts” and “thens” that organize our chronicles and retellings, does not belong to the myths themselves but to the translation of those myths into a non-mythological language. That which the retelling in a language of linear cognition transforms into sequences is represented in the mythological world as life divided into concentric circles, among which a homomorphic relationship obtains. This is not contradicted by the fact that a character who is a single unity in one circle can in another circle disintegrate into antagonistic and feuding characters.2 At no stage in the existence of human society, however, could the mythological world have served as the sole organizing principle of human cognition (just as at no stage could people have used only poetry or have been entirely ignorant of the uses of poetry). A world of exceptions, of random occurrences (from the point of view of myth), and of human actions having no parallel in profound cyclical laws has accumulated in the form of verbal stories, that is, texts organized into a linear chronological sequence. Unlike myths, which recount what should occur, these texts recount what actually happened, contrasting the panchronic nature of myths to real-time past. Myth looked upon those features of real events that did not correspond to its profoundly cyclical world as non-existent, while the chronological-historical world discarded those profound ­regularities that contradicted observed events. Chronicles, real-life stories, and history emerged along a linear temporal axis.

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Despite the obvious antagonism and constant struggle between these two modeling languages, actual human experience of the structure of the world is constructed as a permanent system of internal translations and of the shuffling of texts within the structural field created by the tension between these two poles. Some cases display a capacity for assimilating phenomena that appear different, and for exposing analogs, homeomorphisms, and isomorphisms, which are essential to poetic thinking, and somewhat for mathematical and philosophical thinking, while other cases display sequentiality, cause and effect relationships, and chronological and logical connections, which are characteristic of narrative texts and the science of logical and experiential cycles. And so, the world of children’s thought, which is primarily mythological, does not and should not disappear in the mental structures of the adult, but continue to function as a generator of associations and as an active modeling mechanism; without taking this into consideration, it would be impossible to understand the behavior of adults. Observing the bipolar organizing structure at the most diverse levels of human intellectual activity, it is possible to isolate oppositional pairs, with discrete linear thinking predominating along one axis and homeomorphic, continuous thinking along the other, and to establish a parallel with the opposition of the left and right hemispheres of individual cognition. Children’s consciousness Mythological consciousness Visual consciousness Action Poetry

↔ ↔ ↔ ↔ ↔

Adult consciousness Historical consciousness Verbal consciousness Narrative Prose

This system could be extended to include similar oppositions. It is important to emphasize the value of isolating the level of semiotic apprehension of the world for it is at that level that the organizing opposition becomes evident, which can then be situated within the adduced series. Without that opposition, the given semiotic mechanism is devoid of any internal dynamism and is only capable of transmitting information, not creating it. The impossibility of exact translation of texts from discrete languages into non-discrete, continuous ones and back comes from their ­fundamentally different makeup. In discrete language systems, the text is secondary to the sign, that is, the text can be clearly broken down into

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signs. It is not difficult to isolate a sign as an initial, elementary unit. In continuous languages, however, the text is primary and cannot be broken down into signs; the text itself is a sign or an isomorph of a sign. Relevant here are not the rules for combining signs but rather rhythm and symmetry (and the corresponding phenomena of arrhythmia and asymmetry). When a certain elementary unit is isolated, that unit cannot be broken down into differentiated subunits. And so, for example, when we have to recognize an unfamiliar face (i.e., to identify two photographs of someone we do not know personally), we will focus on the comparability of individual features. However, non-discrete texts (e.g., a familiar face) will be perceived as a single, undifferentiated whole. We could also point to our apprehension of the meaning of images in dreams, where no alterations will prevent us from correctly knowing what meaning to ascribe to this or that phenomenon.3 Consider Pushkin’s poem “Zaklinanie” [Incantation]:      Appear to me, beloved shade,       As you were before we parted,       Pale and cold like a wintry day,      By your final agony distorted.      Come as a distant star,       As the faintest sound or breeze,      Or as a dreadful apparition,       I care not: Return to me! (Pushkin 1959–1962, II, 315)4

We are not speaking here of a relative language, in which “a distant star,” “the faintest sound,” “a breeze,” or “a dreadful apparition” are expressions that are only conventionally tied to the content “you.” All these are essentially hypostases, the exterior of which is directly linked to the content. In discrete languages, one sign is connected to another sign, while in continuous languages, a sign’s appearance is transformed or is assimilated to the corresponding cognitive spot on another level. Naturally, given such a profound difference in the structure of these languages, the exactness of translation is replaced by the problem of semantic equivalence. However, the tendency toward increasing specialization of languages and increasing difficulty of translation between them represents only one aspect of those complex processes that together form an intellectual whole. A cognitive structure must form an individual, that is, it must integrate contradictory semiotic structures into a bounded unity. Opposing tendencies must be eliminated in that single structural

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whole. This whole is necessary so that, despite the seeming impossibility of translation between L1 and L2, translation constantly takes place and yields positive results. At the moment when communication between two languages becomes truly impossible, then the cultural individual begins to fall apart at that level, and it simply ceases semiotically (and sometimes physically) to exist. There are two types of integrating mechanism. First, there is the blocking of metalanguage. Metalinguistic descriptions are an essential element of an “intellectual whole.” On the one hand, by describing two different languages as one, they force the entire system to be perceived from a subjective point of view as some kind of unity. The system then self-organizes, orienting itself to the given meta-description, rejecting all those elements that, from the point of view of the meta-description, should not exist and accentuating those that are emphasized in the description. The moment the meta-description is created, it exists, as a rule, as something future and desired, but in the extended course of its development, it is transformed into reality and becomes the norm for the given semiotic complex. At the same time, auto meta-descriptions force the given structure to perceive itself from the outside as a unity, to attribute to itself a defined pattern of individual behavior, and to see the broader cultural context as a whole. Such an expectation, in its turn, stimulates the unity of self-­ perception and behavior of the given complex. Second, an extended creolization of these languages can take place by which the principles of one of these languages exert a profound influence on the other, despite the completely different nature of their grammars. In their actual functioning, a mixture of the two language may occur, which, however, as a rule, escapes the attention of the speaking subject as she is perceiving her own language through the prism of meta-descriptions, and these most often arise on the basis of one of the component languages, ignoring the other (or others). So, contemporary Russian language functions as a mixture of oral and written languages, which are essentially different languages, but this, however, remains unnoticed as the speaker’s linguistic meta-consciousness equates the written form of the language with language as such. Cinematography is extremely interesting in this regard, as it has functioned from the very start as a bilingual phenomenon (moving photography + written verbal text = silent film; moving photography + spoken verbal speech = talking films; and there exists a third language, music, which is an optional, though widely used element). In the consciousness

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of the perceiver, however, cinematography functions as a single language. In this respect, it is not surprising that, although cinematography and theater fundamentally belong to the same category, insofar as they represent a combination of verbal text and text in the language of gestures, poses, and actions, theater is perceived by viewers as primarily words while cinema is perceived as action par excellence. Revealing here is the fact that the “score” of a theatrical production, a play, fixes the words but leaves actions and gestures to the discretion of the performers (i.e., the verbal text is invariant, but the gestures and actions are variant), while the score of a film, the screenplay, fixes first and foremost the sequence of actions, events, and gestures, that is, the language that is visually perceived through images, but leaves the words in most cases to the “dialogue specialists,” screenwriters, or to the director, who is given a great deal of license in this regard. Accordingly, scholarly meta-descriptions in the theater focus, as a rule, on the words, while in cinematography, they focus on the visual elements. In terms of metalanguage, theater is closer to literature, while film is closer to photography. However, what interests us in this correlation is the creolization of the language components of cinema. During the age of silent montage films, the influence of verbal language was evident in the precise segmentation of filmic material into “words” and “phrases” and in the transfer of the verbal principle of the relative relationship between form and content into the sphere of visual signs. This produced the poetics of montage, which represented the transfer of the principles of verbal art of the futurist period into the realm of visual representation. The language of moving photography became the language of cinematic art when it adopted the elements of the language of verbal poetry, which were structurally alien to it. In the age of talking films, the active “emancipation” of cinematic languages from the principles of verbal speech took place. At the same time, however, a broad reverse movement occurred: The technical conditions of cinematic film stock demanded short texts, and the shift in the aesthetic nature of film, involving the rejection of a poetics of mimetic gesture, led to a turn toward theatrical, literary, and conversational speech. The nature of film influenced the structure of cinematic language by singling out one distinct layer. Slang, along with abbreviated, elliptical conversational language, became the most highly “cinematographic.” At the same time, the introduction of this level of speech into cinematic art elevated its prestige value in reference to the culture at large and lent it a fixity, which made it a cultural equivalent of written language. (Cinematography in this regard

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was fundamentally distinct from literature: Any literary work is a representation of spoken speech, that is, it lends it a written, stylized form, while the cinematographer can strengthen and rehabilitate spoken speech in its “natural” form.) This had wide-ranging implications outside the boundaries of film, leading to a conscious turn toward “non-standard speech.” If before “talking like in a book” or “like in the theater” (or “like in art”) referred to the art of speaking correctly, artificially, literarily, then today “to talk like in the movies” (or “like in art”) in many cases refers to “talking like people actually talk”—with a pronounced mumble, mistakes, ellipses, and slang. Deliberate non-literariness became a part of contemporary style. Spoken speech oriented itself in this case to pronounced particularity as an ideal cultural norm. One could present many other examples of diverse linguistic interferences in support of the conclusion that the majority of actually functioning languages (and not their models or meta-­ descriptions) turn out to be a mix of languages and can be separated into two or more semiotic components (languages). In this way, one can observe in the thickness of culture two contradictory processes. When the mechanism of duality is activated, it leads to the constant splitting of every culturally active language into two, the result of which is that the total number of cultural languages increases exponentially. Every one of the languages produced in this way appears independent, that is, as an immanently self-contained whole. At the same time, however, an opposing process is underway. Pairs of languages are integrated into unified semiotic formations. In this way, a working language emerges at one and the same time as an independent language and as a sub-language, entering into a broader cultural context as a whole and as part of a whole. As a part of a higher-order whole, a language acquires additional properties in light of the initial asymmetry that lies at the basis of culture. Here is an example of such oppositions: literary prose non-literary prose

↔ ↔

poetry literary prose

Obviously, “literary prose” in the first pair is not the same as “literary prose” in the second, as that which is activated in the first pair are the qualities of segmentation, discreteness, and linearity, which characterize all verbal speech and stand in opposition to the tendency in poetry toward textual integration. In the second pair, literary prose is perceived, together with poetry, as part of artistic speech, and only in that capacity, thanks to

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its distinction from non-literary prose, can it be integrated with the latter into the structure “prosaic speech in a given language.” Only things that are different can be integrated. An increase in semiotic specificity, which can be observed as a permanent feature in the history of culture, is a stimulus for the integration of individual languages into a single culture. We have already mentioned that every integrated semiotic pair of languages with the ability to enter into communication, store information, and, what is especially important, produce new information is a thinking structure and in a definitive way functions as “cultural individuality.”5 Integrating at ever-higher levels, these “cultural individualities” at their summit constitute the individuality of a culture. * * * We cannot understand the nature of culture without taking into consideration the physical and psychological differences among individuals. Many theories that introduce the concept of the “individual” as some kind of abstract conceptual unity proceed from an understanding of the concept as an invariant model that includes everything necessary for constructing socio-cultural models. That which distinguishes one individual from another, as well as the nature of these differences, is, as a rule, ignored. The reason for this is the idea that differences among individuals relate to the realm of the variable, the unsystematic, and, from the point of view of cognitive models, the non-essential. And so, for example, when examining an elementary model of communication, it seems entirely natural to assume that the addresser and the addressee possess entirely identical codes. It is assumed that such a model offers the most exact modeling of real communicative acts. Of course, any scholar of culture knows that no single individual is a perfect copy of another, and that individuals differ in their psychological and physical attributes, their individual experiences, their outward appearance, their personalities, and so on. In such cases, however, it has been proposed that failed communication be attributed to “technical errors” of nature, which, due to limitations in its “productive capacities,” cannot regulate serial production, and so everything concerning the realm of individual variation has nothing to do with the essence of the individual as a social and cultural phenomenon. Such a view first arose in antiquity, but it was most clearly formulated by sociologists of the ­eighteenth century. To this day, it is routinely critiqued, but it nonetheless endures as an unspoken presumption.

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We proceed from the opposite assumption, stipulating that individual differences (on the basis of which group differences accumulate on a psycho-­cultural level) belong to the very foundation of the life of an individual as a cultural-semiotic object of study. It is precisely this variation among individuals that is responsible for the development of all culture and lies at the basis of the innumerable communicative and cultural acts of every individual. Let us imagine an organism, or apparatus, which has only two reactions to outside stimulation. Let us propose, for example, that this organism has the ability to determine, based on the degree of illumination, whether an act is occurring during the day or at night. Distinguishing between these two situations, this apparatus is able to perform twofold actions: When night is signaled, it can turn a light on, and when day is signaled, it can turn a light off. Let us connect this apparatus with another just like it so that the former can transmit to the latter the signals “night” and “day,” according to which the light there, where the second apparatus is located, can also be turned on and off. This new structure will possess the following: 1. Omniscience. Its knowledge will be poor and ineffective insofar as it cannot guarantee even relatively complete knowledge of its environment; but within the limits of its language, that knowledge will be absolute. This apparatus will always be capable of answering the one question stipulated in its construction. The answer “I don’t know” is impossible for such an apparatus. In any situation, it will distinguish the parameter “light” ↔ “absence of light,” and will react after having eliminated all other parameters as non-essential. 2. An absence of doubt and vacillation. To the extent that analysis of the surrounding world and reactions to it are connected automatically, then there can be no vacillation in the apparatus’ choice of behavior. The behavior may be ineffectual insofar as it cannot ensure the survival of said organism, but its behavior will be fully guaranteed. Its monosemic determination of the state of the surrounding world will lead to a monosemic reaction. 3. Complete understanding between the addresser and the addressee of the signal. An identical coding-decoding system connected to a transmitting and a receiving apparatus guarantees that the sent and received texts will be completely identical. Incomprehension is possible only as a result of technological errors in the connection.

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Let us imagine, however, that our apparatus must develop a greater capacity to survive. Naturally, this will involve an increase in the number of parameters from the surrounding world to which the apparatus is capable of reacting, and the apparatus will attempt to increase that number to the greatest extent possible. It is obvious, however, that during the course of evolution, a qualitative shift in the consciousness of the reactive apparatus will not occur. The fact of consciousness can be observed when inside the apparatus designed to represent the outside world in the form of an alphabet, which permits a given organism to identify states of the surrounding world with an inner code, an empty cell is reserved for future, as yet undetermined and unnamed states. The segmentation of the outside world, the decoding of its states, and the transfer of those states into a language cease to be given once and for all, and within every new classificatory system, there remains a reserve of the unknown, which remains to be discovered, defined, and conceptualized. With the introduction of such “empty cells,” the reacting mechanism of our apparatus acquires new features of consciousness: It acquires flexibility, the ability to develop on its own, and increasing efficiency, thereby creating more effective models (representations) of outside situations. But at the same time, this mechanism loses omniscience—the automatic appearance of an answer to every question—and the absence of vacillation, or an automatic connection between information arriving from the outside and the organism’s reaction. The latter is connected to the other decisive step in the transformation from mechanical automatism to conscious behavior. If before every exterior stimulus called forth one, and only one, automatic reaction, now that stimulus calls forth at least two equally valid reactions, a situation that requires the mechanisms of evaluation and selection; in other words, the reaction ceases to be automatic, acquiring an information-­ rich quality, which turns it into an act. The degree of effectiveness is immeasurably higher for our apparatus, which, from that moment on, is endowed with individual behavior, having the opportunity to choose from among different reactions, which inevitably involves a moment of vacillation. Therefore, the moment we increase the complexity of the apparatus to such an extent that it can be classified as possessing intelligence, that ­apparatus will acquire the ability to react flexibly and effectively to changes in its environment and to reorient itself in that environment by generating more effective models, which at the same time leaves it in a state of con-

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stantly increasing ignorance and uncertainty. Those who study artificial intelligence must not forget that the thinking structures they create (provided, of course, we do not use that term to refer to mechanical appendages to the human intellect that are devoid of independent thought), once they have created them, will immediately become the victim of neuroses stemming from feelings of vulnerability, ignorance, and doubt regarding what behavioral strategy to adopt. The phenomenon of thought by its very nature can never be self-­ sufficient. As with all great innovations and discoveries, any invention that alleviates difficulties becomes a source of new, more powerful problems demanding new inventions. The colossal leap forward in the realm of cognition, which was accompanied by a sharp increase in human longevity and survival, demanded new discoveries to help humans cope with the challenges created by conscious existence. On the one hand, it was only natural to compensate for this increased uncertainty and ignorance by turning to the protection of omniscient beings. It is no coincidence that religion emerged during the same evolutionary period in which humans acquired the faculty of thought. This issue, however, is entirely separate and does not fall within the purview of our current investigation. Another means of overcoming the challenges brought about by thought was to turn to collective intelligence, or culture. Culture, as supra-individual intelligence, represents a mechanism designed to compensate for the shortcomings of individual intellect, and in that respect represents an inevitable addition to it. In this sense the mechanism of culture can be described in the following way: Insufficient information in the thinking structure of an individual requires that individual to turn to another similar individual. If we can imagine a human being acting under conditions of total information, then naturally we can assume that this being has no need of anyone else to help in decision-making. The normal condition for human activity, however, is one of insufficient information. No matter how far we extend our information networks, the demand for information will expand, outstripping the pace of our information gathering. As a result, no matter how quickly knowledge increases, ignorance will only increase. And, as cognitive activity becomes more efficient, it will become more complicated, not simpler. Under these conditions, insufficient information is compensated for ­stereoscopically, that is, by producing a completely different projection of reality—a translation into a completely other language. The advantage of having a communication partner is that the partner is other. The collective

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benefit to participants in a communicative act involves developing the non-identity of those models in which the outside world is represented in their consciousness. This is achieved through the non-correspondence of the codes forming their respective consciousnesses. In order for this communication to be mutually beneficial, the communicative partners must “speak in different languages.” With the development of culture, therefore, the third advantage of simple systems disappears—the adequacy of mutual comprehension between the communicative partners. Moreover, the entire mechanism of culture, which makes one individual necessary for the other, will function to increase the distinctiveness of each, leading to a natural complicating of communication. To compensate for this new complexity, it was necessary to create metalinguistic mechanisms, on the one hand, and a common language, representing the combination of two divergent and specialized sublanguages, on the other. While preserving its distinctness and independence, individuality becomes part of a second-order structure, culture, which is more complex than individuality. It is obvious that the very same system of relations that unites various languages (semiotic structures) into a higher unity also combines diverse individuals into a thinking whole. The aggregate of these two—structurally monotypic—mechanisms also forms a supra-individual intellect, or Culture. * * * The distinction between Culture as a supra-individual unity and lower-­ order supra-individual units (of the anthill variety) lies in the fact that once a distinct individual has entered the whole as a part, that individual does not cease to be a whole. Therefore, the relationship among the parts is not mechanical in nature but involves semiotic tensions and collisions, which are often quite dramatic. The principle of structural formation described above functions in both directions. On the one hand, as culture develops, the emergence of psychological traits within the individual consciousness of a human being becomes possible, with all the attendant communicative difficulties. On the other hand, distinct personal features are, with exceptional force, integrated into a semiotic whole. The richness of inner conflicts ensures the exceptional flexibility and dynamism of Culture as collective intelligence. (1978)

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Notes 1. And so, in European culture of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, a discrete verbal system clearly dominated. Natural language and logical metalanguages became models for culture itself. However, it is precisely in periods dominated by this or that system that the impossibility of transforming that system into the only one becomes evident. 2. See Lotman (1973). 3. Consider Tolstoy’s description of a dream in “The Snow Storm”: “But the old man breaks through the heap of snow with his head; and now he is not so much an old man as a hare, and leaps away from us. All the dogs bound after him. The advice-giver, who is Theodor Filípych, tells us all to sit round in a circle […] but the little old man is no longer the little old man, he is the man who was drowned” (Tolstoy 1964, 298, 299). The sign images here are not conventional insofar as their form is associated with the content unconditionally and not iconically. (In this case, the change of an outward sign would mean the sudden shift to another sign: “hare,” “drowned man,” and “old man,” “advice-giver” and “Theodor Filípych”; if we read them as iconic signs, they are essentially different kinds of sign; however, in this case “hare—old man—drowned man” are perceived by us as one and the same.) The presence of both conventional and iconic signs is a reflection of the dualism “discrete ↔ non-discrete” in a discrete system. In such a transposition of the fundamental semiotic dualism of a culture into one of its parts, verbal signs are doubled (a discrete representation of discreteness), which results in their becoming meta-elements, while the iconic signs become hybrid formations: a discrete representation of the non-discrete. 4. All translations from works cited are mine, unless otherwise noted. (Translator’s note). 5. See Lotman (2004).

References Pushkin, Alexander Sergeevich. 1959–1962. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 10 tomov. D. D. Blagoi et al. (eds.). Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura. Lotman, Iurii. 1973. “Proizkhozhdenie siuzheta v tipologicheskom osveshchenii.” In Iu. M. Lotman, Stat’i po tipologii kul’tury, 9–41. Tartu: Tartuskii UP. Lotman, Iurii. 2004. “Kul’tura kak kollektivnyi intellekt i problema iskusstvennogo razuma.” In Iu. M.  Lotman, Semiosfera, 557–567. Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo—SPB. Tolstoy, Leo. 1964. “The Snow Storm.” In Leo Tolstoy. Short Stories, Louise and Aylmer Maude (trans.), 274–305. New York: Random House.

CHAPTER 4

The “Contract” and “Self-Surrender” as Archetypal Models of Culture

When analyzing the most archaic socio-cultural models, we can distinguish at least two that are of particular interest in light of their extended transformations in the history of culture. Acknowledging a certain degree of relativity, we will call the one magic and the other religion. It should be stressed from the start that we are not discussing actual cultures but rather typological principles. Indeed, the religions that have emerged throughout the course of history typically represent a complex amalgam of these two elements. In some world religions, according to our terminology, magic dominates. A magical system of relationships is characterized by the following: 1. Reciprocity. This means that the agents participating in these relationships are both actors; for example, a magician performs certain actions in response to which the conjured power performs its actions.

Originally published as “‘Dogovor’ i ‘vruchenie sebia’ kak arkhetipicheskie modeli kul’tury,” Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii 32, 1981: 3–16. The translation here is from Iurii Lotman, Istoria i tipologia russkoi kul’tury, 22–33. Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo—SPB, 2002. J. Lotman (*) University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia © The Author(s) 2019 Juri Lotman - Culture, Memory and History, ed. by M. Tamm https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14710-5_4

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Unilateral actions do not exist in a magical system; therefore, when a magician out of ignorance performs incorrect actions, that is, actions incapable of calling forth the magical power and compelling it to act, then these words and gestures are not recognized in the system of magic. 2. Coercion. This means that specific actions performed by one party entail obligatory and precisely pre-determined actions by the other party. In regard to magical relationships, there are many established texts testifying to the fact that the magician compels the power to appear and act against its will, although the magician has less power at his disposal. The performance of certain actions by one party demands corresponding actions by the second party. In this case, the power is evenly divided: the otherworldly power exerts control over the magician while the magician exerts power over the otherworldly power. 3. Equivalence. The relationship between the two parties in a magical system is characterized by equivalent exchange and can be equated to an exchange of conventional signs. 4. Obligation. The interacting parties enter into a specific type of contract, which can have an outward expression (such as signing a contract or taking an oath to observe certain terms and conditions) or it can be implied. However, the presence of a contract assumes the possibility of its violation to the same extent that a potential for exchange and disinformation follows from an exchange of conventional signs (see Reichler 1979). From this there inevitably follows the possibility of different interpretations of the contract and of attempts by each of the parties to introduce into the contractual formulas content that is favorable to it. At the basis of any religious act lies not an exchange but an unconditional surrendering of oneself to a higher power.1 One party surrenders itself to the other without this act being accompanied by any conditions; moreover, the receiving party is acknowledged as the more powerful. This type of relationship is characterized by the following: (1) Unilateralism. These relationships are unidirectional in nature; the subject surrendering itself to the higher power counts on its protection, but there is no obligatory connection between the first party’s action and the second party’s response, and an absence of recompense cannot serve as the basis for terminating the relationship. (2) As a result, there is an absence of obligation

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in such relationships; the first party surrenders everything, while the other party can give something or not, it can reject a worthy donor and reward an unworthy one, with the latter understood as someone who does not participate in the given system of relationships or who violates it. (3) These relationships are not marked by equivalence for they preclude the psychology of exchange and do not permit the notion that basic values might be arbitrary or conventional in nature. Therefore, the means of communication in this case are not signs but symbols, the nature of which precludes the possibility of separating form from content and, as a consequence, the possibility of deceit or interpretation. (4) As a result, relationships of this kind have the nature not of a contract but of an unconditional gift. It should be stressed that we are discussing models for understanding the cultural psychology of these relationships—real world religions cannot get by without some degree of magical thinking. For example, while rejecting the idea of equivalent exchange in relationships between man and God within the limits of earthly life, a number of religions accept the idea of posthumous recompense, establishing a system of obligatory relationships, that is, relationships between life on earth and life after death that are at once conditional and, as a result, just. Compare this to the opinion of St. Augustine, according to whom the final salvation or condemnation of an individual does not depend on his virtue but entirely on the will of God. The official church of the pagan Roman empire in its final decades was magical, although behind its façade there lurked secret cults of a religious nature. The system of making sacrifices to the gods formed the basis of contractual relationships with those gods, while the official worship of the emperor took the form of a contractual agreement with the government. It is precisely by virtue of the magical characteristics mentioned above that the “religion” of the Romans did not contradict either the juridical thinking that developed and took root in the depths of its cultural psychology or the entire structure of its juridical state. Christianity, from the position of the Romans, was deeply antithetical to the state insofar as it was a religion in the strictest meaning of the word and, as a result, precluded any form of formal-juridical, contractual-legal consciousness. Rejecting this consciousness was, for a representative of Roman culture, a rejection of the very idea of government. The pagan cults of medieval Rus were visibly shamanistic, that is, magical in nature. The simultaneous adoption of Christianity in Rus and the rise of the Kievan state led to a series of consequences that are of particular

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interest to us. The co-existence of two faith systems produced two ­contradictory models of social relationships. The relationship between the prince and the armed forces tended toward the contractual. Such a model most adequately reflected the developing system of feudal ties founded on the vassal-lord relationship, as well as a whole system of mutual rights and obligations and of the etiquette-governed exchange of signs on which the ideological formation of knightly society rested. The tradition of Russian magical paganism entered organically into the new order that formed as a result of the European synthesis of the tribal institutions of barbarian peoples with the Roman juridical tradition, the latter remaining firmly entrenched in the old cities of the empire with their civil law, their complex system of legal relationships, and their abundance of lawyers. In the West, contractual consciousness, magical at its core, was cloaked in the authority of the Roman state and occupied an equal place with the religious authority, while in early Russia, that consciousness developed as essentially pagan, which left an imprint on social values. It is significant that in the Western tradition, a contract in and of itself could not be good or bad; one could conclude a contract with the devil as, for example, in the life of St. Theophilus, who sold his soul to the devil but then bought it back through his repentance. But it is also possible to conclude a contract with forces of good. So, in The Little Flowers of Saint Francis, there is the famous story of a contract made between Francis of Assisi and the savage wolf from Gubbio. After telling the wolf, “Brother Wolf, you have done great harm in this region, and you have committed horrible crimes by destroying not only irrational animals, but even have the more detestable brazenness to kill and devour human beings made in the image of God,” Francis concludes: “I want to make peace between you and them [the inhabitants of Gubbio].” Francis then proposes to the wolf an equivalent exchange. If he renounces his evil deed, then the inhabitants of Gubbio will stop hunting him and will provide him with food: “Will you promise me that?” The wolf then “raised its front paw and meekly and gently put it in St. Francis’ as a sign that it was giving its pledge” (Monte Santa Maria 1958, 88–90). No similar texts are known in the Russian folk tradition or in the literary tradition of medieval Rus, where a contract can only be made with a satanic power or with its pagan equivalent (a contract between a peasant and a bear, for instance). First and foremost, this lends an emotional nuance to the contract as such, denying it the aura of a cultural value. In the chivalrous culture of the West, where the relationship between God

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and the saints can be modeled on the system of lord and vassal and ­subordinated to the conventional ritual of being knighted and serving a lady, a contract, which is authenticated by a ritual, a gesture, a parchment, or a stamp, was imbued with an aura of holiness and of the highest authority. In Rus, however, a contract was perceived as something entirely human, with “human” here being opposed to the “divine.” The introduction of kissing a cross in those cases where a contract needed to be ratified testifies to the fact that without divine authority, which is unconditional and extra-­ contractual, the contract was not sufficiently guaranteed. Second, in all cases where a contract is concluded with an evil power, observing the contract is sinful while violating it is salutary. It is precisely in communication with an evil power that verbal communication becomes relative and one is permitted to use words in order to deceive. The possibility of alternative interpretations of a word, or casuistry, is likewise associated not with clarifying a word’s true meaning but with the desire to deceive (see the saying “A lawyer’s conscious is for sale” in Dostoevsky).2 Compare this to the episode in the fairytale “Dragon and the Gypsy,” in which a dragon and a gypsy engage in a whistling contest. “The dragon whistled so loudly that the leaves fell from all the trees. ‘You whistle well, my friend,’ said the gypsy, ‘but I whistle better. Cover up your eyes or else when I whistle they’ll pop out of your head!’ The dragon believed him and tied a cloth around his eyes and said ‘Now, you whistle!’ The gypsy then took a cudgel, and how it whistled past the dragon’s head” (Afanas’ev 1936, 363).3 Such a play on words, which exposes the relative nature of the linguistic sign and transforms a contract into a deception, is only possible with the devil, a snake, or a bear, but never with God or the divine world. Consider the words of Daniel the Exile: “Lies are for the world, not for God. You cannot lie to Him nor play with the divine.” It is telling here that “to lie” and “to play” are presented as equal. Related to this, the system of relationships established in medieval society, that is, the system of reciprocal obligations between a higher power and the feudal lords, was negatively perceived very early on. For example, in his attempt to convince the prince that the members of his council, or duma, were deceitful servants who were leading their lord into misfortune, Daniel the Exile opposes their behavior to an ideal of subjugation and is not ashamed to compare himself to a dog: “Or you say, prince[:] You lied like a dog[.] But princes and boyars like a good dog.” Contractual service is bad service. Even Peter I would write with some irritation to Prince Boris Sheremetev, whom he suspected of harboring sympathy for

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the old boyar code of conduct: “This is like a servant who sees his master drowning but doesn’t want to save him until he’s checked to see whether it is in his contract that he should pull him out of the water” (Peter I, 1893, 265). These words can be compared with a letter from Alexis Kurbatov to Peter: “I sincerely wish to serve you, my sovereign, as I do God, without pretense” (Solov’ev 1993, VIII, 312). This is no accidental comparison; it has deep roots. Centralized government, which was less mediated in Russia than in the West, was built on a model of religious relationships. Incorporated into the Domostroi, or book of household rules, was an isomorphic model: God in His universe, the tsar in his realm, and the father in his family, reflecting three degrees of unconditional self-­ surrender and copying the religious system of relationships onto other levels of society. Under those circumstances, the concept of “state service” assumed an absence of any conditions between the two parties. On the one hand, it assumed the unconditional and total surrendering of oneself, and, on the other hand, it assumed mercy. The concept of “service” could be genetically traced back to the psychology of the subjects of the prince’s patrimony. As the role of this bureaucracy, which was personally dependent on the grand duke, grew, eventually becoming the state bureaucracy, so too did the role of the grand duke’s mercenary troops, and the psychology of the grand duke’s court became the psychology of its civil servants. Religious feelings were projected onto the prince, and service became servitude. Merit was defined by mercy. As Vasily Griaznoy expressed it in a letter to Ivan the Terrible: “Without your princely mercy, who would I be as a person?” The clash of these two types of psychology can be traced throughout the Russian Middle Ages. Moreover, whereas the psychology of exchange and contractual agreement generated signs, rituals, and etiquette, the religious position was oriented toward symbolism and know-how. The paradoxical combination of these two latter qualities should come as no surprise. Chivalrous culture was oriented toward signs. In order to acquire cultural value, something within the system must become a sign, that is, it must be maximally cleansed of its practical, non-signifying function. So, “honor” for a feudal lord in medieval Rus was associated with the awarding by the sovereign of a significant portion of military booty or of a large gift. However, once having received this gift, it was necessary according to the code of honor to use it in such a way as to reduce as much as possible its material value while emphasizing its value as a sign: “They began making bridges across the marshes and moors, using their cloaks, mantles, furs

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sheepskin jackets, and all their Polovtsian valuables” (Dmitriev and Vinogradova 1952, 11). This model of knightly behavior was presented in the Russian redaction of an epic poem about Digenes Akritas, The Act of Digenes, a translation from the eleventh–twelfth centuries. In that redaction, the knight Digenes decides to take for his wife “the beautiful daughter of Strategos,” whose father and brothers had killed all those who had previously sought her hand. When he arrives at Strategos’s court, the maiden is alone, her father and brothers being away. Nothing prevents Digenes from taking his beloved away, but he commands her to remain and to inform her father of her imminent abduction. Strategos refuses to believe it. Digenes then breaks through the gates and, upon entering the court, “began to shout, summoning Strategos and his eldest sons to witness their sister’s abduction” (italics added—J. L.). But Strategos even now refuses to believe this brave soldier is challenging him to a fight. Digenes waits three hours in vain before taking Strategos’s daughter away with him. The success of his undertaking, however, brings no joy to Digenes, only sadness: “Great is my shame” (Kuz’mina 1962, 149). Everything here—his future wife, the fighting, and the wedding—had been transformed into signs of knightly honor; they did not have value in and of themselves but only when they were difficult to obtain—without this element of difficulty, they lost their meaning. Fighting acquired value not by victory alone but only when the victory was won according to established rules and procedures and under maximally difficult conditions. Defeat and death in an attempt to achieve an unachievable goal was worth more than a victory—and all the practical benefits derived therefrom—obtained through calculation or practical intelligence, or even ordinary military effort. Effect is valued higher than effectiveness. The hopeless attempt by Igor Sviatoslavovich with his modest detachment “to seek out the city of Tumutarankani” inspires the author of The Lay of Igor’s Campaign more than the combined detachments of the Russian princes in 1183–1184. Such was the psychology of the narrator in La Chanson de Roland. The semiotic nature of behavior forces actors to accentuate the moment of play. Correct use of the language of behavior replaces any practical outcome as the goal of the action. And so, in the knightly culture of Western Europe, the jousting tournament was equivalent to battle. In medieval Rus, the function of the tournament in feudal society was performed by the hunt, which became a specific type of game in which the signifying values of knightly martial

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behavior were concentrated. It is no coincidence that Vladimir Monomakh listed his hunts alongside his victories in battle as equally worthy of pride. The opposite form of behavior excludes conditionality. The fundamental feature of this behavior is a propensity to reject play and the relative nature of semiotic signs and to equate the unconditional with the truth. The unconditional nature of the social meaning of behavior reveals itself in two ways. For the social elite, it is manifested in a propensity toward symbolism in one’s behavior and in the entire semiotic system; for the lower classes, it is manifested in a zero degree of semioticity, that is, the transfer of behavior into the realm of the purely pragmatic. The difference in semiotics between a sign and a symbol as expressions of the conditional and the unconditional, respectively, was noted by Ferdinand de Saussure: “One characteristic of the symbol is that it is never wholly arbitrary; it is not empty, for there is the rudiment of a natural bond between the signifier and the signified. The symbol of justice, a pair of scales, could not be replaced by just any other symbol, such as a chariot” (Saussure 1959, 68).4 Power in the symbolic consciousness of the Russian Middle Ages was endowed with features of holiness and truth. Its value was unconditional— it was an image of heavenly power and was an incarnation of eternal truth. The rituals with which power surrounded itself imitated the divine order. In the face of such power, the individual acted not as a contracting party but as a drop of water in the sea. Surrendering oneself, the individual demanded nothing in return except the right to surrender oneself. And so, Pyotr Shafirov, finding himself in Istanbul following the Battle of Poltava and considering whether to undertake a military diversion with the goal of seizing the Turkish territory of Charles XII, wrote to Peter I: “And although it will be found out that this was done by the Russian side, nothing else will happen here except that I suffer” (qtd. in Solov’ev 1993, IV, 42). A number of similar examples could be provided. What is crucial here is that the bearer of this conventional psychology when confronted with the necessity of sacrificing his life looks upon death as the exchange of life for glory: “And when a man is killed in battle, what is amazing about that,” Danil Galitsky said to his troops. “If a man is killed in battle, so what? … Others die at home without glory, whereas those died in glory” (Galitskii 1908, 822; italics added—J.  L.). From the opposite position, there can be no talk of an exchange of values; here we have the poetry of nameless death. The reward is the dissolving of the individual in the absolute, from which one can expect nothing in return. Dracula does not

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promise his troops glory and does not associate death with the idea of just recompense5; he simply proposes death to them at his command and without condition: “If you want to think twice about death, do not come with me into battle” (Lur’e 1964, 127). In imbuing the concept of government with religious sentiment, social psychology of this type demands from society that it transfer its entire semiosis onto the tsar, who becomes a symbolic figure, a kind of living icon.6 The remaining members of society are left with behavior having zero semioticity; only purely practical activity is required of them. It is revealing that practical activity continued to be valued very low, which made it possible for Ivan to refer to his courtiers as “laborers” —they were relegated to a level in early feudal society at which only serfs, who were outside the social semiotic system, were found. Practical service yielding real results was demanded from these subjects. Any concern they might show for the socio-semiotic side of their life and work was perceived as “laziness,” “craftiness,” or even “treason.” Revealing in this regard is the shift in the treatment of hunting from an honorable activity to an entertainment, a distraction from one’s government duties; the sovereign retained the right to engage in this activity, but now as entertainment. Already in The Tale of the Battle on the Pyana, the passion for hunting among negligent commanders is opposed to their state military service: “Those who go hunting, enjoy themselves, feel like at home” (Povest’ 1908, 307). Later in the same spirit, Ivan the Terrible wrote to Vasily Griaznoy: “Another time you hoped not to sleep as on a campaign, but came with dogs for hunting hares—so that the Crimeans bound you in robes” (Ivan Groznyi 1951, 193). And Griaznoy, who was not offended by the epithet “laborer”—he had written to the tsar: “You are the lord; like God you [can] turn someone small into someone big”—takes offense at this last reprimand and writes to Ivan that he received his wounds and scars not while hunting but in battle, in service to the state. The eighteenth century brought profound changes to the entire cultural system. However, this new stage in social psychology and the semiotics of Russian culture involved only a transformation of the previous stage, not a complete break with it. Most evident on the cultural surface of everyday life was the shift in official ideology. The religious model of government did not disappear but was subordinated to interesting transformations in the axiological relationship of high and low, which traded places. Practical activity in the sphere of the “low” was raised up to the very summit of the hierarchy of values. The de-symbolization of life that

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accompanied the demonstrative trampling into the ground of the previous period’s symbolism exposed those symbols to public ridicule while elevating the authority of practical activity. The poetry of craftsmanship, of useful skills and activities that were neither signs nor symbols but of value in and of themselves, played a significant role in the pathos of Peter’s reforms and of Lomonosov’s scholarly activity. Osip Mandelstam saw in this pathos the essence of the eighteenth century: I’m constantly drawn to citations from the naïve and clever eighteenth century, and now I am reminded of the lines from the famous Lomonosov missive: They think incorrectly about things, Shuvalov, Who consider glass lower than minerals. From where does this enthusiasm come from, this high-flown utilitarian enthusiasm, from where such an inner warmth that positively sets aglow this poeticizing about the fate of the industrial crafts? What a striking contrast to the brilliant, cold impersonality of the scientific thought of the nineteenth century! (Mandelstam 1977, 95)

Regarding the behavior of Peter I, Lomonosov stresses that “with his hands born for the scepter he reached out for work” (Lomonosov 1986, 208). The ideal of the worker-tsar was regularly put forward, from Simeon Polotsky’s poem “Delati” [Doing] in his collection Manyflowered Garden (1680), to Pushkin’s “Stanzas” (1826). However, this reversed system was characterized not only by differences from the previous system but also by similarities in terms of its initial form. Peter’s government was not the incarnation of a symbol; it was its own ultimate truth, without anything above it; it was not a representation or image of anything. It did, however, like the pre-Petrine centralized government, demand faith and the complete surrender of its subjects. An individual surrendered himself to it. Thus was created a secular religious governmental system, and practicality ceased to exist outside the semiotic system. The specific gravity associated with the semiotics of contracts also fundamentally changed in the general culture of the age. The semiotics of contracts, which had been almost entirely destroyed along with the whole

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cultural legacy of the early Russian medieval period, received powerful support in the context of Western cultural influence. Feofan Prokopovich and other propagandists in Peter’s camp elaborated in their speeches on the political theories of Samuel von Pufendorf and Hugo Grotius, although refracted through the Russian tradition. The power of the tsar was conceived as a gift from God and was justified by a citation from Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians (6:5).7 At the same time, it was maintained that the tsar, upon accepting this power, entered into an unspoken contract that obligated him to rule for the welfare of his subjects. Having ceased to be a symbol, the tsar was now obligated practically to serve his subjects, and his subjects him: If every rank is from God, as the second argument shows, then the thing most necessary for us and most pleasing to God that the rank demands is: mine for me, yours for you, etc. If you are a tsar, then rule, taking care that the people have no sorrow, that the powerful serve justice, and to preserve the country from enemies as a whole. If you are a senator, devote yourself completely to this cause. Put simply, everyone should consider what their position demands of them, and should actively fulfil its demand. (Prokopovich 1961, 98)

The system of government ranks that was introduced in the eighteenth century and that competed with the principle of unconditional and inherited nobility of blood was also founded on the exchange of titles as signs. Equivalence in such exchanges, while violated in practice, had to be strictly observed in theory. To that end, statutes were devised, as well as a system of ranks based on a strict hierarchy according to length of service. The fact that someone who was passed by for a title could, according to the laws and norms of the time, raise the issue and demand the title by enumerating his rights to it, testifies to the fact that in the consciousness of the age, favor was not outside the law but was regulated and established by rules for the exchange of obligations between a civil servant and the state. The spirit of contracts that permeated eighteenth-century culture demanded that the value of traditional institutions be rethought, or at least reformulated. And so, although everyone knew that autocracy existed in Russia and this was recognized in official ideology (in particular, in the system of titles) and, of course, in government practice, acknowledging that fact was considered an unwelcome violation of etiquette. Catherine II declared in her Nakaz, or Instruction, that Russia was a monarchy, not an autocracy, meaning that it was ruled by laws and not by the ruler’s will.

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Alexander I would repeatedly stress that autocracy was a sad necessity, of which he personally did not approve. For him, as for Karamzin, autocracy was the reality not the ideal. This tendency was especially evident in discussions of the rights of the nobility. Already in his second satire (On Nobility, 1730), the poet Katemir considered the privileges of the nobility as a kind of advance, received for the service of their fathers, which must be repaid through their own personal service to the state. This idea, which was developed by writers such as Sumarokov, turned into a theory of exchange of personal services for the honors received by their ancestors. The nobleman who did not engage in personal service was a double-­ crosser, who took but gave nothing in return:       Noble entitlement flows in us from blood to blood,       But let us say why nobility is thus passed on.       If my grandfather lived for the good of society,       He earned payment for himself, and for me an advance;       And in receiving this advance through another’s service,       I should not limit my merit to it.       Having taken this substantial advance for encouragement,       Do I have the right to use it without having done the work?      (Sumarokov 1935, 203)

Against this backdrop, an opposing process was at work. Alongside the tendency to rationalize semiotic exchange and to shift the center of gravity to the content of the exchange, there existed a second tendency—toward the irrational singling out of semiosis as such. The emphasis here was placed on the arbitrariness of signs and rituals. Therefore, there quickly arose a closed court culture in which etiquette and the theatricality of everyday life were cultivated. Duels—or the ritual process of restoring offended honor—became popular as a means of maintaining the semiotics of corporate honor. The emerging culture of the dandy was built on the play that arose from the arbitrary relationship between the form and content of a sign, producing a need for dictionaries to explain the meanings of relative forms of expression, in particular, the gallant speech of love. Based on the principle of the general dictionary (containing a headword, an example of phraseological usage, a dictionary entry, etc.), Dreux du Radier’s Dictionnaire d’amour (1741) was adapted to the Russian context by Alexander Khrapovitsky:

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Anxiety:

I am enduring mortal anxiety. Includes the meaning: “While observing the accepted codes of conduct, I give a seemly expression to my ardor.” Speak: […] If a beautiful woman pleasantly remarks that you are speaking nonsense, that means “Although I want to take you as a suitor, I am frightened by your customary lack of modesty.” […] “Remember to whom you are speaking” or “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” and other similar words carry the same meaning. Torment: “I experience unbearable torment,” means for the most part: “I am pretending to be your beloved, but you, who go often to the theater, think that love without torment doesn’t exist, and so I must use passionate words to satisfy you.” (Khrapovitskii 1779, 9, 18, 42) Such metatexts are also essential for understanding the language of beauty spots: “A beauty spot on the temples means illness, on the left side of the forehead, pride, below a lower eyelid, tears, on the upper lip, a kiss, on the lower lip, a disposition, and so on. The key to this alphabet, like that of ministers [ministers refers here to diplomats—J. L.] is not always the same; they are arbitrarily selected and changed to protect their relations” (Gromov 1798, 134–135). The language of fans and of flowers developed at this time as well. The popularity of masquerades, it would seem, also introduced an element of conventionality, even in regard to oppositions given by nature, with men dressing as women and women as men.8 One should keep in mind that the association of unmotivated signs with the devil remained in the consciousness of the folk. This explains the popularity in moralist literature of associating the semiotic conventionality of the culture of the dandy with atheism and moral relativity. It would be a mistake to view the eighteenth-century culture of the dandy from the same positions as its critics, seeing it as nothing more than a monstrous social anomaly. It is precisely in depths of that culture that there developed a consciousness of the autonomy of the sign, which would become an important impetus for the formation of the culture of individualism in the Romantic age. The fact that this culture begins in Russia with Trediakovsky’s Journey to the Isle of Love and ends with Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveler forces us to see in this more than just a chain

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of caricatures ranging from Korsakov in Pushkin’s The Moor of Peter the Great to Sliunai in Krylov’s play Victory. The tense nature of the social conflicts at the end of the eighteenth century generated further shifts in the structure of the languages of culture. Any association of the world of signs with the social structure of society discredited the idea of a sign as such in the eyes of the eighteenth-­ century Enlightenment. Following Voltaire, Enlightenment thinkers subjected the “prejudices of the age” (Pushkin) to multi-faceted critique, which in practice meant reviewing the entire repository of semiotic concepts accumulated over the course of centuries, as carried out by Rousseau, who, having uncovered the lie of civilization, detected its founding principle in the arbitrary link between form and content in the word. The opposition he put forward between the word and intonation, gesture, and mimicry was in fact an opposition of the unmotivated sign to the motivated one. Rousseau built his social ideal on the basis of a social contract, that is, on the idea of equivalent exchange of values between people, which is impossible when the conventionality of signs has been destroyed. While rejecting social semiotics, he wanted to preserve its results. At the opposite pole stood the ideology of the Masons. The Masons were opponents of the contractual theory of society. Against it, they proposed the idea of surrendering oneself to the absolute (be it the social order, the ideal of humanity, or God) and gratuitously dissolving oneself into it. While orienting themselves toward the Middle Ages, however, they remained people of the eighteenth century—their emblems were not medieval symbols; they created a secret language for the initiated, which on a semiotic scale is situated closer to the language of beauty marks than to that of medieval symbols. Both attempts to break out of the confines of linguistic relativity turned out to be in vain. The eighteenth century ended with two grandiose masquerades: the “Roman” masquerade in Revolutionary Paris and the knightly masquerade at the court of Paul I. While material from the nineteenth century does not fall within the scope of this article, it should be pointed out that at the beginning of the that century the idea of “self-surrender” and the rejection of a culture based on semiotic conventionality once again took center stage. This was represented, on the one hand, by the archaic idea of the providential mission of autocracy, fanatically promoted by Nicholas I, and, on the other, by the progressive faction in Russian society inspired by the idea of “surrendering oneself” to the objective and unconditional values of freedom, history, the people, and the “common cause.”

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Notes 1. What is meant here is precisely power and not goodness insofar as a religious inclination toward evil powers is also possible. 2. Lotman is referring here to an essay published by Dostoevsky in February of 1867 in his column Diary of a Writer, in which he offers a very negative portrayal of lawyers, citing the folk expression “Advokat – naniataia sovest’,” or “a lawyer is a hired conscience” (1994, 361). (Translator’s note). 3. In a contract with an unclean power, the usual way of breaking the contract is through repentance (see “The Tale of Savva Grudstyn”). A more complex variant is presented in the Apocrypha of Adam. According to this text (which A. N. Pupin claims is taken from an Old Believers’ manuscript, but doesn’t provide any details), Adam concludes a contract with the devil in exchange for the redemption of Eve and Cain: “And the Devil said[:] ‘You will sign a contract about yourself[:] In life I belong to God, in death I belong to you [i.e., to the Devil (translator’s note)]’” (Tikhonravov 1863, 16). Also characteristic, however, is another, more widely circulated text, in which Adam consciously deceives the devil when concluding the contract. After his expulsion from paradise, Adam harnesses an ox and begins to plow the land: “And the Devil came[.] ‘I will not give you any land to farm, because the earth belongs to me, whereas heaven and paradise belong to God[.] Sign a contract that you are mine, and then farm my land[.]’ Adam said[:] ‘To him who owns the land belong I and my children.’” Later, the author explains that Adam had cleverly deceived the devil for he knew that the land belonged to Satan only temporarily and that in the future Christ would be incarnated (“that the Lord will come down to earth and be born by a virgin”) and with his blood would redeem the land and the people from the devil (4). In the Western European tradition, a contract is neutral; it can be good or bad, and in the specific chivalric version with its cult of the sign, keeping one’s word became a matter of honor. Characteristic of this are plots involving a knight who keeps his word to Satan (see the inversion of this in the legend of Don Juan; in violating all the obligations of religion and morality, he keeps his word given to the statue of the Commodore). In the Russian tradition, a contract acquires its “force” from a sacred object or place, which guarantees the keeping of the contract. A contract that has not been sanctified by the authority of a non-conventional power has no “force.” And so one’s word given to Satan (or to his earthly deputies) must be broken. 4. The Russian translation (“is never entirely arbitrary”) sounds less categorical than the original: “n’être jamais tout à fait arbitraire” (Saussure 1962, 101). For arguments distinguishing a sign from a symbol, see Todorov (1972, 275–286) and Todorov (1982, 16–18). In filling in the concept of “symbol,” we are following Saussure and not Peirce, who contrasted the symbol

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to the “icon,” which is based on social convention. The non-conventional nature of the symbol, however, does not remove its differences from iconic signs. While both are derived from the principle of similarity, there exists an important difference between them. Similarity in a symbol is rhetorical in nature (the invisible is transmitted through a visible resemblance, the infinite through a finite resemblance, the non-discrete through a discrete resemblance, etc., so that the subject and object of comparison are located in conceptual fields with a different number of dimensions), while similarity in iconic signs is more rational in nature. With iconic signs, it is possible to monosemically reconstruct from the representation what is being represented, which is fundamentally impossible in a system of symbols. 5. Compare this with “Death on the field of battle is often called a ‘judgement’” (Meshcherskii 1958, 85). 6. It was precisely the symbolic nature of the authority of tsarist power that excluded any possibility of playful behavior on the tsar’s part. In this respect, moments of play in the behavior of Ivan the Terrible were perceived both subjectively and objectively as satanism. 7. The verse Lotman refers to reads: “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ” (Ephesians 6:5). (Translator’s note). 8. See, for example, the following note written by Catherine II: “A very amusing idea has come into my head. We must have a ball at the Hermitage. We must tell the women to come in deshabille and without petticoats, and without big wigs on their heads […]. In this hall there will be four stalls with clothes and masks on one side and four stalls with clothes and masks on the other, one side for the men and the other for the women. Above the stalls with men’s clothing we must put the sign ‘Dressing rooms for the women’ and above the dressing rooms with women’s clothing: ‘For the men’” (Catherine II 1907, 659).

References Afanas’ev, Aleksandr. 1936. “149. Zmei i tsygan.” In Narodnye russkie skazki A.  N. Afanas’eva v 3 tomakh, M.  K. Azadovskii, N.  P. Andreev, and Iu. M. Sokolov (eds.), I, 362–363. Leningrad: Academia. Catherine II, Empress of Russia. 1907. Sochineniia imp. Ekateriny II (v 12 tomov), Vol. 12, A.  N. Pypin (ed.). St. Petersburg: Tipografiia imperial’noi Akademii nauk. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. 1994. “Something on Lawyers in General. My Naïve and Hasty Assumptions. Something on Talented People in General and in Particular.” In A Writer’s Diary. Volume 1. 1873–1876, Kenneth Lantz (trans.), 359–365. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

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Dmitriev, L. A. and V. L. Vinogradova (eds.). 1952. Slovo o polku Igoreve (copy of the 1880 edition). Leningrad: Sovetskii Pisatel’. Galitskii, Danil. 1908. In Polnoe sobranie russkikh letopisei, Vol. 2. St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Eduarda Pratsa. Gromov, Gleb. 1798. Liubov’. Knizhka zolotaia. St. Petersburg: Tipografiia pri Gubernskom Pravlenii. Ivan, Tsar of Russia. 1951. Poslaniia Ivana Groznogo, D. Likhachev and Ia. Lur’e (eds.). Moscow and Leningrad: Akademiia Nauk SSSR. Khrapovitskii, Aleksandr. 1779. Liubovnoi leksikon. [Translation of Dictionnaire d’amour (1741), by Dreux du Radier]. Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia [u N. Novikova]. Kuz’mina, Vera. 1962. Devgenievo deianie. Deianie prezhnykh vremen khrabrykh chelovek. Moscow: Akademiia Nauk SSSR. Lomosonov, Mikhail. 1986. “Nadpis’ 1. K statue Petra Velikogo.” In Isbrannye proizvedeniia, A. A. Morozov (ed.), 208. Leningrad: Sovetskii Pisatel’. Lur’e, Iakov (ed.). 1964. Povest’ o Drakule. Leningrad: Nauka. Mandelstam, Osip. 1977. “The Nineteenth Century.” In Osip Mandelstam: Selected Essays, Sidney Monas (trans.), 94–100. Austin and London: University of Texas Press. Meshcherskii, Nikita A. 1958. Istoriia “Iudeiskoi voiny” Iosifa Glviia v drevnerusskom perevode. Moscow and Leningrad: Akademiia Nauk SSSR. Monte Santa Maria, Ugolino di. 1958. “How St. Francis Tamed the Very Fierce Wolf of Gubbio. In The Little Flowers of Saint Francis, Raphael Brown (trans.), 88–91. New York: Doubleday. Peter I, Emperor of Russia. 1893. Pis’ma i bumagi imperatora Petra Velikogo, Vol. 3. St. Petersburg: Gusudarstvennaia tipografiia. Povest’ o poboishi izhe na P’ian. 1908. In Polnoe sobranie russkikh letopisei, Vol. 14. St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Eduarda Pratsa. Prokopovich, Feofan. 1961. Sochineniia. Moscow and Leningrad: Nauka. Reichler, Claude. 1979. La diabolie, la séduction, la renardie, l’écriture. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1959. Course in General Linguistics, Wade Baskin (trans.). New York: Philosophical Library. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1962. Cours de linguistique générale. Paris: Payot. Solov’ev, Sergei. 1993. Sochineniia v 18 knig. Moscow: Mysl’. Sumarokov, Aleksandr. 1935. Stikhotvoreniia. Leningrad: Sovetskii Pisatel’. Tikhonravov, Nikolai. 1863. Pamiatniki otrechennoi russkoi literatury, Vol. 1. St. Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia Pol’za. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1972. “Introduction à la symbolique.” Poétique 11: 272–308. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1982. Theories of the Symbol, Catherine Porter (trans.). Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

CHAPTER 5

Toward a Theory of Cultural Interaction: The Semiotic Aspect

The study of literatures beyond national borders is associated with the mythological school and Indo-European linguistics. The impulse behind this was the observation of striking similarities at the most varied levels between texts that until then had not been assumed to have anything in common. After that, all the researchers working in the schools that followed—the school of “borrowings,” the cultural-historical school, Nikolai Marr’s stage school, and others—dedicated their efforts to addressing the same question: explaining the similarity of names, motifs, plotlines, and images in works of culturally and historically distant literatures, mythologies, and folk poetry traditions. This problem remains at the center of current research. Definitive in this regard for more than a century and a half is a concept given its most precise formulation in the works of Viktor Zhirmunsky and Nikolai Konrad. Originally published as “K postroeniiu teorii vzaimodeitsviia kul’tur (semiotitcheskii aspekt),” Uchenye zapiski Tartuskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta (= Trudy po romano-germanskoi filologii: literaturovedenie) 646, 1983: 92–113. The translation here is from Iurii Lotman, Semiosfera, 603–614. Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo—SPB, 2000. J. Lotman (*) University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia © The Author(s) 2019 Juri Lotman - Culture, Memory and History, ed. by M. Tamm https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14710-5_5

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These scholars broke down the comparative study of literature into precise methodological forms, distinguishing between genetic and typological similarities at the level of texts and of individual textual elements. At the basis of this approach was the idea of evolutionary unity already put forward by Edward Burnett Tylor. Here we see the possibility of a genetic conception of “world literature.” The fundamental condition necessary for researchers to produce both typological comparisons and studies of historical-cultural “influences” and “borrowings” lies in the concept of evolutionary unity. When Konrad writes of Japanese chivalric culture or of the Chinese Renaissance, for example, he is assuming that world-historical stages of cultural development produce typologically similar phenomena in the most distant cultural contexts. “However,” notes Zhirmunsky, “in specific comparative analysis of historically similar phenomena in the literatures of different peoples, the question of stagist typological analogies in the literary process inevitability intersects with the no less fundamental question of international literary influences. The impossibility of entirely excluding the latter is perfectly obvious. The history of human society knows no examples of completely isolated cultural (and, as a consequence, literary) development, that is, without more or less direct interaction and mutual influence among the individual parts” (Zhirmunskii 1979, 20). A precondition for such interactions is the combination of evolutionary unity with “the irregularities, contradictions and lags” characterizing, as Zhirmunsky claims, “the development of class-based society” under conditions marked by “the irregularities of a single socio-historical process” (ibid.). Relying on the well-known postulate put forward by Marx that “the country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future” (Marx 1906, 13), on the one hand, and on Alexander Veselovsky’s postulate regarding “overlapping flows,” on the other, Zhirmunsky formulates his own postulate to the effect that every outside influence only accelerates a culture’s imminent literary development. In their time, these short postulates represented a significant step forward in the comparative study of cultures, and they remain valuable today. This does not mean, however, that these postulates are sufficient at our current stage of research. We must note, first and foremost, that a large number of factors in which the impulse to interaction is not likeness or similarity (be it evolutionary or in terms of plots and motifs, genres, and so on) but difference have yet to receive scholarly attention. We can provide at least two possible

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explanations for a culture’s interest in a thing or an idea and for the desire to acquire or master it: (1) the thing is needed because it is understandable, familiar, and fits within existing concepts and values; or (2) the thing is needed because it is not understandable or known and does not fit within existing concepts and values. The former can be described as a “search for oneself,” while the latter can be described as a “search for the other.” To this day, the comparative study of culture bears the stamp of its Indo-European and mythological “forebears,” which is evident in all its techniques for uncovering elements of sameness. Of course, it is much more efficient to find similarities in the motifs of Iranian and Celtic legends than to pay attention to the differences. However, when we take the next step toward producing not simply histories of individual cultures that are based on parallel stages but histories that are immanently autonomous, and place before ourselves the task of creating a history of human civilization, such a selection of material leads us to the wholly unproven conclusion that these similarities render varied material into a single unity. Of course, one cannot say that the question of mutual influence of diverse elements has not attracted attention. Viktor Shklovsky and Iurii Tynianov, for example, studied how the function of a text changes as it is appropriated by another culture, and, related to this, how such interaction was tied to the transformation of the text (see Tynianov 1977, 257, among others). It follows from this that, in order for a text to become an active participant in the process of literary succession, that text, even within one and the same culture, must be transformed, at least conditionally, from something known and “domestic” into something unknown and “foreign.” After Dionýz Ď urišin showed that there is no fundamental difference between the interaction of different texts within a national literature and of texts of different cultures in terms of the mechanics of contact (see Ď urišin 1974, 65, among others), the significance of these postulates from the point of view of comparative studies has become obvious. A great number of specific comparative studies are built on the analysis of the transformations and structural shifts in certain texts and literary phenomena as they are assimilated within another tradition. And so, the problem is not new, but, on a theoretical level, it remains far from being resolved. The proposition formulated by Ď urišin, which is closely related to general works on the theory of text, is quite significant.1 We will attempt

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below to demonstrate that it can be sufficiently broadened to accommodate all forms of creative thought, from acts of individual consciousness to textual interactions on a global scale. Before we broach this problem, however, it is necessary to examine one specific aspect of the question we wish to analyze. Until now, the focus of attention among researchers has been the conditions under which it becomes possible for one text to influence another. But we are interested in another question: Why and under what conditions in specific cultural situations does a foreign text become necessary. This question can be posed another way: When and under what conditions is a “foreign” text necessary for the creative development of one’s “own” culture or when and under what conditions does contact with another “I” become an unavoidable condition for the creative development of one’s “own” consciousness (which is the same question). Every consciousness includes within itself the capacity for logical operations, that is, the capacity to transform certain initial utterances in accordance with specific algorithms, alongside elements of creative thought. The latter are associated with the capacity to transform initial utterances in a way that is not monosemantically predictable. Analogic mechanisms play an essential role here. However, it has to be emphasized that these analogues must be of a type that would exclude the possibility of their monosemantic algorithmicization. Moreover, one cannot claim that this analogic mechanism will be characterized by probability. A host of considerations speaks against such an assumption. Let us point out the fundamentally instantaneous nature of these intellectual operations and, as a result, their incompatibility with statistical modeling, which makes any talk of probable modeling pointless. Perhaps, we should talk instead of “relative equivalence” (the meaning of this concept will be explained below), which enters into the given mechanism of analogy. Every consciousness, it appears, includes elements of each type of thought. However, we can propose that scientific thought is characterized by the predominance of logical structures while artistic thought is characterized by the predominance of creative thought, and that everyday consciousness is located somewhere between those two poles. Research into the psychological mechanisms of creative consciousness, however, lies outside the limits of our competence. To reach the goals we have set, it is sufficient to limit ourselves to a certain general cybernetic modeling of the situation that interests us here.

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We will refer to creative consciousness as an intellectual apparatus capable of producing new messages. We will consider as new those messages that cannot be produced instantaneously from another message with the help of a given algorithm. The initial message can be either a text in some other language or a text in an “object language,” that is, reality viewed as text. Alongside the desire to unify codes and maximize the ease of mutual understanding between an addresser and an addressee through the mechanism of culture, completely opposite tendencies are at work. It goes without saying, the development of culture is linked to the increasing structural complexity of the individual and of the individualization of the mechanisms for encoding information in it. This process, which takes place in periods of the greatest development and complexification of socio-cultural life, requires further explanation. The socio-communicative difficulties associated with the individualization of the inner semiotic structures of the individual are obvious. A sharp decline in communicability creates a situation in which mutual understanding between two individuals is complicated to the point of complete isolation, which is without question a social ill, producing societal and individual tragedies too numerous to list. All this is obvious and aligns well with the initial propositions from the classical theory of information science, which consider every change in a message in the process of transmission to be a harmful distortion produced by noise interference in the channel of communication, that is, the result not of the theoretical model of communication but of the technology used to implement it. However, this conceptualization, according to which we are dealing with a collateral or parasitical effect, is contradicted by the entire history of culture, which convinces us that the individualization of codes is a tendency that is no less active and constant than that of their degeneration. Moreover, in the present case, we are evidently confronting an even more general developmental tendency. Examining the biological function of reproduction and the evolution of the mechanisms of reproduction over the course of biological development, we can detect a parallelism between the processes described above. At the lower rungs of the evolutionary ladder, reproduction occurs through cell division and, as a consequence, the initial method is characterized by extreme simplicity and intelligibility. Later sexual classes arise for which fertilization requires the presence of an other,2 which immediately complicates this physiological act, the absolute necessity of which for

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the continuation of life would seem to demand extreme simplicity and probability. The next stage, which occurs before the emergence of culture, is widely represented in animal societies; this stage involves selection: What is beneficial for the continuation of the species turns out to be not a being from the opposite sexual class but a limited group or a strictly assigned individual. As a result of the growing number of interdictions in the animal world, the complex semiotic concept of love arises, which over the course of cultural development is subjected to extraordinary mediation. One could dedicate many volumes to which cultural mechanisms facilitate the complexification of the reproductive function, often resulting in situations that rendered it almost impossible (as in the ideal of platonic love, the chivalric code of love, the mystical eroticism of various medieval sects, and so on). Similarly, in the realm of communication we confront a process of progressive complexification, which leads to the undermining of its initial function. So how can we explain why it became important to do in a maximally complex way that which should be done in the simplest manner possible? If we return to communicative processes, we must direct our attention to another aspect of the problem. Not only does the increasing complexity of codes complicate mutual understanding, but the semiotic structure also becomes ever more complex in the process of cultural development, which makes decoding more difficult as well. The following is a chain illustrating the increasing complexity of texts: the message of a traffic signal; a text in a natural language; and the profound creation of a poetic talent. It is obvious that the first text can be understood by the receiver of the message in only one way; the second text is oriented toward a monosemantic “correct” understanding, while allowing for moments of ambiguity; and the third fundamentally excludes the possibility of monosemantic understanding. Once again we are faced with a communicative paradox. The text that has the greatest cultural value and whose transmission should be highly probable turns out to be the least capable of being transmitted. Are we really dealing in all these cases with the “technical imperfection” of the system? Does the system acquire some benefit from making the understanding of valuable texts difficult or from cultural prohibitions on sex? These questions, it would seem, can be adequately answered only if we pay attention to the fact that the transmission of a message is not the only function of a communicative mechanism or of culture as a whole. These mechanisms also work to produce new messages, that is, they play the same role as the creative consciousness in a thinking individual.

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Let us imagine that text T1 does not simply entail the transmission from A1 to A2 along a connecting channel but must be subjected to translation from language L1 to language L2. If a relationship of monosemantic correspondence exists between these two languages, then the translation (T2) that is produced as a result cannot be considered a new text. It can be fully characterized as the transformation of an initial text in accordance with a given set of rules, so that T1 and T2 can be considered two recordings of one and the same text. Now imagine that translation must take place from language L1 to language L’, between which there exists a relationship of untranslatability, meaning that there are no monosemantic correspondences for the elements of the first language in the structure of the second. However, through cultural conventions, which are established historically as the result of special effort, relationships of relative equivalence have been established between the two languages. Similar cases in the actual process of culture represent a regular, law-governed phenomenon. All cases of intergeneric contact, such as the cinematic rendition of narrative texts, represent partial realizations of such regularity. Let us examine this particular case as untranslatability is perfectly obvious here, and yet the persistent attempts to carry out translations of this type are familiar to everyone. Contrasting the language of cinematography to the verbal structures of narrative, we observe a profound distinction in their fundamental principles of organization, such as relativity versus iconicity, discreteness versus continuity, linearity versus spatiality, which completely foreclose the possibility of a monosemantic translation. Whereas in the case of languages with monosemantic correspondences, a text in one language corresponds to one, and only one, text in another language, here we are entering the realm of interpretation, within which there exists a multitude of different texts, each representing an equally valid translation of the source text. It is obvious that if we were to perform a back translation, we would never reproduce the source text. In that case, we can speak of the production of new texts. In this way, the mechanism of relatively equivalent translations serves to generate new texts, which is the mechanism of creative thinking. The lack of equivalence between the language in which A1 codes a message and the language with which A1 decodes the message, which is the unavoidable condition of every real act of communication, can be seen in terms of two ideal models. The first model has the goal of circulating already existing messages within a given collective. From within this model

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the ideal is for codes K1 and K2 to be identical, and all differences between them would be interpreted as distorting noise. The second model has the goal of generating new messages in the process of communication. From this point of view, the difference between codes is a useful and productive mechanism. This mechanism is, however, by its very nature based on structural paradoxes. The basis of those paradoxes consists of the following: A minimal structure capable of generating a new message serves as a kind of communicative chain connecting A1 and A2. In order for the act of generation to take place, it is necessary for both A1 and A2 to be autonomous entities, that is, closed, structurally organized semiotic worlds with an individualized hierarchy of codes and memory structure. However, in order for communication between A1 and A2 to be possible at all, these different codes must in a certain sense represent a single semiotic entity. The tendency toward ever greater autonomy of elements and toward their transformation into self-contained entities alongside the tendency toward their ever greater integration and transformation into parts of a whole are both mutually exclusive and presuppose one another, creating a structural paradox. As the result of this, a unique structure is created in which every part is at once a whole, and every whole functions as a part. This bipartite structure is open to ever-increasing complexity; within itself it exhibits a propensity to further complicate all its elements, transforming them into self-sustaining structural nodes, and in the process transforming them into semiotic organisms. From the outside, this structure is constantly coming into contact with similar organisms, combining with them to form a new whole at a higher level of complexity while transforming itself into a part of that whole. This structure exists in two variants. On the one hand, there are real human collectives in which every individual unit has the urge to transform itself into a self-sustaining and unrepeatable world of its own while at the same time entering into a hierarchy of structures at ever higher levels, forming at every level a communal socio-semiotic entity, which, in its turn, enters into more complex unities as a part. The processes of individualization and generalization, or the transformation of the individual into an ever more complex whole and into an ever-smaller part of that whole occur in parallel. On the other hand, this is the same way every artistic text is formed (which holds true in a somewhat less vividly expressed way for every non-­ artistic text, too). Every part of that text has a tendency to become more

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complex in the artistic process, forming a kind of self-contained whole while integrating itself into other structures at the same level of complexity, becoming a part of ever more complex integral formations. This process is active on two levels. On the level of the text, it can be illustrated by the phenomenon of cyclization: novellas grow into novels and novels into series, as with Balzac’s La Comédie humaine or Zola’s Rougon Macquart novels. (Series of the most varied types are possible and are formed, in part, at the level of publishing but nonetheless have real value for the reader.) From this point of view, the emergence of concepts such as “prose of the journal Otchestvennye zapiski [Notes from the Fatherland]” or “prose of the journal Novyi Mir [New World]” is a literary-­historical textual reality (although perhaps not for the author for whom the fact of publication in this or that journal can appear random in nature). This process is even more pronounced in poetry, in which the cycle or collection (having the features of a single text, such as compositional structure), or the transformation of the entire oeuvre of a poet, a group of poets, or the poets of an entire period into a single text, are well-­ known phenomena. At the same time, the reverse process is taking place. The more expansive a novel is, the more structurally closed its chapters will be; the more global a poetic cycle is, the weightier every verse line, word, and phoneme will be. Twentieth-century art, in which the globalization of texts (the textual “counterpoint” of the age) occurs alongside the extreme automatization of meaningful units of text and their hermetically sealed self-­ sufficiency, is another good example. This process, however, also takes places at the level of code: every text is multiply coded (double coding represents the minimal structure). The conflict of thought formation arises not between individual textual formations but between languages manifested in text. Waves of syncretization of different arts—ranging from the syncretization of actions in archaic societies to modern talking pictures and “decorative” poetry, on the one hand, to the extreme separation and self-sufficiency of certain art forms and the formation of closed genres with their own rules, as in the western or detective novel, on the other—illustrate the two opposing tendencies characterizing this process. The structural parallelism of textual and individual semiotic characteristics allows us to define a text at any level as a semiotic entity, and to view an entity at any socio-cultural level as a text. Thought formation does not take place in a static system. In order for such an act to become possible, some message must be introduced into

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the communicative system A1, A2. In the same way, for a bistructural text to begin generating new meanings, it must be included in a communicative situation in which there may arise a process of internal translation, that is, semiotic exchange between its substructures. It follows from this that an act of creative consciousness is always an act of communication, of exchange. Creative consciousness, in this view, is defined as such by an act of information exchange, during the course of which an initial message is transformed into a new one. Creative consciousness is impossible within an entirely isolated, monostructural (without the potential for internal exchange), and static system. From this proposition, there follows a series of conclusions essential for the comparative study of cultures and cultural contacts. The immanent development of a culture cannot occur without a constant flow of texts from the outside. Moreover, this “outside” itself has a complex organization. It is “outside” a given genre or specific tradition within a given culture and “outside” the circle drawn as a specific metalinguistic boundary separating all messages inside the given culture into those that are culturally existent (“high,” “valuable,” “cultural,” “iconic,” etc.) and those that are non-existent or apocryphal (“low,” “worthless,” “alien,” etc.). Finally, these are foreign texts, which come from another national, cultural, or regional tradition. The development of culture, as with any act of creative consciousness, is an act of exchange that constantly assumes the existence of an other—a partner in this act. This initiates two opposing processes. On the one hand, a culture in need of a partner will constantly create its own conditions for that “other,” the bearer of a different consciousness, one that differently encodes the world and texts. This image, created in the depths of a culture—and fundamentally at odds with its own dominant codes—is exteriorized by the culture, which projects it onto cultural worlds lying outside it. A typical example includes the ethnographic descriptions done by Europeans of “exotic” cultures (to which Russia has belonged at various points in history) or Tacitus’s description of the German Huns. On the other hand, introducing exterior cultural structures inside the world of a given culture assumes the establishment of a common language, and this, in turn, requires the interiorization of those exterior structures. In order to communicate with an outside culture, a culture must interiorize that culture’s image within its own world. This process is inevitably dialectical and ­contradictory insofar as the interior image of the exterior culture possesses a language of communication with the cultural world into which it has

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been incorporated. This communicative facility, however, is associated with the loss of certain defining qualities of the copied exterior object, qualities that are often the most valuable as stimulants. Let us look at an example. The poetic work of Pushkin was perceived by readers of the early 1820s as something unprecedented, innovative. Assimilating this phenomenon required the creation of an “image of Pushkin” in the reader’s consciousness. This image itself then became a fact of literature. Located between Pushkin as a real and dynamic literary phenomenon and the reader’s consciousness, this image of Pushkin played a dual role. It interpreted and “translated” Pushkin’s world, that is, it facilitated the reader’s understanding by simplifying the phenomenon, removing every new and dynamic element that could not be accommodated in the image, which is to say, whatever generated incomprehension. This “double” of Pushkin was not static: the actual work and behavior of the poet were constantly transforming this image, despite its resistance. But the image also influenced the work and behavior of the actual Pushkin, often forcing him to behave “like Pushkin.” After the poet’s death, this image displayed amazing cultural vitality and a capacity to evolve. The dual role of the interiorized image, which requires that it be translated into the inner language of the culture (so as not to be “foreign”) and that it be “foreign” (i.e., not translated into the inner language of the culture), produces a collision of great complexity, one that is at times marked by tragedy. For example, the opposition of Russia and the West produced the Russian Westernizer. Within the internal collision of these two concepts, the Westernizer played the role of “representative” of the West. The Westernizer was judged according to Russians’ understanding of the West, and Russians judged the West by looking at the Westernizer. But a Russian Westernizer bore little resemblance to a real person from the West of this time and, as a rule, knew the West very poorly. He constructed his understanding of the West in contrast to the Russian reality he observed. This was an ideal West, not the real one. It is not surprising then that the Slavophiles and other traditionalists and supporters of Russian nationalism were often people who had received their education at German universities and were Anglophiles, like Admiral Shishkov and Prince Shirinsky-Shikhmatov, or were diplomats who spent their lives abroad, like Fyodor Tyutchev and Konstantin Leontiev. On the other hand, many Russian proponents of the Western Enlightenment, like Pushkin, had never been to Europe or, after arriving there, found it entirely foreign, like the critic Belinsky. The confrontation of Russian Westernizers with the

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actual West was, as a rule, accompanied by a disenchantment no less profound than that experienced by their opponents when faced with Russian reality. Nevertheless, it is impossible for Russians to experience another cultural context without having such phenomena within the internal structure of their consciousness. An essential component of cultural contact involves the naming of a partner, which is equivalent to introducing that partner into one’s own cultural world, the coding of that partner with one’s own code, and defining that partner’s place in his or her picture of the world. One can view, by analogy, the identification of specific genres of foreign literature using domestic genre classifications, the decoding of foreign cultural behavior using a system of domestic codes, or the nominal conflation of different literary forms (e.g., establishing the relative equivalence of Russian and French Alexandrine verse through the mutual translation of poetic texts). However, the opposite is also possible: renaming oneself in accordance with the name given by one’s exterior communicative partner. Such phenomena are typical of polemics, when, for example, a nickname given to one’s opponent in the context of a polemic is appropriated and included within one’s “own” language, thereby losing its derogatory valence and acquiring a positive one. Every polemic demands a common language between the opponents—in the above example, the language of the opponent becomes that common language, but at the same time it is subjected to cultural appropriation, which leads to the semiotic disarming of the opposing side. For example, writers promoted by the critic Belinsky were given the name “the natural school” by Faddey Bulgarin, editor of the journal Severnaia pchela [Northern Bee], as a derogatory epithet (Mordovchenko 1950, 225). In the course of the polemic, however, the opponents traded arms and the derogatory epithet became a slogan. (Consider Alexander Blok’s “Yes, Scythians are we! Yes, Asians are we…”.) This phenomenon is well documented in the history of ethnonyms. In the history of cultural self-definition, naming and drawing boundaries around the communicative subject, along with the process of constructing one’s opponent—the “other”—is one of the fundamental issues in the semiotics of culture. However, it is important to stress that the dynamism of a consciousness at any cultural level demands the presence of another consciousness, which, paradoxically, ceases to be “other” to the same extent that the cultural subject in the process of generating new texts in confrontation with the “other” ceases to be him or herself. To separate

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interaction from the immanent development of individuals and cultures can only be done speculatively. In reality, these are dialectically connected and interwoven sides of a single process. The idea is widely held that a text is appropriated from an exterior context because it turns out to be relevant from the point of view of the immanent development of that literature. This idea feeds on conceptions of a dual order. On the one hand, the historical process, seen from a providential or fantastic point of view, is conceived as directed toward some specific and known endpoint. The very idea that one could possess within oneself some basic potentialities that remain unrealized is unthinkable. From the opposing point of view, one might believe, for example, that Russian literature at its inception already contained a natural trajectory: to move into the nineteenth century toward Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Then we could say that Byron and Schiller, Rousseau and Voltaire were historically determined to play the role of catalysts in this process. Few would support this claim, although many make arguments that would appear to proceed from this premise. On the other hand, the much more natural claim is made, that the researcher examines actually occurring phenomena as the only possible ones, and laws governing these phenomena are then derived from this fact. (One should remember that the history of culture almost always deals with unique facts, which do not lend themselves to statistical analysis or which are so few in number that such analysis would be entirely unreliable.) As a result, having isolated an instance of cultural contact (e.g., the influence of Byron on Russian Romantics), the researcher then views all previous cultural material from this point of view as evolving naturally, so that the influence of Byron appears as an unavoidable knot toward which all threads lead. The influence of the researcher’s metalanguage on the historical material presents this as the discovery of the immanent laws governing the cultural process. Lost from view is one important concept. If the meaning of every cultural contact is to serve as a missing link and to speed the evolution of a culture in a pre-determined direction, then over the course of a culture’s development, the surplus in the structure of the culture should progressively expand. (This is tacitly assumed in the concept of “young” cultures, rich in inner possibilities, and “old” cultures, which have exhausted these possibilities—concepts which have more poetic than scientific value.) And every incident of cultural contact must increase this surplus, as a result of which the predictability of the cultural process over the course of its ­historical development should steadily increase. This is,

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however, contradicted by actual facts and by the concept of cultural value as an information mechanism. In fact, one can directly observe the opposite process. Every new step forward in a culture’s development increases rather than exhausts the information value of the culture. As a result, its inner unpredictability increases rather than decreases, as does the array of untapped possibilities lying before it. In this process, the exchange of cultural values looks roughly like this: When a text, precisely because it is a text and not some naked “thought” (as Zholkovsky and Shcheglov use the term), is introduced from the outside into a system with a high degree of inner unpredictability, that text will itself acquire inner unpredictability, becoming not a manifestation of some reified language but a polyglot formation lending itself to a host of interpretations from the position of different languages; marked by inner conflict, it is also capable in a new context of revealing completely new thoughts. The introduction of such a text sharply increases the inner unpredictability of the entire system, lending volatility to its next stage of development. However, insofar as culture is a self-organizing system, it is constantly describing itself on a meta-structural level (in the writing of critics, theoreticians, guardians of taste, and lawmakers) as something at once clearly predictable and strictly organized. On the one hand, these meta descriptions enter the ongoing historical process just as grammars enter the history of a language, exerting a reverse influence on its development. On the other hand, they become the property of cultural historians, who are inclined to conflate such meta descriptions, whose function is to strictly regulate that which has accumulated excessive unpredictability in the depths of culture, with the real fabric of the culture as such. The critic writes about how the literary process should develop. Boileau, for example, established norms precisely because the process was going in a different direction and norms were being violated (otherwise his writings would have no meaning), while historians believe that the task before them is to describe a real process or, at least, its dominant form. No legal historian would conclude that bribery had disappeared based on the repeated outlawing of bribes by the Russian government in the seventeenth century. Rather, the historian would assume that in real life bribes were quite common. Literary historians, however, consider themselves justified in assuming that the prescriptive writings of theoreticians were observed by writers more strictly than criminal laws were observed by government workers. The meta descriptions of culture are in and of themselves not a skeleton or

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a foundational layer but rather one of the structural axes of culture; for the historian, they are not a self-evident fact but material for study, one of the mechanisms of culture, situated in a constant struggle with other cultural mechanisms. (1983)

Notes 1. Even a list of general works on the theory of texts would be impossible due to their number. Most relevant for Dionýz Ď urišin and his concepts are the works of Jan Mukařovský and Mikuláš Bakoš, as well as the works of the Slovak research group led by František Miko. 2. We are offering her a crudely approximate picture. In actuality, preceding the formula “an other of the opposite gender” is simply the demand for “another,” when there is still only gender, but reproduction requires union with another individual, although sexual differences between them are still absent.

References Ď urišin, Dionýz. 1974. Sources and Systematics of Comparative Literature, Peter Tkáč (trans.). Bratislava: Univerzita Komenského. Marx, Karl. 1906. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. I. The Process of Capitalist Production, Frederick Engels, Ernest Untermann (eds.); Samuel Moore, Edward Aveling, (trans.). Chicago: Charles H. Kerr. Mordovchenko, Nikolai. 1950 Belinskii i russkaia literatura ego vremeni. Moscow and Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura. Tynianov, Iurii. 1977. Poetika. Istoriia literatury. Kino. Moscow: Nauka. Zhirmunskii, Viktor. 1979. Sravnitel’noe literaturovedenie: Zapad i Vostok. Moscow: Nauka.

CHAPTER 6

Culture as a Subject and Its Own Object

This short exposition on some research principles should not be seen as having any philosophical significance. The author is far from making any such claims. This is simply an attempt to share experience derived from researching specific facts in the history of culture. In addition, the author was motivated by a dissatisfaction with the way certain traditional theoretical categories have been reflected in the history of literature and culture. Classic works on the history of specific cultures written in the nineteenth century were shaped by the thinking of Hegel and Darwin. First and foremost, culture was assumed to be an object lying outside the researcher. This object was located in a state of development, which was a rule-governed, progressive, and directed evolution. The researcher was situated outside this object. Knowledge was conceived as the discovery of regularities (structures) hidden within the object (culture). The researcher, armed with logic, occupied the position of truth. When one spoke of the “subjective factor,” it was assumed to be an aberration from the truth

Originally published as “Kul’tura kak sub’iekt i sama-sebe ob’iekt,” Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 23, 1989: 187–197. The translation here is from Iurii Lotman, Semiosfera, 639–647. Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo—SPB, 2000. J. Lotman (*) University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia © The Author(s) 2019 Juri Lotman - Culture, Memory and History, ed. by M. Tamm https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14710-5_6

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caused by non-scientific influences such as emotions, ignorance, or outright immorality. As the process of research itself became an object of study, however, our view of the researcher’s positionality grew more complicated, manifesting a tradition that in the final analysis led to Kant. The object of analysis became a mechanism of analysis, knowledge about knowledge. Interest shifted away from the problem of how the spirit is embodied in text to how a text is perceived by readers. On this basis several hermeneutic schools developed. In its most extreme form, the hermeneutic method shifted attention entirely onto the subject of culture. The history of culture was presented as the evolution of its interpretation by a contemporary audience, on the one hand, and by subsequent generations, including the tradition of scholarly interpretation, on the other. In the first case, the interpretation is carried out within the synchronic framework of a given culture and forms a part of it, while in the second case, it is studied diachronically and faces all the challenges of translating from one language into another. While in the first case the accent is placed on the object (the text) and in the second it is placed on the subject (the interpreter), the classic dichotomy of subject-object is nonetheless present in both approaches. The classic model of communication developed by Roman Jakobson, it would seem, applies both these approaches, introducing a bipolar structure for the circulation of messages involving an addresser and an addressee. These correspond to the two types of research: analysis of text generation corresponds to the grammar of the speaker, and the analysis of interpretations corresponds to the grammar of the listener. Accordingly, in the world of artistic texts, a distinction was made between generative and interpretive aesthetics. And so, the concept of the text as a closed and self-­sufficient world was complemented with the idea of coding and decoding structures lying outside the text. Accordingly, the researcher could move either to an “interior” or to an “exterior” position in relation to the text. The development of “the aesthetics of perception,” represented by the work of the Constance School, emphasized the one-sidedness of both “objective” and “subjective” approaches and made significant advances in our understanding of the workings of a text.1 As a result, however, the distinction between subjective and objective aspects was made even more pronounced and absolute. Moreover, while heuristic principles are useful at a certain stage, in the actual workings of a text (at all levels, including the whole of culture as a text) they acquire such a high capacity for mutual translation that it

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seems useful at times to reject these fundamental philosophical concepts. And so, while the concepts of objective and subjective, on the one hand, serve as universal instruments for describing any culture as a phenomenon in all its manifestations, they represent, on the other hand, the result of a specific (European) cultural tradition at a specific moment in its development. Alexander Piatigorsky, for example, has repeatedly demonstrated the inapplicability of these categories to Indian consciousness. If we were to remain within the European cultural tradition, however, in addition to the above-mentioned founders of modern European thought, Hegel and Kant, it would be useful to mention a third figure—Leibniz—whose ideas may once again assume scholarly relevance. The fundamental problem in the semiotics of culture is the problem of meaning-making. We will define meaning-making as the capacity of a culture as a whole or of individual parts to produce new, non-trivial texts. We will define new texts as those that arise as a result of irreversible (as Prigogine used the term) processes, that is, texts that are to a certain extent unpredictable. Meaning-making occurs at all structural levels of a culture. The process assumes the introduction of texts from outside the system and their specific, unpredictable transformation between the time they enter and leave the system. Systems of this type—ranging from minimal semiotic entities to global ones of the type “culture as a self-sufficient universe”—acquire structural isomorphism, despite their material differences. This makes possible the construction of a minimal model for such systems, on the one hand, while turning out to be extremely valuable for analyzing the process of meaning-making, on the other. The invariant model of a meaning-making entity assumes, first and foremost, its definitive delineation and self-sufficiency, and the presence of a border between it and the semiotic space outside it. This makes it possible to define meaning-making structures as their own form of semiotic monad, functioning at all levels of the semiotic universe. Such monads are represented by the culture as a whole as well as by every sufficiently complex text within it, including individual humans viewed as texts. The “isolation” (within certain limits) of such a monad assumes not only the presence of a border and of a latent structure but also of an “entrance” and an “exit.” To the extent that each monad acquires not a material but a semiotic-informational life, its “use” by someone entering the text leads neither to its physical annihilation nor to the annihilation of its information. In the process of being “used,” the text is subjected to transformation, leading to the generation of a new text upon exiting; the initial text,

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however, remains in its original form and can enter into new relationships with its own transformation. When a cat eats a mouse, the latter in the course of being used ceases to exist physically as an actual biological structure. When a technical invention is “eaten” by a new invention, however, it is subjected to information annihilation but continues physically to exist. When in the course of artistic evolution, a fundamentally new text is created, neither the physical nor the semiotic existence of the initial text is annihilated, although the latter may be temporarily deactivated. In this sense, the very concept of evolution when applied to complex semiotic phenomena, such as art, can be used only by transforming the concept to such an extent that it is probably better not to use it at all. Another unique feature in the workings of such a structure is its capacity to enter itself and, as a result, transform itself insofar as, from its own point of view, it is entering as a text among texts and, consequently, represents for itself normal semiotic “fare.” From this, it follows that the capacity for self-description (self-reflection) and for the translation of itself onto a metalevel is present in the very nature of the monad. A monad at any level is, in this way, an elementary unit of meaning-­ making and, at the same time, has inherent within itself a sufficiently complex immanent structure. Its minimal organizing structure includes a binary system consisting (minimally) of two semiotic mechanisms (languages) located in a relationship of mutual untranslatability and, at the same time, resembling each other, to the extent that each with its own means models the same extra-semiotic reality.2 In this way, a text entering from the outside acquires at least two mutually untranslatable semiotic projections. The minimal structure consists of a third element: a block of relative equivalences, a metaphor-generating apparatus, which makes possible the operation of translation in situations of untranslatability. As a result of these “translations,” the text is subjected to irreversible transformation, and the act of generating a new text takes place. However, no semiotic mechanism can function as an isolated system within a vacuum. A necessary condition for its functioning is its location within the semiosphere—that is, in semiotic space.3 Every semiotic monad, due precisely to its independence and semiotic autonomy, is capable of entering into a convergent relationship with another (or other) monad (monads), forming a bipolar unity at a higher structural level. These two proximate but unrelated elements are transformed into an organic unity at a higher level only when they enter into the same structural union of a higher order. And so, structures “predisposed” to such relationships are

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those that possess antonymous languages (e.g., mirror structures, such as “right-left”) and that, at a higher level, are describable using the same metalanguage; in general, structures that are simply “independent” before confronting another structure can in the future be viewed as possessing a certain form of symmetry. For example, two independent and mutually unrelated tribes when engaged in battle can form a social structure with a symmetrical-asymmetrical organization, like a hierarchy. Or consider a contrary example: Despite 300 years of Mongol rule in Rus, a unified social structure did not emerge; despite the innumerable military and government contacts that could not have taken place without specific forms of communication, the formation of a common semiotic mechanism did not result. The reason for this may lie not only in the incommensurability of urban and steppe cultures but also in the fact that the Tatars were tolerant of other religious faiths and did not persecute Orthodox Christians in Rus. This created an incommensurability with Orthodox Russian culture, in which the church played an extremely important organizational role. If the Tatars had persecuted Christians, they would have been more fully “understood” and would have been inscribed into the Russian hagiographic consciousness as “tyrants.” In that case, they could have formed a dual unity with Rus, similar to the dual unity of pagan Rome and Christianity. (The behaviors of Christian martyrs and Roman civil servants were mutually alien and could seem, from the opposing point of view, as “barbaric,” “unenlightened,” “fanatical,” “tyrannical,” and “satanic,” but both could be described within the system of a unified metalanguage; and while the religious indifference and enlightened government pragmatism of the Mongols made it possible for their culture to enter into a semiotic relationship with Chinese culture, it made it incommensurable with Russian culture.) It would be tempting, therefore, to describe different semiotic systems from the point of view of their predisposability or unpredisposability to mutual convergences. As soon as two monads enter into a relationship, forming a single semiotic mechanism, they shift from a state of mutual neutrality to one of mutual supplementarity and structural autonomy, and begin to cultivate their own particular and mutual contrasts. Symmetry and asymmetry are two sides of a single process that begins in the process of evolution with the formation of sexual symmetry-asymmetry and the symmetrical and asymmetrical functions of the bi-hemispheric human brain (in more profound cultural layers, one can point to the left and right rotation in the structure of matter) and ends with the laws governing complex semiotic entities.

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The emergence of cultural habitats is related, on the one hand, to the fact that when entering into a complex unity, different cultures form mechanisms for intercultural communication and reinforce the features of their shared identity. On the other hand, this mutual interest feeds on the untranslatable specificity of each—whether we are speaking about the “mysterious East” (“The East is East and the West is West”), the “enigmatic Slavic (or German) soul,” the “inscrutable nature of women,” “negritude,” or any other assertions of cultural specificity. First, these mechanisms never emerge in isolated cultures. An isolated culture does not know specificity and displays no interest in the question. For such a culture, a “man” and “a member of our tribe” are synonyms, which are opposed to god, the dead, demons, animals (and sometimes women), but have no other ethno-cultural specificity. Second, ethno-­ cultural specificity appears first in the eyes of the foreigner. It is no coincidence that the first grammars were written by foreigners or for them, and the same is true of the earliest descriptions of customs. At this stage the ones who describe see themselves as bearers of metalinguistic description and, therefore, as possessing no specificity but rather as embodying a neutral norm. Third, when a culture that has until now been the objective of description enters the level of self-description, it, as a rule, assumes an exterior point of view, describing itself as exceptional and unique. And so, the cultural self-consciousness of Russian Slavophiles was to a great extent defined by their affiliation with the German historical tradition, represented by Schelling in particular, and by Madame de Staël’s On Germany, which not only encoded German culture as Romantic for all of Europe but to a large degree determined the Germans’ self-encoding. Finally, there is the question of the specificity of those cultures that seek to play the role of norm-bearer for all cultures, considering themselves to be without specificity. The specificity of the “Eastern man” forced Kipling to construct the “specificity of the Western man,” and ethnographic descriptions of “exotic” peoples naturally lead to the idea of studying one’s one contemporary society with the methods of anthropology and ethnography. The capacity of one and the same monad to enter as a substructure into other monads of a much higher level and, as a result, to remain a whole while becoming a part of other wholes and in that respect being non-­ identical to itself presupposes a complex polyglotism in its interior structure. Defined in this way, a semiotic monad acts as a separate entity that is constantly embedding its closed structure within the borders of another individual semiotic space, while at the same time acting as a segment,

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which, driven by the urge to become complete, enters into ever newer combination. It is the propensity of every monad, regardless of the structural level at which it is located, to become both a whole and a part. We have spoken of the monad as a generator of new messages, that is, messages that are not constructed based on an automatically functioning algorithm. Elsewhere we have pointed out the monad’s capacity to store previous information, or to remember. To this we would add that within the semiosphere, a constant exchange of information and a transformation of texts are taking place. This guarantees the structural isomorphism of the monads and their inclusion in the process of metalinguistic similarities, or shared borders, within which a certain common level of semiosis is established. The presence of these characteristics makes it possible to define a semiotic monad as an intellectual unit, a bearer of Reason. An individual does not simply think but locates him or herself inside a thinking space just as the bearer of speech is always embedded in some linguistic space. The intellectual capacity of the semiosphere is determined by the fact that it appears before us as the intersection, combination, and incorporation of an enormous number of monads, each of which is capable of meaning-­ making operations. This is an enormous organism made up of organisms. The law governing this organism, that of the isomorphism of parts to the whole and of parts among themselves, can be imagined—if we recall the Biblical image of man’s likeness to God—as a lower unit representing millions of individual variants of a higher, singular essence. The almost limitless variation of monads provides the basis for defining them as semiotic entities. But there is another serious justification for this. Human entities possess not only an individual consciousness but also individual behavior. This means that in every situation in which more than one behavior is possible, a human being will have to make a choice. The sources for this proposition are more profound than one might think. Studying irreversible processes in physics and chemistry, Ilya Prigogine arrived at conclusions that have general theoretical significance for everyone interested in dynamic processes. Prigogine distinguishes between processes that occur in states of equilibrium and those that occur in non-equilibrium states. The former develop evenly, according to the laws of causality, and follow a reversible (symmetrical) trajectory, which allows one to predict what will come from what has already occurred. The specificity of non-equilibrium systems is that along their dynamic trajectory there appear points of bifurcation, to use Prigogine’s term, that is, points at which the subsequent movement can proceed with equal probability in

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two (or more) directions, making it impossible to predict in which of these directions it will go. Under such conditions, chance or ancillary factors, which can influence the future development of the process, assume a much greater role. The introduction of chance into the mechanism of causality is an enormous contribution of Prigogine’s work.4 It de-automatized our picture of the world. The majority of processes occurring in human society can be characterized as irreversible, that is, taking place in situations of extreme non-­ equilibrium; these are especially interesting to the cultural historian. But here we encounter some interesting differences: The interference of human intelligence in a dynamic process decisively alters the nature of its dynamism. If a choice at a bifurcation point is determined by chance, then it is obvious that the more complex the internal organization of an object in a state of development is (and, as a consequence, the more randomness it, as a text, contains), then the more unpredictable its behavior will be at a bifurcation point. The most complex object we can imagine is one possessing the capacity for intelligence, as its behavior at a bifurcation point assumes the character of a conscious choice. The potential for intelligence lies in the presence of randomness in nature. However, a structure that rises to the level of intelligence transforms randomness into freedom, which greatly complicates its relationship to causality because now, between cause and effect, there lies an act of intellectual choice, free from automatization. From this it follows, first, that an act of intelligence is the result of the development of asymmetrical irreversible processes and is inevitably tied to structural asymmetry, and, second, that it includes a complex moment of randomness (the latter being only a reformulation of the link between unpredictability and information). With a certain degree of caution, we can claim a parallel between semiotic monads and the concept of individuality, insofar as inherent in both is a certain degree of autonomous behavior. This, in particular, leads to the conclusion that the long process represented by the history of culture does not entail increasing predictability. A monad, which as a part is subjected to the strict laws of determinism, as a whole or an “individual,” possesses the possibility of choice and a specific reservoir of unpredictability, that is, autonomy from the whole and from its semiotic context. And insofar as the semiosphere is shot through with “semiotic individuals” at various levels, it represents a special construct, at one and the same time an organizing hierarchy of structures and an enormous number of closed semiotic

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worlds (“individuals,” texts), freely swimming in semiotic space. The more complex the organization of the monad, the more autonomous its behavior and the more unpredictability it introduces into the system as a whole. Such organization possesses an enormous information load and, in fact, unlimited possibilities for development. How does this view of culture relate to the traditional articulation of subject and object? The existence of a meaning-making monad requires that it be submerged within an intellectual whole of a higher order and directly incorporated into a monad at a higher level, based on the following principle: every intellectual whole is a part of another intellectual whole and a whole in relationship to its parts. But both as a part and as a whole, it can communicate with its whole and with its parts only by using mechanisms of translation, like a participant in a dialog. The relationship “subject-object” assumes that intellectual activity is concentrated at one pole and structural organization, at the other. From the point of view laid out here, elements are located in a relationship of “inclusion-exclusion,” with every thinking element located within the thinking world. The categories “subject-object” can arise only when an individual monad, having risen to the level of self-description, models itself as an isolated and solitary intellectual essence. This is how things look when we examine them from within the semiosphere. However, we have previously pointed out that every meaning-­ making machine can work only when texts are introduced from the outside, that is, in contact with extra-semiotic reality. Perhaps, in this respect it would be useful to define the semiosphere as a subject and the extra-semiotic world as an object. First of all, let us pause for a moment on the inconsistency of our terminology. We are saying that texts enter the semiosphere from the outside, and that we see in them an “extra-semiotic reality.” This contradiction is related to the fact that the semiosphere cannot come into contact with anything but texts, and texts are the products of semiosis. In this way, any contact with a space lying on the other side of a given semiosphere demands the preliminary semioticization of that space. Similar to the way in which communication in the realm of natural language is unavoidably communication in a natural language, communication in the realm of culture is always cultural communication. For every culture the existence of an extra-cultural space (a space on the other side) is a necessary condition for its existence and at the same time a first step in its self-definition. However, the claim that extra-semiotic space is not semiotic is a fact only

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from the point of view of the given culture, and in practical terms it means that there exist habitats where the given languages are not used. But does this mean that languages are not used at all? In his lectures on the history of interaction between the cultures of the East and West, Nikolai Konrad liked to give the example of the first encounters of the Dutch and the Japanese; both described the opposing side as “barbarian,” outside of civilization, referring to the fact that neither found in the other their own culture. An “extra-semiotic” realm often turns out to be the that of another culture, with “extra-semiotic” meaning a foreign semiotics. But this is not the point. It is necessary to keep in mind that, semiotically speaking, as soon as an outside world is presented, it is already named, that is, at least superficially semioticized. For all practical purposes a semiosphere cannot encounter an extra-semiotic world. Very often concepts of the “natural” that are projected onto an outside world both before and outside semioticization developed in the depths of the given culture as its ideal antistructure. And so, the ideal “savage” sought by philosophers and missionaries of the eighteenth century in exotic lands was the creation of the very civilization from which they were fleeing, just as the realm of the subconscious discovered in the twentieth century was an antistructure of the consciousness of that age, projected onto psychiatric processes that were not yet assimilated. Such is the myth of outer space in the mass culture of the late twentieth century. All these examples belong to a long history of “inside out” worlds created by various civilizations. But the real outside world is nonetheless an active participant in semiotic exchange. The boundary of the semiosphere is a realm of heightened semiotic activity where numerous mechanisms of “metaphoric translation” are at work, “pumping out” analogously transformed texts in both directions. Here new texts are generated with intensity. The same work takes place here as at the border between differently constructed parts of a monad and at any other border inside the semiosphere. A clear incarnation of this can be seen in the heightened cultural activity that takes place at the borders of great empires, such as Ancient Roman, in periods when internal culture-generating mechanisms have been exhausted. The simultaneously occurring processes of barbarizing Rome, on the one hand, and romanticizing the barbarians, on the other, is convincing proof that we are dealing here with a complex, pulsating dialog, and not with one-sided reception. The model “subject-object” turns out once again to be only a relative and one-sided abstraction.

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Without forgetting the monadic structure of the semiotic field and understanding oneself as a monad within that field, the historian of culture turns out to be in a position that is more complicated than before but one that is probably more closely aligned with reality. (1989)

Notes 1. For a general overview of the work of the Constance School, see Warning (1988). 2. So, for example, the projection of one and the same reality in the space of everyday speech or poetry, of poetry or painting, or of the right or left hemisphere of the human brain will yield untranslatable but similar images, constructed as metaphors. 3. For more on the concept of semiosphere, see Lotman (2005). 4. See Prigogine (1976) and Prigogine and Stengers (1984).

References Lotman, Juri 2005. “On the Semiosphere,” Wilma Clark (trans.). Sign Systems Studies 33(1): 205–229. Prigogine, Ilya. 1976. L’Ordre par fluctuations et le système social. Düsseldorf: Springer. Prigogine, Ilya and Isabelle Stengers. 1984. Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature. Toronto: Bantam. Warning, Rainier. 1988. Rezeptionästhetik. Theorie und Praxis. Stuttgart: UTB.

CHAPTER 7

On the Dynamics of Culture

One of the most important assumptions in semiotics is the existence of a space before or outside semioticization, against which the fundamental concepts of semiotics are defined. Such an approach is entirely justified from a heuristic point of view. The error consists in the mixing of principles that occurs when we begin to confuse logical conventions for empirical reality. A similar convention is the assumed existence in dynamic processes of some kind of starting point, a relative zero, although a “zero state” is never available to us in empirical reality. And so, we construct a model of the dynamics of culture beginning with a “semiotic ground zero,” which corresponds to the animal world (this, despite evidence of a well-­developed zoosemiotics). “Zero” as a field of heuristic stipulation is then carried over into our understanding of reality: “relative zero” contains within it the myth of origins. When a chronicler writes: “Ancient men lived like animals, lived like cattle, they killed one another, ate impure things, and did Originally published as “O dinamike kul’tury,” Trudy po znakovym sistemam 25, 1992: 5–22. The translation here is from Iurii Lotman, Semiosfera, 647–663. Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo—SPB, 2000.

J. Lotman (*) University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia © The Author(s) 2019 Juri Lotman - Culture, Memory and History, ed. by M. Tamm https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14710-5_7

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not know marriage,” he is introducing an initial “point zero”: an initial state is announced as one without features (here, the feature of orderliness). Subsequent history appears as a process of organization. This essentially mythological point of view is associated with the hypothesis concerning the opposition of language and speech. The actual historical process can be described in completely antithetical ways. Earlier stages can be presented as characterized by more rigid organization, and here the connection to zoosemiotics, which lives on to this day, can be contrasted to now discarded views on the behavior of “savages.” In the historically recent past, these latter views were presented in terms of freedom from all constraints—without any organizational structure except for spontaneous “animal” practices—and their subsequent development was presented as the introduction of a “law-governed” system into this chaos of individual tendencies, for example, the replacing of promiscuity with a system of rules. The study of the behavior of higher animal species presents us with a picture antithetical to that of rigid organization. Key moments in life such as marriage, raising children, hunting—basically, every evaluation of a situation and the choice of a corresponding action—are strictly ritualized. However, it is important to stress that the phenomenon of ritual has its own distinct nature. A fundamental role in ritual is played by the organization of memory, and this represents a mechanism for connecting the individual to group memory. Therefore, outside the human world, ritual creates a system of perpetual organization, leaving no room for evolution or severely limiting it. It deprives the individual of the possibility of individual behavior, making behavior highly predictable. Typical in this sense are those cases in which an animal finds itself separated from the “normal” conditions of behavior, for example, when a predator has lost its pack or is removed from its natural surroundings. Such predators, hunters say, are especially dangerous as their behavior is unpredictable (“they act crazy”). But such unmotivated behavior, dangerous for those in the vicinity, can be described from another perspective. Although a degradation in terms of ritual, this behavior is characterized by a sharp increase in unpredictability and can be described as a dynamic moment marked by an explosion-­ generating increase in the role of individual behavior. The transition from the cyclical repetition of collective behavior, which preserves a rigid semiotic structure, to the disorder of unpredictable behavior (the possible result of a catastrophe, which radically changes the entire structure of a specific situation) can be viewed as a moment of shift

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from cyclical to historical development (the concept of “moment” here is, of course, relative, as this was a process of very long duration). Historical process, which displaced the cyclical, led to the formation of constant conflict between repetition and the internal dynamics of behavioral forms. At certain critical points, these dynamic processes assumed an unpredictable character, whereas the processes of stabilization they were displacing possessed a high degree of predictability.1 Moreover, they had an extremely limited choice of possible variants. The dual nature of the dynamic process leads to the conclusion that, depending on the choice of a descriptive language, human history can be represented either as repeating the same structures or as unpredictable. For this reason, it makes sense to distinguish between cyclical and directed forms of dynamism; the latter can, in turn, be divided into slow dynamism, which occurs according to consolidated laws and, as a result, is characterized by a high degree of predictability, and catastrophic dynamism, characterized by a sharply lowered level of predictability. From the point of view of these two forms of development, the dynamism of regular repetitions is perceived as stasis, which is precisely how Plato described the organized substitution of stable forms, using the stylized image of Egypt as an example. Сomplexity is increased by the fact that, in reality, we never have a stable, consecutive, rhythmic shift from dynamic (catastrophic) to normative stages of development. In actual history, many dynamic, though non-­ synchronized and unrelated, processes possessing different temporalities of development co-occur, along with simultaneously occurring processes that are experiencing a period of stability in different spheres of development. And so, for example, rapid development and explosions in one sphere of science may not be linked chronologically or causally to similarly explosive tendencies in other spheres of life. An explosive state in the realm of art can occur synchronically with stabilization in the sphere of politics. However, in cases of especially tumultuous co-occurrence of various explosive periods, those processes can lend their language to other dynamic processes, or to all of them. And so, the tumultuous occurrence of a socio-­ political explosion in the age of the French Revolution of the eighteenth century led to the description of explosive processes in other spheres with the terminology of socio-political revolution. In turn, the naming of those processes exerted a reciprocal influence on the nature of their occurrence. Self-naming, similar to all other forms of naming, often defines a certain behavior as a type, thereby determining its historical fate. And so, for example, the terms “Bolshevik” and “Menshevik” owe their existence to a

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relatively random classification of votes at one of the early congresses of the Social Democrats; subsequently, however, they would determine to a significant degree the actual historical destinies of these parties. The term “Bolshevik” created an image of size and strength, which impressed workers, whereas the term “Menshevik” was related semantically to sacrifice and selectivity, which clearly impressed the intelligentsia. There is, in part, a psychological basis to the magic of naming, ranging from the Latin “nomina sunt omina” to the fate of Gogol’s hero Bashmachkin.2 Bashmachkin’s first name and patronymic, Akaky Akakievich, give him a dual fate: one derived from a Greek word meaning “mild,” and the other derived from the Russian folk etymology: “caca.”3 In stressing that he was unable to find another name for his hero, Gogol underscores the fateful nature of the name. There are analogous examples related to the magic of naming, but they have a much more profound significance, revealing the real intrusion of naming into the practical world. The naming of reality changes its essence and the nature of behavior. It follows, therefore, that real historical processes are multi-layered and poly-functional, and, as a result, can be described in different ways from different points of view. For the sake of simplicity, however, we will examine only the developmental trajectory of the dominant structures of this or that process, having already noted that in real historical movements all structures are colored by various second-tier explosions and by “explosive waves” from previous stages. As already noted, in pre-human cultures (in this case, the cultures of higher animals) the memory of the species dominates. Conditional behavior is a form of preserving in the life of a species—or a group certain expedient experiences—and correctly repeating them in established forms. When the cyclical model of dynamics is replaced by the linear model, there occurs a significant broadening of possible types of behavior. From the point of view of other animals, this living creature, which was an early form of man, must have been perceived as “crazy.” A “normal” animal could not predict its behavior as it is impossible to predict the behavior of someone who is crazy, whose consciousness rejects most of the prohibitions of the healthy animal.4 This situation is reminiscent of a scene from Kipling’s Jungle Book. The organized, “rational” behavior of the book’s animal heroes is contrasted to the nonsensical and unpredictable behavior of the monkeys, with their sham organization. One can assume that the behavior of early man was perceived in this way by those animals that first

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encountered him. This unpredictability, that is, the fact that man had at his disposal more levels of freedom than his opponents, who had to limit themselves to a relatively small and predictable number of behaviors (gestures), placed man in an advantageous position, which greatly compensated for his relative vulnerability in comparison with the animals. Kipling was able to fathom, with extraordinary precision, how the world of animals saw “proto-man,” who seemed to them not only crazy but also as waging a “war without rules.” A similar situation would arise if someone from the Renaissance were observed by people from the Middle Ages, who were more strictly organized (less dynamic); he would seem to them as breaking all the rules and achieving victory by forbidden means, as someone not “acting like a human.” This shaking loose from the norms of behavior—which is an essential condition for progress—is subjectively experienced by the collective located at a previous stage of linear progress not only as madness but also as moral degradation. This explains the many claims made throughout human history that animals are more just than humans. The sudden entry into a new, more expansive system of rules is experienced as a shift from a world of rules to one of unlimited freedom. Man, that “crazy” creature from the point of view of the animal world, turned out to be extremely productive from his own point of view. Insofar as his enemies from the world of animals could not predict his behavior, their opposition became highly ineffective.5 However, these new possibilities needed to be consolidated; and so, when behavior left the previous realm of predictability, this did not lead to limitless opportunities—that is, chaos—but rather to a new organizing structure with its own expanded limits. Insofar as this new experience had to be transmitted to subsequent generations, it quickly assumed a contingent, gestural character. Expedient, nonhereditary behavior was consolidated within a system of established collective movements. This effective, expedient behavior was consolidated and passed on by being transformed into proto-ritual. Contrary to general opinion, humans at this stage must have been creatures with highly ritualized behavior, not “savages” doing whatever they wanted to do. And so, at the beginning of human culture there lies an enormous, perhaps catastrophic, explosion, followed by a stage of consolidating that which had been achieved at the moment of explosion. A clearly distinguishing feature of this new dynamics of behavior was that it was stored in biological memory and as such was connected to the

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pre-human stage of development, while at the same time being characterized by a perpetual strengthening of the role of individual experience. In the animal world periods of ritualized behavior are introduced into the memory of the species. “Free” or individual behavior occupies a secondary plane and is not fixed in the visible memory of the species. What is useful is consolidated in the collective, while what is random and individual is relegated to oblivion. In human society, however, the relationship of the law governed and the random changes, with unpredictable behavior being allocated an important role as the generator of new possibilities. This generator was associated with individual actions and corresponded with an increasing degree of freedom. The opposing mechanism—collective in nature—evaluated and included some of those actions in its behavioral memory while eliminating others. In moments of bifurcation, the shakiness of limits leads to an explosion of new forms of behavior. In periods of slow development, there occurs the selection and consolidation of forms that are justified by their expediency. In this way, random outbursts are transformed into behavior. Selection consolidates and stores in the legacy of future generations those actions arising at the time of explosion to which a certain motivation is subsequently attributed. The task of preserving individual experience demands new and significantly more complex memory functions. Out of various, often random, types of behavior, expediency selects—and memory preserves and passes down—a limited set of those that have meaning. In this way the sequencing of the two stages is fixed: an unpredictable increase in new possibilities of behavior in moments of bifurcation is followed by the selection (in periods of slow development) of the most expedient variants. From the latter stage we can make the following conclusion: at an early stage the selection of behavioral forms is not by nature creative, that is, it is carried out according to specific rules, which, as a consequence, limits the role of randomness. The consolidation of expedient gestures and actions, once selected, also requires ritualization, as a conventional system of gestures, shouts, and musical wails made them easier to remember. The necessity of transmitting expedient actions demanded the convergence of that system with specific forms of proto-art. The idea that human activity at early stages of its development was practical, in our sense of the word—that is, fundamentally antithetical to the emotionally “artistic” principle—is not supported by either the available material or our theoretical understanding. At precisely this stage the

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problem of consolidating experience demanded mechanisms of memory that man did not previously possess. This entirely new demand, to preserve the ever-growing reservoir of noninherited information, produced an apparatus for remembering, which was by nature artistic. This was not a human invention, as we can reference the well-known example of bees, which transmit noninherited information by translating it into the conventional language of “dance.” Of course, the relative stability of the information transmitted by bees made it possible for them to limit themselves to an inherited and relatively limited system of “dance,” whereas the open nature of human information required a significantly richer and more dynamic mechanism. And so, already at the earliest stages of human behavior, which we can evaluate only theoretically (as is well known, everything we are able to observe even among the most “primitive” peoples either belongs to a significantly later period or is the result of secondary simplification), we can tentatively distinguish two opposing tendencies, which possess, however, a similar structure. The first involves expanding the possibilities of rigid behavior and creating new kinds of ritualization, while the second involves selecting and consolidating behaviors in the collective memory, which is linked to their condensation in rituals. In neither case, however, is ritual divorced from the realm of practical activity, nor is it opposed to it; rather, ritual represents a language through which a practical action assumes a socio-behavioral function. And so, the system of meaningful actions in prehistoric times was significantly more rigid than at subsequent stages of development. This is analogous to the way people at the earliest stages of written culture would not permit themselves to use a script aimlessly; they attributed to it a sacred function, a ritual function, as well as a directly practical function in life, so that humans, for whom behavior in all its totality (gestures, exclamations, etc.) had now acquired meaning, could not allow themselves to use the script in vain. It was at one and the same time action, memory, and myth. The next stage was linked to the differentiation of the practical realm from the mythic. The practical sphere assumed much greater freedom, that is, it was translated into a language with a significantly greater number of elements and of possibilities for combining those elements, a language that was not only much more varied, but that subjectively could exist as a non-language, that is, as a non-organized sphere. The realm of mythological language was condensed and assumed a more pronounced structure. At this stage, semiotic thought and practical behavior were still the same

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or were closely connected. Within this system, however, one can already observe a distinction between actions having meaning and meanings corresponding to an action, between an action that means something and meaning that is manifested as an action. This distinction later assumed profound significance. An action became the source for perceiving certain forms of cultural behavior as bearers of a certain semantics. On this ground, there arose, for example, the distinction between practical and sacred eating, brought about by the de-­ ritualization of the former and the more pronounced ritualization of the latter. In both cases, however, eating retained a gastronomic, not a symbolic, character. Moreover, the physiological experience of food formed an integral part of ritualized eating as well. Eating had to be accompanied by the joy derived from the physiological satisfaction of hunger. Receiving food that was richer, tastier, with higher fat content, and in greater quantity was linked to the inseparability of the magical function from the physiological satisfying of hunger. The same gestures, cries, exclamations, and laughter that expressed feelings of joy and abundance had a magical quality, but they weren’t a game. They were filled with sincere, direct emotions, which could leave the outside observer with an impression of chaos. The physiological aspect of eating assumed a secondary ritual character, gradually producing that system of ritual physiology described by Mikhail Bakhtin and a host of ethnographers. Bakhtin interpreted this system as an intrusion of freedom into the sphere of ritual organization, but he also showed that “freedom” itself was manifested in ritualized forms. In this way, subjective de-ritualization leads to a redoubling of ritual. The subsequent intensification of the magical function of eating, as with other physiological processes, leads to a serious shift in stress. If, as noted above, eating was at first (in the logical sense, as it is difficult to speak of real historical sequencing) the content of an as-yet undeveloped ritual, it was later transformed into a sign, a ritualized form. On the one hand, this led to a broadening of the realm of content. The ritualized ingesting of food could register not just the satisfaction of hunger but an entire complex of positive emotions and meanings (associated with the concluding of peace, of marriage rituals, and so on). The feast becomes a universal form of ritual, with a broad positive meaning. At the same time, it serves as the ritualized expression of the most varied content. Even emotions, the physiological source of which are subjected to ever greater semiotic ritualization, are consolidated, as with the ritualized expressions of joy at a feast, which lend a semiotic character to all the behavior. The need

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then arises to learn happy or sad behavior and how to distinguish between the two.6 (Consider the folk tales of the fool who cries at a feast and laughs at a funeral; here, the fool is someone who has not mastered the language of behavior.) There occurs a broadening of the realm of expression: food can be replaced by a symbol of food just as red meat can be replaced by vegetables. There develops a complex and highly varied system of substitutions, during the course of which yesterday’s content turns into today’s expression, that is, a sign. This is how the sacrifice of a priest or another sacred person is replaced by a temporary substitute, another person, such as the member of another tribe, a slave, or generally by someone “foreign.” To the extent that the “foreigner” is perceived as “not entirely human” (in many languages the word for “human” is the same as the tribe’s self-designation), the next step involves replacing the sacrificed human with a sacred animal, during which the semiosis becomes more complex: the sacrificed priest, who in the full ritual is also eaten, signifies god, the slave that replaces him signifies the priest (and, as a consequence, also god), and the ritualized animal that is eaten also signifies god. Only later is the sacrifice of god replaced by the sacrifice to god. However, it involves the same mechanism of substitution, right up to the Christian sacrament of communion, starting with the Last Supper (Mark 14: 22–24) and ending with the complete substitution of the sacrificial victim with bread and wine (the host). The Last Supper is not simply the foreshadowing of Christ’s death, as a later consciousness will rationally interpret it; it is the same thing as the crucifixion, only in a different language. For the consciousness of later periods, the difficulty of understanding this type of substitution led to the emergence of plots that interpreted as a play on words what had initially been the signification of one and the same thing in different symbolic systems. Later rational thought is inclined to simplify this mythological unity. And so, for example, there is the well-known practice among the Romans of deceiving the gods. The divinity was promised a certain number of heads of cattle, but after the successful completion of the deal, the god was presented with the “heads,” or pods, of poppy flowers. Understanding this episode as word play and deception is, of course, a later interpretation of an earlier mythological union of semiotic sacrifice and commercial exchange of equal values. Here, the juridical thinking of the Romans translated mythology into its own language. In this way we can contrast the relationship of the physiological and the semiotic in the perception of sexual intercourse. This perception has

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undergone a no less complex evolution. At certain stages sexual intercourse was not distinguished semiotically from consumption as both entered into the general image of abundance and into situations in which they were translated into a more general language (involving the limiting of prohibitions up to and including their complete elimination). In other historical moments an extreme semiotization of the physiological aspects of sexual intercourse took place. And so, the ritual of chivalric love involved the opposition of the everyday to the semiotic, which in principle excluded the possibility of sexual intercourse altogether (consider the Virgin Mary as an object of knightly devotion). At the same time, the physiological act, for example, the rape of a peasant woman by a knight, in principle could not be translated into the language of love. In stark opposition to such a behavioral system is that of young people in the second half of the twentieth century who translated sexual intercourse into the realm of the “everyday” and “habitual,” and distinguished it from behavior related to love and family. The stage at which an act is at one and the same time speech is replaced by a propensity to separate the two. A fundamentally new stage in human culture was linked to the appearance of arbitrary signs, that is, signs that were entirely divorced from the things to which they referred. This enormous revolution created speech in our current understanding of the word. Of course, speech arose much earlier, but before a word was separated from that to which it referred, it performed approximately the same role that gestures play in contemporary communication—the role of an accompaniment or to provide emphasis or nuance; the main semantic meaning remained with the object or gesture. The potential for such a language was shown with paradoxical truth by Jonathan Swift, who described one of the languages of the Laputians, which involved the inhabitants carrying around with them a large number of objects, which they showed to one another in place of words. Here, the object was the expression and the word was its content. Such a language, with all its inconvenience, would possess one undeniable advantage: it would exclude the possibility of lying insofar as expression and content were inextricably linked. Separating words from things had innumerable consequences, the most immediate of which was the possibility of lying, while a more delayed consequence was the emergence of poetry. The subsequent history of humankind becomes the history of how words were used. If before this the dominant role of semiotics in culture

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was masked by practice, now semiotics (the function and role of speech) became the dominant mechanism of history. One of the fundamental questions of culture became its relationship to language, the complexity of which increased due to the following circumstance. Traditional philosophy of history proceeds from the assumption that any new stage is linked to the complete disappearance of the previous one. However, by analogy with biological evolution in which early forms of life only rarely die out but usually evolve, adapting themselves to new conditions, the emergence of a new dominant in human history and culture does not lead to the disappearance of the previous one. Similarly, while the emergence of later civilizations led to the disappearance of slavery or of other—even earlier— economic forms, archaic systems of rites and forms of behavior moved to the periphery but, as a rule, co-existed with later structures. For example, the dual functionality of armed combat, in the practical sphere and in the relative sphere of semiotics, constantly shifted in historical practice. With the establishment of feudal ethical norms, a wound from an adversary took on a double meaning: alongside its practical meaning, it assumed a more pronounced symbolic significance. As a sign of bravery, receiving a wound became something desirable. (This tradition continued into the modern period; consider the well-known custom at German universities of inflicting a wound on one’s face and during the healing process reopening the wound to make it more pronounced—and frightening; the wound becomes a sign of honor.) The semiotics of honor transforms everyday notions, making the undesirable desirable. At the same time, semiotic representations came to replace real actions. And so, during the ritual of knighting, the actual spilling of blood was gradually replaced by the sign of being struck by a sword. In addition, there emerged the concept of an “honorable wound,” that is, a wound that bestows merit, and that of a dishonorable wound. The former includes dangerous wounds inflicted to the front of the body, while the latter include wounds inflicted from behind and not with a weapon. The intrusion of relative semiotic meanings is reflected, for example, in the fact that a later redaction of Russian Law, a legal text of the early Russian Middle Ages, stipulates that wounds that insult one’s honor (i.e., wounds delivered with the side of the sword or the handle, or with the back of the hand) demand greater compensation to the injured party than more physically serious wounds. Theoretically, we can define elements of cultural semiotics according to the degree of their complexity in the process of evolution. In reality, however, various semiotic structures, from the most primitive to the most

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complex, exist simultaneously and intersect. And so, for example, the duel is a specific semiotic structure that intersects with various other mechanisms. Even its relationship to the physical act of fighting is not so simple. The famous duelist Count Fyodor Tolstoy, known as the American, played with the relationship between dueling and the physical leveling of the arm, as witnessed by the poet Vyazemsky: “The prince owed Tolstoy a rather large sum on a promissory note. The term of the loan had run out long ago, and several extensions had been issued, but the prince wasn’t paying the money back. Finally, having lost all patience, Tolstoy wrote to him: ‘If you do not pay back the loan in its entirety by such-and-such a date, I will not go looking for justice in the courts but will direct myself directly to your excellency’s litso [face]’” (Viazemskii 1929, 70). Here, we have a many-layered play on words. “To direct oneself to a litso” is a bureaucratic expression meaning “to file a complaint directly with an official.” At the same time, for Tolstoy, it was meant as a relatively serious insult, accompanied by a challenge to a duel (a slap in the face as a sign of insult was, as a rule, replaced in actual practice with the sign of a slap, expressed with a threatening gesture, such as the throwing down of a glove, or a verbal insult).7 Tolstoy the American, however, was also threatening the offender with something else—namely, that he would exit the sphere of semiotics for the realm of the practical and simply “sock him in the mug [morda]” (the expression “to sock someone in the mug” was a ritualized rejection of ritual. It is no coincidence that the Master in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, from the non-ritualized perspective of a lunatic, demands immediately to know whether his offender has a “face” or a “mug” (Bulgakov 2016, 145). “To sock someone in the mug” and “to give someone a slap on the face” are, in the language of behavior, not synonyms but antonyms). And so, in threatening “to address himself directly to the litso,” Tolstoy’s play on words belongs simultaneously to bureaucratic language, to the language of gesture, and to non-ritualized practice. A duel creates a situation that is diametrically opposed to a fight. The threat of physical pain is generally eliminated and is replaced by various corresponding elements: “life”—“death” by “delivery of insult”— “removal of insult,” that is, material harm is replaced by semiotic honor. The immediate result of this is the requirement of equality. A duel is possible only between equal adversaries. They must be equal in age and in social standing. And so, the impudent remarks of Pushkin addressed to General Mikhail Orlov in Kishinev could not have led to a duel not only because of the latter’s magnanimity but also because the status of the

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­ eneral, who was a commander of a division and had been wounded in g battle and awarded medals for valor, and that of the fledgling poet were too different. Orlov could refuse the poet satisfaction without risking his own honor in the least. Faddey Bulgarin’s refusal to duel with the poet Delvig represents a similar situation. Bulgarin declined with the words: “Tell the Baron that I’ve seen more blood than he’s seen ink.” Pushkin recorded this as an example of a sharp and resourceful retort, not as an act of cowardly avoidance of danger. A duel between a former officer in the Napoleonic Wars and a myopic Petersburg poet could be refused without any damage to the one who clearly held the advantage. A duel between a nobleman and a raznochinets, or someone without rank, was equally impossible. This explains the grotesque comedy of Bazarov’s duel with Pavel Patrovich in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. It is also well known that the French poet Vincent Voiture was an inveterate duelist precisely because he suffered from the inferiority complex of a raznochinets. And someone who had insulted Voltaire refused his challenge to a duel, instructing his servants to simply beat the impudent young man with sticks. In this way, the duel combines the threat of death with an assertion of the social equality of the adversaries, thereby bringing the injured party into the semiotic field of the nobility. Compare the two epithets in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin: “To prepare for him an honorable grave […] at a gentlemanly distance” (Pushkin 1959–1962, IV, 125; italics added). The material side of a duel is always connected to a specific hierarchy of concepts, which are essentially arbitrary. A duel represents the rite of removing insult and reestablishing honor. For the duel to be transformed into murder, it is necessary to destroy the semiotics of these two phenomena. The arbitrary nature of the duel also defines the semiotic relativity of the compensatory act. If someone well versed in questions of honor admits that an insult is not fatal by nature, then the element of actual fighting may weaken by degrees as the hierarchy of conventional semiotic gestures expands. Reestablishing honor can be done through the relative spilling of blood (at least a small drop) or by an exchange of shots. The latter also has a ritual character, for even in the absence of bloodthirsty intentions demonstrating a desire for peace can only occur in specific forms. Here, the semiotics of gestures plays a role. For example, a shot in the air should not be done in a demonstrative way. (The position of the first to shoot is especially delicate in this regard insofar as, when firing into the air, he forces his opponent to act in a similarly restrained manner, thus denying him the freedom of choice.) Demonstratively shooting into the air, especially by

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the first shooter, can be seen as an insulting act of disdain. This is precisely what infuriated Martynov and provoked his bloodthirsty reaction in his duel with the poet Lermontov. The highest degree of conventionality is achieved when a dual is replaced by gestures in a conventional situation, by the exchange of conventional formulas of address or by no less conventional forms of duel-related behavior. And so, for example, the duel between Griboedov and Iakubovich did not have any real cause; neither of the adversaries had been insulted and neither had any reason to injure the other. Nonetheless, they had to exchange shots as participants in a famous quadruple duel in which they were playing the part of seconds. It is precisely here, however, that we see the intrusion of emotions, such as offense and animosity, into the ritual, which almost caused the duel to end in tragedy. The structure of the semiotic dimension of culture is contradictory. On the one hand, there is a propensity toward the proliferation of languages. The dynamic nature of the process is determined by the constant appearance of ever-newer sign systems and the shifting of their dominant. Gestures, singing, dance, and various other forms of art replace one another by turn as leader of the semiotic process. This process is never mono-structural. Only on the plane of scholarly simplification can we imagine an isolated history of literature, painting, or other semiotic mode. In reality, movement occurs in the form of perpetual exchange, involving the perception of foreign systems accompanied by their translation into the system’s own language. During the course of comparison, this process can be compared to the mutual influence of different sections in a symphonic orchestra. To write an isolated history of a certain language, for example, the language of poetry, outside its surrounding context, would be like removing one instrumental part from an orchestral score and viewing that part as the whole work.8 In fact, these ideas were the basis of Iurii Tynianov’s concept of the dominant role played by secondary literary movements and by the constant shift between first and second-tier literatures. Tynianov’s idea was that high poetry was not born as high poetry but came from a reservoir of outcast poetry. (Compare this with Akhmatova’s [1990, 157] verse: “If only you knew from what rubbish/ Poetry grows, knowing no shame.”) This could be paraphrased as the idea that a new state of literature is not born from the previous stage without the dominant influence of secondary lines of development. The opposite propensity is associated with the desire of every tendency to seize the dominant position and to lend its language to the entire

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period. In Russian—and more broadly, European—culture of the latter half of the nineteenth century, the novel occupied the dominant position and lent its language to all other forms of art. (It would be interesting to study the influence of the Russian novel on Russian and European philosophy, as well as on the everyday behavior and the overall nature of political struggle in that age.) In equal measure, the period of Romanticism was associated with the extraordinarily wide-ranging invasion of poetry into political thought and into the everyday life of people of that time. (Compare how contemporaries insisted on a resemblance in face and form between Napoleon and the Decembrists Pavel Pestel and Sergey Muravyev-­ Apostol. The two Russian men did not resemble one another, and so the fact that contemporaries saw features of the French emperor in both men means that their political role dictated the perception of their outer appearance, not the other way around.) For Prince Andrey Bolkonsky in War and Peace, the phrase “my Toulon” became a sign of his life’s work; the content of that sign—to play a role in history—was expressed in the following way by Lermontov: “I was born so that the whole world would be the witness/Of my triumph or my destruction” (1954–1957, II:38). This fundamentally new function of language involved a long process of differentiation. The differentiation of language from action brought reality closer to gesture. If, at its inception, speaking was inseparable from action and was a part of action, speaking had now become self-sufficient, and word and gesture (action) could be separated. This sharply increased the independence of lexical semantics. The other side of the process involved the separation of the sign from action and the possibility of self-­ sufficient signs. The expression “the liberation of the word” represented the possibility of lying speech. This became irrefutable proof that language had acquired an entirely new level of freedom. Speech’s desire for stable forms, for ossification in invariant texts, on the one hand, and the expansion of freedom to combine elements of speech, on the other, represent two opposing tendencies, with the dynamics of their conflict forming the basis of the entire process. One can assume that the first function of speaking was associated, on the one hand, with magic, and on the other, with the consolidation of repeated gestures from key moments of behavior. In a similar way, speaking sought stability—repeatable formulae. Speaking was conservative and ideally directed at ossification and sacralization. The periphery of speech, however, developed in the opposite way. While connected to ritual, the periphery nonetheless preserved a high degree of freedom. Kipling’s

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­ onsensical monkeys “chatter,” that is, they produce words that are freely n associated with thoughts (which he distinguishes from the ritualized speech of his positive heroes). Such chatter reigns beyond the boundaries of ritual. It is precisely there, beyond ritual, that a word attains a level of freedom that allows it to generate verbal art. Non-sacred poetry demanded a level of freedom that could appear only in play, that is, in a type of behavior fundamentally opposed to the sacred. This new, fundamentally dynamic structure infiltrates the sacred world from the outside, from the world of play, drunkenness and profligacy, then reaches its apogee and is itself sacralized.9 And so, Dionysus, surrounded by a crowd of followers in sacred ecstasy, infiltrates the ordered world of the Greek gods and enters into competition with Apollo. We now have before us a complete cycle. A structure that is anti-sacred by nature and located on the periphery of culture enters into hand-to-hand combat with culture’s sacred center so as to eventually displace it and take its place. Compare this to the Renaissance, when a desacralization of culture occurred within Catholic countries, initiating a dramatic dialogue between sacred and non-sacred forms of art and culture. This dialogue, it would seem, ended with the universal victory of profane forms of culture in eighteenth-­century Europe. However, the place of the sacred ended up being filled with profane forms of culture that then assumed sacred functions. A typical example of this is Russian literature, which began in the eighteenth century and, before Gogol, Dostoevsky, or Tolstoy, fulfilled a function that in the Middle Ages was sacred in nature. Art, especially literature, assumed a religious-ethical function that had not previously belonged to it. In equal measure it spread into the realm of philosophy (constituting the specificity of the Russian school of philosophy) and journalism, assuming for itself the universal function of a general language of culture. If “meaningful action” was replaced by “meaning expressed through action,” then, with this shift to the verbal dominant, meaning expressed other meaning, that is, every meaning could become the expression of some other content, which, in its turn, could became the meaning of third- and fourth-level content. Medieval mysticism showed just how far art could extend its multi-layered symbolics. A semiotic structure is completed in the tension between two opposing tendencies, the introduction of ever-newer languages, their proliferation, and the stabilization of that proliferation within a finite list. This is how, for example, the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth saw a sharp increase

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in the activity of artistic semiotics in spheres that until then had been neither artistic nor semiotic. And so, fairs, circuses, and folk festivals, along with all their inner structures, such as the cries of street vendors, began to be perceived as perfectly legitimate forms of art. The most striking result of this was the rehabilitation of cinematography. At the other end of the cultural world, however, the ossification of traditional forms of art, which were no longer considered artistically productive, was taking place. At the same time, another process was underway: the antithesis of speech and language as the antithesis of empirical reality and the relative model of that reality concealed within itself two possibilities. From one point of view, the long and varied list of texts generated by the arts could be viewed as reality, and the language constructed in the process of enumerating that last, as a relative model. In the history of culture, however, we also encounter the opposite view, according to which it is precisely extreme generalization that opens a path to reality, while individual occurrences are relegated to the realm of chance and appearance. This real duality of the semiotic mechanism was reflected in the medieval debate between the nominalists and realists. The duality in the nature of human culture is connected to its deepest essence: the contradictory combination of linear directionality and cyclical repetition. The dual nature of human culture is the real basis of the two semiotic approaches to its history. Culture can be viewed linearly as the perpetual replacement of old structures with new ones, as in traditional historiography. Such a view highlights the constant emergence of new forms, which replace and displace old ones. In the history of culture, however, cyclical conceptions, which see the dominant in the repeated substitution of structures, are also repeatedly put forward. This problem can be resolved by pointing out that repetition belongs to the language of culture, while dynamic variety belongs to its speech. However, as emphasized above, the opposition of language to speech is absolute only in the conventional process of description. In reality, they are constantly changing places. Cyclical and dynamic processes are equally real. Different types of description simply illuminate different types of reality. (1992)

Notes 1. See Prigogine’s concept of bifurcation points in dynamic processes in Prigogine (1980, 103–130).

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2. Bashmachkin’s surname derives from the Russian word bashmak, meaning “shoe.” (Translator’s note). 3. Lotman is probably referring here to the Greek work ἄκακος, meaning “guileless,” “innocent,” or “simple.” (Translator’s note) 4. Something analogous, although to an immeasurably lesser degree, is displayed when an animal ends up in a situation that is radically anomalous for it, for example, a geological disaster. There the stable behavior of an animal comes into conflict with an altered world, just as significantly altered behavior on the animal’s part brings it into conflict with a stable world. 5. The dynamics of human behavior, in its turn, significantly influenced the behavior of animals. It would be wrong to think that an animal of the Stone Age acted like the animals of today. They were much less vulnerable. The contemporary behavior of animals would seem “crazy” to them, insofar as many features of that behavior were the result of contacts with humans. 6. We should distinguish these cases from those involving the ritualized non-­ coincidence of behavior and its interpretation, as with, for example, ritualized laughter at funerals and wakes or the ritualized weeping of the bride-to-be in marriage rituals. 7. A glove or a car could be thrown in someone’s face, serving as a sign of a slap, or on the ground, as a sign of a sign. Osip Mandelstam challenged Aleksey Tolstoy to a duel by simply touching his palm to Tolstoy’s cheek. Valentin Stenich, according to Elena Tager, described this episode, seeing in it only the comic mismatch of Mandelstam’s face and the “chivalric” situation. He was probably right that Mandelstam’s behavior was an extremely refined form of insult. Any resemblance to a fight that would have been understandable and natural to Tolstoy was completely replaced by the insulting gesture of touching his cheek. 8. This phenomenon is, of course, from the start dual. Similar to the way in which an individual human personality is both a part of the collective and its likeness, a separate history of literature or of any other field of art or a history of art as a whole can be viewed as part of a cultural whole and as its likeness. 9. For deep analysis of this dimension of the cultural history, see Bakhtin (1984).

References Akhmatova, Anna. 1990. “Mne ne k chemu odicheskie rati” / “I don’t need martial hosts arrayed in odes.” In The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, Vol. II, Judith Hemschemeyer (trans.), 154–157. Somerville, MA: Zephyr Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and His World, Hélène Iswolsky (trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Bulgakov, Mikhail. 2016. The Master and Margarita, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (trans.). New York: Penguin. Lermontov, Mikhail. 1954. “K* (My sluchaino svedeny sud’boiu…).” In Lermontov, M.  Iu., Sochineniia v 6-i tomokh. Vol. 2. Poems, 1832–1841, 38. Moscow and Leningrad: Akademiia Nauk SSSR. Prigogine, Ilya. 1980. From Being to Becoming. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman. Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich. 1959–1962. Sobranie sochinenii v 10 tomakh, D. D. Blagoi et al. (eds.). Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura. Viazemskii, Petr. 1929. Staraia zapisnaia kniga, Lidiia Ginzburg (ed.). Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo pisatelei.

CHAPTER 8

The Role of Art in the Dynamics of Culture

The very essence of culture is opposed to monolingualism. Simply pointing out the dialogic basis of culture, however, tells us little about its specificity. Of course, one could point to the fundamental principle of dialogue and the emergence of foundational dialogic structures in every culture. However, such a static and, one might say, anatomical principle of classification, while convenient in many ways, is nonetheless insufficient; it can even become a source of false conceptions. It is therefore necessary to emphasize that dialogue and dynamics are two inseparable processes. This bubbling stream is extremely difficult to analyze insofar as it involves the interweaving of dynamic structures. Every partition threatens the loss of a fundamental point of view. The more complex the dialogic system, the greater the role played by the interweaving of dynamic structures. Below we will attempt to illustrate the inseparability of dynamism and polyglossia, using as an example art, which represents one of the highest manifestations of a complex dynamic structure. Originally published as “Rol’ iskusstva v dinamike kul’tury,” Studia Russica Helsingiensia et Tartuensia 4, 1995: 9–24. The translation here is from Iurii Lotman, Istoria i tipologia russkoi kul’tury, 116–127. Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo—SPB, 2002. J. Lotman (*) University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia © The Author(s) 2019 Juri Lotman - Culture, Memory and History, ed. by M. Tamm https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14710-5_8

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The necessity of culture and of its highest incarnation, art, is conditioned by the dual nature of the information process. On the one hand, that process is founded on the mechanism of memory—the preservation and accumulation of information. Higher information structures, however, must contain a more complex process—the generation of fundamentally new messages, which cannot be generated automatically from a pre-existing repository of messages. These two forms of information processing are fundamentally different. Quantitative accumulation is built on the basis of consecutive and symmetrical structures. When reversed, these structures return us to the initial starting point. And so, movement from the initial point to the endpoint can, when changing direction, take on an oscillating character and be repeated over and over. These orderly, regular events constitute one of the components of processes taking place in nature; they can be contrasted to another component, which we will refer to with the word “explosion.” We understand explosions as events whose consequences are unpredictable due to the many factors involved and the extraordinary complexity of their interconnection. We include here events of a duration that so far exceeds the limits of a human life that we are unable to determine whether we are dealing with a one-time event or a repeating one. We also include in the category of explosions one-time events, which are by definition non-repeating. Explosive processes belong among the essential (and, from the point of view of the human observer, fundamentally destructive) phenomena of nature. An explosion is a moment of dynamism, during which the shift to a new state takes place according to the laws of chance. In such cases neither cause-and-effect mechanisms nor probability mechanisms perform their usual functions. The random processes we are dealing with can be isolated or irregular and may not be subject to the laws of causality or frequency. (Such a situation may also arise with processes with a defined frequency when, due to insufficient information, we know only portions of their trajectory or possess an unrepresentatively small amount of data.) While random processes occur in great numbers, they also touch upon such important moments of dynamism that we cannot limit ourselves just to counting them. The function of explosive processes changes in a fundamental way when they are viewed in relation to humankind. As soon as humans enter the picture, with their consciousness of freedom of choice and with their individual behavior, the role of random processes immeasurably increases. In some realms, especially those that are of particular

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interest to history, those processes become dominant, altering the emphasis in historical processes. In a moment of explosion an event is released from the control of a strict chain of cause-and-effect relationships. An “explosion” is a moment during which an event finds itself not with one possible outcome, but rather with an entire cluster of equally probable states insofar as the result of an “explosion” is essentially unpredictable. We can only record the outcome. Of course, when looking retrospectively at an explosion, we inevitably subject it to secondary re-evaluation. Those outcomes that actually occur move to the level of law-governed, naturally occurring outcomes, while those relegated to oblivion by the randomness of the explosion are defined as impossible or highly improbable. In this way, an explosion is a bursting forth of events occurring at the intersection of various possibilities. It is also necessary to emphasize that the very concept of “explosion” is an objective factor in a physical process, on the one hand, and is inseparable from the human interpretation of that process, on the other. The moment of explosion is a breach of the limits of predictable events. The poet Valery Briusov defined the Bolshevik Revolution, which he perceived as an explosion, as the transformation of unlimited fantasy into everyday life:      From the world of prose       We’ve been thrown into the improbable.

And the freedom of the poetic dreamer enters practical life:      Fate has accepted reveries,       And once again shown its vicissitudes. (Briusov 2014, 89)

Of course, the “unpredictability” of an explosion belongs to its interpretation in the mind of individuals and so can be evaluated as a subjective aspect of history. Insofar as the future behavior of individuals and of the human race in its historical reality is to a significant degree determined by ideas, and by the evaluation of events by those experiencing them, separating the “subjective” from the “objective” is essentially impossible. We can change the language for describing events, but we must not forget that this language can be transformed in an instant into an active participant in those events. Defining a fact as subjective or objective depends on the position of the observer, and insofar as that position is, as a rule, mobile and represents, in its turn, a conglomeration of points of view, the

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s­eparation of the so-called objective from the subjective is impossible. If we were to take a rigid position on this question, we would inevitably return to the age of German philosophy at the end of the nineteenth century, that is, to a previous stage. These realms of historical dynamism where chance plays the dominant role have traditionally fallen outside the boundaries of historiography. Prominence was given to faceless, predictable processes exhibiting the regular occurrence of models, such as the laws of economics and mass movements in all their psycho-biological manifestations. Significant scholarly achievements were made, while material relating to the opposite pole and connected to individual, unpredictable phenomena fell outside the scholar’s purview. Such a relationship to the individual reminds us of these lines of Derzhavin:      Poetry is loved by you,       As something beautiful, sweet and useful,       Like delicious lemonade in summer. (Derzhavin 1988, 352)

If the historian of economics, as many assume, bakes the bread of science, then the art historian offers the reader “delicious lemonade in summer,” something a public occupied with practical concerns can easily do without. This is precisely the place allocated to the history of art in comprehensive history courses. It is presented at the end, and hastily, so as to provide “a more complete picture.” The scholars of the Annales School attempted to broaden the field of history by including material that had typically been ignored.1 While traditional history studied great people and “world events,” the historians of “la longue durée” abandoned both, producing histories without great people or historical events. We are attempting here to return to these phenomena their right to the historian’s attention while not abandoning the achievements of the previous period in historiography. The dual nature of explosive processes links them at the same time to objectively occurring processes and to the subjectively human flow of events. An explosion is impossible in a world where there are no people, but it is equally impossible in a world where there are only people. Explosion represents a form of being on the border between two worlds. This “dual existence,” in the words of the poet Tyutchev, defines the specific nature and function of the explosion. Dynamic processes that occur in history are unavoidably associated with self-consciousness. A change in movement, when it occurs in the

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realm of thought, will be subjected to a specific form of self-reflection. One of the fundamental forms of this self-consciousness, which lies at the basis of dynamic processes, is the perception of a state of decline (of lack, loss, or sin). Finding itself in a state of equilibrium, a structure must do something to get itself out of that state. If we were to translate this into the language of individual consciousness, then a sin, crime, or mistake must be committed, that is, some violation of the rules of conduct must take place, which excludes the “correct” symmetry of repetition. Cyclical movement must assume a linear character as it strives, in the words of the poet Anna Akhmatova, “for the nowhere and never, like a train off its rails” (Akhmatova 1990, 259). The example provided here by the poet is, incidentally, very precise: cyclical, repeatable, and orderly movement explodes into some destructive and unpredictable striving. The possibility of lending a degree of comprehensibility to such phenomena by means of an open series of poetic images (Pushkin, for example, uses the image of the “lawless comet” to refer to an explosion of human passions) is determined by a cluster of resemblances that lies at the basis of all forms of creativity, be it artistic or scholarly. Historical instances of “explosion” in human consciousness are also typically reflected in a mood of panic among the general public, a feeling of being surrounded by enemies, or a sense of betrayal.2 An explosion of enthusiasm becomes a panicked explosion. Such situations are characterized by an absence of equilibrium between the energy that provoked the explosion and the explosion itself. We have all observed how in a heated situation of growing collective threat a single voice yelling out “They’ve betrayed us! We’re surrounded!” produces a state of panic and an explosion of energy that cannot be compared with the energy provoking the voice. The latter should be compared not with the effect produced, but with the potential energy accumulating before it, energy hidden inside the state of equilibrium. This process is essentially isomorphic to other perpetual impulses in Russian culture, such as the accumulation of ideas related to Russia’s lagging behind the West, being surrounded by enemies and under secret threat from both the West and the East. The constant sense of lagging behind and of being under (objective and partly imagined) threat from surrounding enemies gave birth to the idea of a “besieged city” so characteristic of Russian history. Consider Mayakovsky’s verse: “Moscow / is an island / and we are on an island” (Maiakovskii 1957, 282).

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In historical reality such a feeling corresponded to a specific position in the structural field of culture. This was a position at the border, accompanied by the conception of oneself as a new culture, young and surrounded by enemies. This position at the border is characterized by an accelerated pace of development, on the one hand, and by the possibility of looking at oneself from an external point of view, on the other. This results in a heightened sense of one’s own exceptionalism and a constant sense of being in the presence of a hostile observer and of being mediocre—producing a desire to merge with one of those cultures on the border with which “my” cultural process is taking place. At the same time, it results in a sense of suspicion, anticipation of a threat from those neighbors, and a keen sense of the impossibility that this desired merging could ever take place, as well as a sense of internal isolation, described so precisely by Alexander Blok in the poem “Requital”3:      And disgust with life;      And mad love for it;       Both passion and hatred for the native land…      And the black earthy blood       Makes us promises, making our brains swell,      Destroying all the borders,      Some unbelievable changes,       Unforeseen revolts […] (qtd. in Smith 2006, 181)

The psychology of the border forces one to view catastrophic situations as perpetual, a constant sign of this upside down world, and to view gradual movement and stasis as that calm about which, in the words of the poet, “we can only dream.” In the history of Russian culture, we continually confront two models of self-description—the image of an immovable block, battered by the storms of a restless outside world, and the symbolic figure of the stallion, racing into the unknown without throwing off its rider.4 The border mentality of St. Petersburg, its function as Russia in the West or as the West in Russia, is defined by the symbolism of the struggle between the horse and its rider, which became a leitmotiv in St. Petersburg’s monuments and poetry5:      Oh, mighty ruler over fate!       Was it not, above the abyss,       High above, with a bridle of iron,       You raised Russia onto its hind legs? (Pushkin 1959–62, III, 297)

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These final words, “onto its hind legs” [na dyby], in their turn, became a mythogenic source (see, for example, Aleksey Tolstoy’s play On the Rack [Na dybe]). The ambiguity of the word dyba, which can also refer to an instrument of torture, lent Pushkin’s poem a meaning probably unintended by the author. Russia’s border mentality defined a quality that was characteristic of Petersburg culture: its feelings of love-hate toward the West, which during the whole course of the Petersburg period shone through in Russia’s relationship to Europe. In addition to their specific geographical meaning, the concepts of “Russia” and the “West” can assume a symbolic meaning. And so, for example, Petersburg and Moscow were often contrasted according to their place on the East-West cultural axis. At the same time, within Petersburg itself, the granite embankments of the Neva and the western Kolomna district isomorphically replicated this opposition. Summering at one’s dacha in Kolomna assumed an aura of the West while summering on one’s estate assumed an aura of Moscow and the East. Being in St. Petersburg, whether at court or at one’s dacha in Tsarskoe Selo, whether at a horse race at court or a society function, bore the signs of service. This was reflected in one’s dress, forms of entertainment, and topics of conversation. Once the nobleman left the “field of service” and settled in Moscow or on his estate, he found himself in the realm of private life, which was reflected in his dress, his topics of conversation, and even his language. Life assumed a private, domestic character. It became more Russian and more closely associated with weather and the natural world. This covert opposition of official life and private life was curiously reflected in the habit of going to Moscow “in search of a wife” and to Petersburg “in search of rank and a career.” This resulted in the partitioning of the average nobleman’s biography, with childhood spent on the family estate (the border between the estate and Moscow is often determined by the calendar, with winter spent in Moscow and summer on the estate), years of service in Petersburg, and with old age marking a return to one’s place of birth. The border position of Russian culture was reflected, in part, in its conceptualization of dynamism. Dynamic processes organically merged with the concept of catastrophe, from which there derived a feature characteristic of Russian culture but foreign to the West: the conflation of ­movement with catastrophe, the opposite of which was only stagnation, immobility, and putrefaction. This resulted in a fundamental contradiction in the Russian experience of catastrophe, which is perceived as death, general

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havoc, and the quintessence of destruction, while at the same time being identified with birth, rebirth, and transformation. The more profound and global the catastrophe, the more vivid the overall regeneration. From this comes the common motif in Russian literature of the merging of total ecstasy with total destruction. The sight of a crashed airplane raises a question for the poet Alexander Blok, which he poses to a deceased aviator:       Or did you come to know      The fatal ecstasy of selflessness,      And wildly craving doom,       Stop the plane’s propellers? (Blok 1960–1963, III, 33)

“The ecstasy of oblivion” defines the psychology behind the behavior of Fedia Protasov in Tolstoy’s play The Living Corpse, and of Dmitry Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. The passionate desire to go to the very end of everything, to entirely lose oneself in destruction, recreates the psychology of the final explosion, which is both a self-­purification and a resurrection. At the same time, explosion is seen as the dissolution of all the agonizing obstacles represented by “normal” life in the lava of infinite possibility and unpredictability.6 It is simple and natural to inscribe the following antinomies within the opposition of gradual organic movement to moments of explosion: vulgarity versus poetry, existence versus non-existence, and the apology for versus the poetry of “utter profligacy,” which, while destroying the constraints imposed by civilization, introduces with particular force the necessity of other, more conditional structural foundations. From this—which is so vividly expressed by Dostoevsky—the idea of explosion calls forth the necessity of an absolute, be it God or the ethical imperative, which lies outside the boundaries of culture. The association of the idea of total destruction with that of total salvation defines the theme of general catastrophe as one of the most important aspects of Russian culture. This is clearly expressed in the hymn sung by the Chairman in Pushkin’s drama A Feast during the Plague. His hymn is an apology for the right of man to refuse to acknowledge the laws of life that restrict his freedom and will. The high level of merriment infusing the song is the same as the “No!” uttered by Don Juan in the face of the victorious Commodore who would restrict his superhuman power. The Chairman defends man’s right not to submit. The significance of Pushkin’s resolution to this question lies, however, in the fact that no resolution is given. The voice

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of the Chairman does not exist outside its deep conversation with the voice of the Priest and with the truth derived from their conceptual conflict. It is characteristic for most interpreters of Pushkin’s text to ignore this truth, while more general works provoked by Pushkin’s text are to a large degree dedicated to the pointless debate over which of the participants in the “dialogue” is right or which of them is expressing the author’s point of view. Pushkin’s position is based on the incompatibility of dialogue with monologue and, as a result, the futility of searching for the one who speaks the truth. The conclusion of the dialogue—“Priest: May the Lord save you! Farewell, my son. (He exits. The feast continues. The Chairman remains, lost in contemplation)” (Pushkin 1959–1962, IV, 381)—is like the peculiar exchange of swords between Hamlet and Laertes. The silence of the participants in the debate signifies no less a recognition that one’s opponent may be right as it does a reluctance to accept that truth. With a certain degree of simplification, one could say that the creative activity of an individual is located along an axis uniting predictable and unpredictable processes. Predictable processes, or the law-governed development of existing structures, comprise the inherited realm of technology. Here, technological ideas arise and, with their realization, new paths open up. These paths are, in principle, predictable, even when the conditions for their emergence have yet to mature. Fantasy in this realm is destined to play the role of plot generator for a Jules Verne; its domain is that which is yet to be invented or discovered but that someday will be. Such fantasy is three steps ahead of technological reality, but travels the same road. The fundamentally new, however, leaps across the unpredictable. It requires the merging of chance and genius. One historian of science rightly noted that had the apple fallen not on Newton’s head, it might have given another person a bloody nose, but it would not have led to the same brilliant idea. Connecting a sufficiently absurd idea with a random event that supports it produces the possibility of the fundamentally new. Pushkin, in an unfinished fragment, brilliant in its brevity and completeness, offers a formula for the movement of scientific thought:      O how many marvelous discoveries       Are being prepared by enlightened minds,       And by Experience, [the son] of difficult mistakes,       And by Genius, the friend [of paradox]       [And by Chance, the god of invention] (Pushkin 1959–1962, II, 594)

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The draft of these unfinished verses by Pushkin marks the path of development of new ideas (“marvelous discoveries” in Pushkin’s terminology) with such precision that it justifies seeing the author of these verses not just as a brilliant poet but as a brilliant thinker, reflecting on the very nature of thought. A new idea is based first and foremost on education— an advance in science is impossible without predecessors. Not only does an “explosion” in scientific thought fail to negate the gradual development that preceded it; it is impossible without it. At the basis of this explosion lies the accumulation of knowledge, referred to in modern parlance as the method of “trial and error,” which Pushkin very precisely named “the father of experience.” However, we must pay attention to the fact that, while Pushkin—being a poet not a scientist—defined experience in exact accordance with the contemporary formula of “trial and error,” he also stressed that there is no natural movement from one step to the next; in order to move through a failure, at the edge of which empiricism comes to a halt, one must have the courage not to stop before a paradox, that is, before something that does not flow organically from everything preceding it and so, from that perspective, appears absurd. The path to “marvelous discoveries” requires that one leap across paradox. Therefore, we cannot break into the world of the unknown by staying within the rigid framework of logical conclusions derived from what is already known, which is why the path of science rarely aligns with the path marked out in science fiction. The latter, as a rule, moves along logical, predictable tracks or it falls into an abyss of absurd propositions, in which case such fiction loses the right to be described as “science.” From this, it follows that the path of cultural progress assumes the organic interweaving of science and art. In various moments of historical progress, science and art trade the dominant role, but for cultural development as a whole, constant dialogue is a necessity. We can observe moments when in the totality of culture one of these domains occupies a secondary position or is considered superfluous. In the actual historical process, however, they are in a state of perpetual conflict and are mutually necessary. The forms of their relationship may change, and the dominant position may switch from one to the other, but their mutual necessity is supported by the entire history of culture and inevitably follows from its theorization. Whereas the mechanism for the technical multiplication of a known idea is equality, the mechanism for its creative incarnation is similarity.

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In this sense, the difference between technology and art can be correlated with the opposition of equality to similarity. The mechanism of similarity makes it possible to establish a relationship between states of individual psychology (in particular, the question of creative processes) and of explosive phenomena on historic and cosmic scales. Let us recall the famous lines from Turgenev’s Torrents of Spring: “First love is like a revolution. The monotonous regular course of everyday life is broken and destroyed in a single moment, youth is at the barricades, its bright banner fluttering high above them, ready to greet whatever is in store—death or a new life—with enthusiastic welcome” (Turgenev 1996, 91–92). The power of this artistic image lies in the fact that it is constructed on the basis of similarity to nonequilibrium processes. The more evident it is that one is speaking of different things, the more artistic energy is expended on discovering connections that would make the different seem the same and the incomparable alike, that is, on establishing a relationship of similarity. Similarity worn down from repeated use turns into comparison, and comparison worn down by repeated use turns into the artistically neutral mechanism of linguistic semantics. The expression “worn down” is, however, misleading. It suggests that the phenomenon changes only from the outside, when, in fact, a leap occurs into a completely different type of semantics. It is the complexity of the relationship between the symbol and the semantics connected with it—a relationship of conceptual similarity—that makes semantic structures of this type so effective in demagoguery and sloganeering. They form an active mechanism for addressing a crowd that is tense, that has been brought to the height of emotion and condensed into a mass audience. This explains the effectiveness of metaphors in revolutionary oratory (compare the speeches of Danton and Trotsky). The conceptual erosion achieved through the thickening of metaphors in these speeches, the concentration of the text and of the tension in the speaker’s voice, make these distinct expressions of an audience’s consciousness. At the same time, it is only against such a backdrop that the weak, emphatically non-oratorical voice of Robespierre or the demonstrable “simplicity” of Lenin’s speech can take on a secondary explosive quality, as noted by Pasternak:                        

He might be speaking about fuel oil, But the twisting of his torso Breathed with the flight of pure essence, Having broken through the stupid shell. (Pasternak 1985, 207)

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Insofar as any core shift in the foundations of historical movement requires a state of explosion, that is, a certain fluidity in the basic structures of culture that until then had been frozen, which presents the possibility of previously impossible rearrangements and interlacings, then that moment about which we are speaking can be compared with states of melting or dissolution, in which frozen and passive participants in a process acquire the freedom to intermingle and interact. Boundaries and shapes lose their distinctiveness, and what was impenetrable becomes porous. This process was described in poetic terms by Schiller in his “Song of the Bell”: “Walled in fast within the earth / Stands the form burnt out of clay. / This must be the bell’s great birth! / Fellows, lend a hand to-­ day” (Schiller 1916, 68). A common example of such an event is the emergence of a new language, which, due to its novelty, is free of any defined and ossified associations. And so, for example, the emergence of cinematography lent the new art form a freedom to determine its associations with other artistic forms. It is as if cinematography were trying out possible associations with other modes of art, with all comparisons exposing differences rather than similarities, and an orientation toward already-­ existing artistic forms revealing the cinematographer’s freedom rather than limiting it. The greater the similarity, the more clearly delineated the field’s uniqueness. The fundamental impossibility of automatic translation from the language of other modes of art stimulated the development of cinematography’s own language. Only when cinematography had created and firmly established its own language could it assimilate other languages without losing its specificity. In the same way, a nation with a rich and well-developed culture does not lose its specificity when associating with other cultures but only enriches its distinct identity. Originality is achieved not from ignorance of the foreign but from its richness. Then the foreign essentially ceases to be foreign. The poet Batiushkov named his notebook “The Foreign—My Treasure.” This was the result of his self-awareness and of the originality of his mature work. Dynamic cultural processes are defined not only by the constant movement of the periphery to the center and back again. Within the general course of gradual movement, which consists of a certain flow, one can isolate movements that are more directed and that occur at greater speed when compared with the surrounding movements. The cyclical processes of nature have a certain rhythm, which allows us to classify some processes as delayed and others as accelerated. These include the constants of cyclical astronomical events, of the course of a human life, and of other

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repeating cosmic and biological processes, against the backdrop of which the life and activity of the individual unfolds. Taking these rhythms into account, we can classify some events in the life and history of humankind as delayed or accelerated, but the inclusion of man into culture and into cultural memory introduces profound changes in these concepts. A more complex picture of cycles emerges, one that already belongs to the realm of culture. At the basis of these cycles may be the lifespan of an individual or even a period of his or her life, as well as other historical intervals. But despite the differences in these initial premises, they are marked by a common trait: culture introduces the concepts of beginning and end into the duration or constant repetition of processes, that is, culture introduces the concept of human life into biological, physiological, and other processes that occur independently of man. Human consciousness can fundamentally shift the signs by which humans distinguish between existence and non-existence; this can be the biological space between life and death, the gap between fame and complete oblivion in the memory of future generations, or any natural moment of exceptionally intense existence (one’s star turn). This related to forms of extended memory that accompany individuals unchanged over the entire course of their history. The power of artistic influence is built on our capacity to experience something that is different as the same, that is, to substitute relationships of difference, on the one hand, and relationships of identity, on the other, with isomorphic relationships. This transforms art, which without the magical power of isomorphism would indeed resemble “delicious lemonade in summer,” into the ultimate force of knowledge generation, the summit of man’s mastery over the mysteries of the surrounding world. A vivid example of explosion as a moment marked by the merging of the unmergeable is presented in Rossellini’s brilliant film General Della Rovere (1959). The film takes place at the end of the Second World War in Italy, which had been occupied by the German army. The majority of the country had already been liberated, but some northern parts of Lombardy were still occupied by Germans. In order to help the Allies drive the occupiers from those territories, an operation was devised involving a popular uprising and an attack by partisans on the German rearguard. The uprising was supposed to be led by an experienced military man from an ancient noble family who enjoyed the love and respect of large portions of the Italian people—General Della Rovere. He was supposed to be sent by plane from Allied headquarters into the rear of the German army. The Germans tracked him down, hoping to take him alive,

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but in the end he was killed. And so, the character whose name serves as the title of the film dies at the very beginning, having never appeared on screen. The subsequent action develops along two different lines: in the prisoner-of-war camp where members of the Resistance do not know of the death of the general and are anxiously awaiting his arrival, and in the rear of the German army. In striking contrast to the stereotypes put forward by other war films of the time, the leader of the German regiment, SS Colonel Müller (played by Hannes Messemer), is represented as a professional military man, not as a bloodthirsty murderer. He performs his “professional” duties with the goal of maximizing efficiency, although the urge to commit cruelty for the sake of cruelty flashes several times across his intelligent and weary face. Cruelty is among the professional characteristics of a military man, but Müller accepts these conditions and carries out his duties just as any professional accepts the rules of his profession. Another plot line is introduced when a con man and petty thief, Bardone (played by Vittorio de Sica), enters the headquarters of the German colonel. Speculating on the misfortune of those whose relatives and friends were arrested by the Germans and were being held in their prison camps, Bardone presents himself to the Italian inmates as someone who enjoys the trust of the occupiers and is able to bring money and food into the camp. Whatever he receives, he, of course, keeps. Bardone’s aristocratic bearing and impeccable manners give the German colonel the idea of presenting the arrested con man as General Della Rovere, and of imprisoning him under that name so that he can establish contacts with arrested members of the local Resistance and in that way uncover their plans. The subsequent plot line is built on the failure of this carefully thought-out plan, for there was one thing the colonel had failed to take into consideration: the artistry of a creative personality and the longing for rebirth and for great deeds hidden deep in the human soul, even one in a state of extreme degradation. The petty thief, who is nonetheless a talented and naturally creative person, is placed in an unexpected situation: he has to play the role of a hero. And he is captivated by the role. He becomes the mask and is no longer able to remove it. The heroic role becomes his essence, and his entire previous life as a petty thief becomes a mask, which he tears off with the “ecstasy of self-forgetting.” At that moment, when the SS officer is waiting for information extracted by Bardone from people awaiting death, Bardone is reborn as General Della Rovere and walks voluntarily into gunfire, dying with the words: “At this victorious moment, we turn our gaze to His Majesty the King, to Italy and to our loved ones.”

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(These final words are especially significant, as it was previously emphasized that Bardone had no loved ones.) His speech is cut short by the sound of gunfire. Rossellini makes us witnesses to the miracle of transformation, of the resurrection of a human soul that has torn off the scab of its former decadence. One of the foundations of the centuries-old edifice of culture is the differentiation between “one’s own” and “the other.” However, upon reaching the structural level of art, culture achieves a more elevated point of view, from which fundamental oppositions appear before us as some kind of higher entity. If we consider the fact that the relationship between “one’s own” and “the other” is the basis of the most tragic confrontations in human history, then the universal role played by art’s ability to resolve the irresolvable becomes obvious, and Dostoevsky’s words—“Beauty will save the world”7—cease to be a paradox. (1992)

Notes 1. See, for example, Delumeau (1967). 2. Consider the panicked sense of treason characteristic of Romantic consciousness: “I knew the treacherous love of friends” (Lermontov), or “To you, traitorous friends, I send my curse” (a parody by Kornei Chukovskii related to the reception of the Nekrasov tradition in “revolutionary poetry.”). 3. On the basis of such duality, there arose the experience of love-hate, so characteristic of Dostoevsky and of Russian culture as a whole. Russia, however, did not hold a monopoly on this theme. It was common among European decadent writers. See, for example, Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Goal.” 4. The latter, however, can be replaced by the equivalent image of the storm that destroys barriers. 5. This is the result of the fact that in the field of Petersburg culture these two forms of arts turned out to be closely linked, almost identical. 6. These are the three possible paths embodied by the three Karamazov brothers—the ecstasy of destruction in the complete freedom of explosion; the salvation of the European path, founded on logic and culture; and the turn to Christ, which resolves all unresolvable contradictions. 7. This line appears in Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot (1868), where it is attributed to the novel’s protagonist Prince Myshkin. In typical Dostoevskian fashion, however, it is not delivered as a statement, but in a question posed to Myshkin by the young consumptive Ippolit Terentiev: “Is it true, Prince, that you once said, ‘Beauty will save the world’?” (Translator’s note).

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References Akhmatova, Anna. 1990. “Odin idet priamym putem” / “One walks a straight line.” In The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, Judith Herschemeyer (trans.), Vol. 2, 258–259. Somerville, MA: Zephyr Press. Blok, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich. 1960–63. Sobranie sochinenii v 8 tomakh. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura. Briusov, Valerii. 2014. “Tovarishchem intelligentam.” In Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh, III, 87–89. Moscow: Media Direct. Delumeau, Jean. 1967. La civilisation de la Renaissance. Paris: Arthaud. Derzhavin, Gavrila. 1988. “Felitsa.” In Russkaia literature XI-XVIII vv., G.  I. Belen’skii et al. (eds.), 349–355. Moscow: Khudozhestvannaia Literatura. Maiakovskii, Vladimir. 1957. “Khorosho! Oktriabr’skaia poema.” In Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 13-i tomakh. Vol, 13, F.  Pitskel’ (ed.), 234–328. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura. Pasternak, Boris. 1985. “Vysokaia bolezn’.” In Izbrannoe v dvukh tomakh. Tom 1. Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, E. V. Pasternak and E. B. Pasternaka (eds.), 200–207. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura. Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich. 1959–1962. Sobranie sochinenii v 10 tomakh, D. D. Blagoi et al. (eds.). Мoscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura. Schiller, Friedrich A. 1916. “Song of the Bell,” Margarete Münsterberg (trans.). In A Harvest of German Verse, Margarete Münsterberg (ed.), 68–82. Great Neck, NY: Granger Book Co. Smith, Alexandra. 2006. Montaging Pushkin: Pushkin and Visions of Modernity in Russian Twentieth-Century Poetry. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Turgenev, Ivan. 1996. Torrents of Spring, Ivy and Tatiana Litvinov (trans.). New York: Grove Press.

PART II

Memory

CHAPTER 9

Memory in a Culturological Perspective

1. From the point of view of semiotics, culture represents collective intelligence and collective memory, that is, a supra-individual mechanism for preserving and transmitting messages (texts) and for creating new ones. In this sense, the field of culture can be defined as a space of shared memory, within which certain common texts are preserved and actualized. Moreover, their actualization occurs within the bounds of a certain conceptual invariant, which allows us to say that a text in the context of a new age preserves its identity to itself in the face of various interpretations. In this way, shared memory within the space of a given culture is secured, first, by the presence of certain textual constants and, second, by a single code, the invariability of the texts, or the continuous and law-governed nature of their transformation. 2. Cultural memory is not only unified, but it is also internally diverse. This means that its unity exists only at a certain level and assumes the presence of a particular “dialectics of memory,” which corresponds to the internal organization of the collectives that constitute the world of a given Originally published as “Pamiat’ v kul’turologitcheskom osveshchenii,” Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 16, 1985: 5–9. The translation here is from Iurii Lotman, Semiosfera, 673–676. Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo—SPB, 2000. J. Lotman (*) University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia © The Author(s) 2019 Juri Lotman - Culture, Memory and History, ed. by M. Tamm https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14710-5_9

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culture. The propensity toward the individualization of memory constitutes the second pole of its dynamic structure. The presence of cultural substructures with a different makeup and memory capacity leads to varied levels of ellipsis in texts circulating in cultural subcollectives, as well as the emergence of “local semantics.” When moving outside the boundaries of a given subculture, elliptical texts are filled in so as to be understood. This is the role played by various commentaries. When, toward the end of his life, the poet Derzhavin felt compelled to write extensive commentaries on his own odes, this was because, on the one hand, he sensed the rushing “river of time” and had a clear understanding that the cultural collective that had constituted his audience in the age of Catherine II no longer existed and that his texts would become incomprehensible for posterity, which Derzhavin considered to be his true audience. On the other hand, Derzhavin was acutely aware of the decline of the ode as a genre and, more generally, of eighteenth-century poetics (which he had actively promoted). Had the literary tradition remained unchanged, then “genre memory,” to use Bakhtin’s term, would have preserved the comprehensibility of these texts, despite the replacement of one collective readership by another. The appearance of commentaries and glossaries, as well as the filling in of elliptical gaps in texts, bears witness to the movement of a text into the field of a collective with a different memory capacity. 3. If we allow for a certain degree of simplification and define memory as the preservation of texts, then we can distinguish between “informative memory” and “creative memory.” Associated with the former are mechanisms for preserving the results of certain cognitive activity. And so, for example, when storing technical information, the final cut (as a rule, that which is chronologically last) is the one that plays the active role. Someone interested in the history of technology is not someone who is inclined to make practical use of its results, although such an interest may arise in someone intent on inventing something new. From the point of view of storing information, however, only the result, the final text, is active. Memory of this kind occupies a plane situated in a single temporal dimension and is subject to the law of chronology. It develops in the same direction as the flow of time, and in accordance with that flow. The memory of art is a particular example of creative memory. Here, an entire cluster of texts turns out to be potentially active. The actualization of this or that text is subject to the complex laws of general cultural movements and cannot be reduced to the formula “the newest is best.” The sinusoidal represents the simplest form of shift between cultural

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­forgetting” and “remembering.” (Consider, for example, Pushkin’s “ decline in relevance for Russian readers of the 1840s–1860s, his increase in relevance from the 1880s–1900s, his decline from the 1910s–1920s, and his increase in the 1930s; in subsequent years, he was thrown from the “steamship of modernity” and then “placed upon a pedestal.”) The general actualization of all older forms of art, including not just the art of the Middle Ages but also that of the Neolithic period, was a characteristic feature of European cultural memory in the second half of the twentieth century. At the same time, the deactivization (as if forgetting) took the place of another cultural paradigm that included ancient and Renaissance art. And so, this side of cultural memory has a panchronic and continuous spatial quality. Relevant texts are sparked by memory, while irrelevant ones disappear, entering a state of potential. Such a disposition of texts is continuous in nature, not syntagmatic, and in its entirety constitutes a text that should be associated not with a library or with computer memory in the forms that are technically possible today, but with films such as The Mirror by Andrei Tarkovsky or Égy barany (Angel of God) by Miklós Janscó. Cultural memory as a creative mechanism is not only panchronic; it resists time, preserving the past as an inhabitant of the present. From the point of view of memory, understood as a mechanism that functions along its entire depth, the past is never gone. And so historicism in the study of literature, in the form in which it was first devised in the Hegelian theory of culture and then in the positivist theory of progress, is for all practical purposes anti-historical as it ignores the active role of memory in the creation of new texts. 4. In light of this, it is necessary to turn our attention to the fact that new texts are created not only within the current cut of culture but also in its past. This seemingly paradoxical statement simply registers an obvious and well-known truth. Along the entire course of cultural history, “unknown” artifacts of the past are constantly being found, discovered, or unearthed either from the ground or from under the dust of a library. Where do these artifacts come from? Why in the field of literary history do we constantly come across titles such as “An Unknown Work of Medieval Poetry” or “Yet Another Forgotten Writer of the 18th Century”? Every culture defines its own paradigm for what should be remembered, that is, preserved, and what should be relegated to oblivion. The latter is erased from the cultural memory and apparently “ceases to exist.” But time changes along with systems of cultural codes and paradigms of remembering/forgetting. That which is declared to be truly essential can

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turn out to be “somehow non-essential” and subject to forgetting, while the non-essential can become essential and meaningful. Ancient statues were found before the Renaissance, but they were discarded and destroyed, that is, they were not preserved. Russian medieval iconography was, of course, known in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but it entered the post-Petrine Russian cultural consciousness as high art and something of great cultural value only in the twentieth century. But it is not only the corpus of texts that changes; the texts themselves change. Under the influence of new codes used to decode texts that were stored within cultural memory long ago, a shift occurs in the elements considered significant and insignificant within the structure of the text. In fact, texts that have attained the level of art due to the complexity of their organizational structure cannot in general be passive keepers of unchanging information, as they are not storehouses but generators. Ideas are not “stored” in cultural memory; they grow there. Texts that form the “shared memory” of a cultural collective serve not only to decode texts circulating in the current cut of culture but also to generate new texts. 5. The productivity of the meaning-generation that occurs when texts stored in cultural memory come into contact with new codes depends on the extent of semiotic shift that occurs. Insofar as cultural codes evolve and are dynamically introduced into the historical process, texts that were left behind in the dynamics of cultural development play an important role. When ancient sculpture or Provençal poetry inundated the cultural memory of Italy in the late Middle Ages, they produced an explosive revolution in the “cultural grammar” of the system. This new grammar, on the one hand, influenced the creation of correspondingly new texts and, on the other hand, determined the perception of old texts, in a way that no longer accorded with ancient or Provençal perceptions. An even more complicated case occurs when texts that, due to their structure, stand far outside the immanent organization of cultural memory, texts for which the culture’s internal tradition has no adequate codes for deciphering, enter cultural memory. Examples of such cases are the mass translation of Christian texts in the culture of eleventh- and twelfth-­ century Rus’, and of Western European texts in post-Petrine Russian culture. In this situation, a rift opens up between cultural memory and its synchronic mechanisms of text generation. This situation usually exhibits some general typological traits. At first a pause in text generation occurs (the culture shifts to reception, and its memory capacity increases far faster than its ability to decipher texts), then an explosion occurs, and the

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­ eneration of new texts enters an extremely rapid and productive phase. In g this situation, cultural development appears as a series of exceptionally vivid, almost spasmodic outbursts. During a period of such outbursts, the culture from the periphery often shifts to the center, where it actively moves texts into the evacuated craters of the former centers of text generation. In this sense, cultures whose memory is basically filled with texts they have themselves created are usually characterized by slow and gradual development, whereas cultures whose memory is periodically subjected to a massive influx of texts created within a different tradition tend toward “accelerated development,” to use Georgy Gachev’s terminology. 6. The texts that fill cultural memory are varied in terms of genre. What was said above regarding the influence of foreign cultural texts can be, mutando mutandis, applied to the intrusion of visual texts, or paintings, into the poetic process of text generation, of theater into everyday behavior, or of poetry into music. That is, it can be applied to any conflict between the generic nature of the texts occupying a dominant position in cultural memory and the codes defining the current state of the culture. This, even in such a condensed form, allows us to say that memory is not a passive storehouse for culture but a constitutive part of its text-­ generating mechanism. (1985)

CHAPTER 10

Cultural Memory

The study of culture began as the study of its history. The first scholars of culture were attracted, specifically, to differences between epochs. The distinctive identity of Hellenism or the Middle Ages, of the Renaissance or Romanticism, was based on contrasting previous epochs with that culture’s subsequent experience. Taken to its logical extreme, this principle led to a theory of closed cultures. Communication between cultures was perceived (both synchronically and diachronically) in terms of the impossibility of contact with an “alien spirit.” From an evolutionary point of view, however, the value of texts from previous epochs and their active participation in periods in which the historical conditions that produced them had been relegated to the distant past presents obvious theoretical challenges. Along the opposite axis were anti-historical conceptions of culture, which viewed culture at its core as an unchanging phenomenon and treated everything produced by history as superficial layers on top of an eternal, timeless essence. In order to find a way out of these c­ ontradictions, Originally published as “Pamiat’ kul’tury.” In Iazyk, nauka, filosofia: logiko-­ metodologicheskii i semioticheskii analiz, 193–204. Vilnius: Akademia Nauk Litovskoi SSR, 1986. The translation here is from Iurii Lotman, Semiosfera, 614–621. Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo—SPB, 2000. J. Lotman (*) University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia © The Author(s) 2019 Juri Lotman - Culture, Memory and History, ed. by M. Tamm https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14710-5_10

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one must not choose between these models but rather establish a completely different approach to the problem. The phenomenon of culture is in a certain respect paradoxical. On the one hand, the historical variability of culture, its dynamic nature is obvious to any unbiased observer. On the other hand, a difference in the speed of historical change across different domains of culture is also obvious. Language, art, and fashion (as well as many other things) enter into a complex, heterogeneous, and poly-functional whole that we call “culture.” However, changes in language occur over centuries while modern fashion changes its code every year. All attempts by scholars to squeeze various forms of culture into unified chronological frames for the sake of conceptual harmony leads to simplifications rather than facilitating our understanding of the problem. The wheels of culture turn at different speeds, and a phenomenon that we call Romanticism in music does not (and perhaps cannot) correspond chronologically with literary Romanticism. Moreover, one cannot fail to recognize a fundamental difference in the relationship of individual cultural components to conceptualizations of time, in particular, historical time. In the history of technology and in the history of material culture in general, only the latest temporal cut “works.” Every new invention relegates previous inventions to a museum, as they will never again be used for their initial purpose. In this sense, the history of technology is history in the fullest sense of the word. The semiotic aspects of culture (e.g., art history) develop according to laws reminiscent of the laws of memory, according to which the past is not destroyed or relegated to oblivion but rather undergoes selection and a complex coding process by which it is placed in storage so that under certain conditions it may resurface. People of a certain epoch, to the extent possible, use the technology of their time, that is, the latest technology. (If that is for some reason impossible, they end up in the position of “laggards.”) It is, however, naïve to think that readers of poems or novels or visitors to museums must reject the masterpieces of the past in order to resist being labeled laggards. A historical (in the trivial but very widespread understanding of the term) study of literature of the 1830s, for example, would include only works written in the period under study—despite the fact that readers of that time were still reading the works of Romantic authors of the 1810s and 1820s, and Shakespeare and Cervantes were living figures for both readers and writers of that time, while Lermontov’s work of the 1830s would become the property of Russian readers only at the end of the nineteenth

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century; the reality of literary life is lost in such a diachronic model. The codes of memory, according to which the culture of the 1830s selected relevant texts from the near and distant past, belonged to the reality of that time no less than the codes by which new texts were produced. The continuous recycling of different texts from the past, the continuous— conscious and unconscious—presence in any synchronic cut of culture of deep, at times truly archaic, states of that culture, and the active dialogue between the culture of the present and various structures and texts belonging to the past force us to question whether superficial evolutionism, which likens the cultural past to an unearthed dinosaur, and strict linearity in cultural development are appropriate instruments for research. Sometimes the “past” of a culture has greater significance for its future than its “present” does. And so, Chernyshevsky, who considered the works of Gogol and Belinsky more “contemporary” for Russian literature of 1855 than those of “contemporary” authors, wrote: “One must ask oneself whether there are indeed corpses in these graves? Aren’t the people buried in them still alive? At the very least, isn’t there much more life in these deceased writers than in many people who are referred to as living?” (Chernyshevskii 1984, 36). Culture, as one form of collective memory, is itself subject to the laws of time but simultaneously sets up mechanisms that resist time and its movement. (When discussing culture here and below, we are not referring to the entirety of this complex concept but only to its semiotic aspect.) It is not simply the last temporal cut that is active here but rather an entire cross section of considerable depth, as certain centers of activity periodically flare up from time past; texts that are separated by centuries are “remembered” and so become contemporary. For example, Gogol, without hesitation, placed Walter Scott and Homer side-by-side as two of the most important writers for his age. At the same time, internal communication between various levels of culture is only possible because culture, as the memory of the whole, is penetrated by individual structures of internal memory. If the external memory of a culture consists of the memory of the previous experience of humankind, then its internal memory is the memory of its previous states of being. It is the latter that will be the focus of the remaining part of this article. * * *

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The functioning of any communicative system assumes the existence of a shared memory of the collective. Without this, it is impossible to have a common language. Different languages, however, presuppose different kinds of memory. We are not referring here simply to a difference in synchronic volume but in diachronic depth. One can formulate the following proposition: the more complex a language is, that is, the more capable it is of transferring and producing more complex information, the deeper its memory must be. Deep memory guarantees the presence of linguistic elements that, first, are subject to change (complete stasis makes memory unnecessary) and, second, possess the capacity to preserve themselves within the system both in their invariability and in their variability. As a result, one and the same element, upon penetrating different states of the system, somehow connects them. In order to do this, the element must possess relative autonomy or independence from its structural context. In every synchronic context, it will function like an “alien,” that is, like a mechanism for reconstructing a previous context. However, if we were to examine it within a series of structural contexts, we would observe not only its stability but also its constant alteration when read by different dynamic codes. The simplest example would be so-called timeless cultural images. A cultural complex, which we will designate with the words Doctor Faust, has traveled across a series of different cultural epochs while retaining a certain invariant quality that constantly reconstructs in our consciousness the cultural contexts into which this complex has been historically included. For every epoch, Faust is seen as a citation from a previous one. At the same time, if we were to pose the problem of Faust as that of an image running through different epochs, then his invariant quality would be activated, which would only highlight the non-alignment of the Faust of German folk tales with those of Marlowe, Goethe, and Thomas Mann. From this point of view, Faust will acquire a degree of cultural activity as an organic part of a synchronic cultural context. Essentially, all meaningful elements—from lexical items in natural languages to the most complex artistic texts—function in this way. We will refer to the function that allows a meaningful element to play a mnemonic role as symbolic, and hereinafter we will refer to as symbols all signs having the ability to concentrate within itself, preserve, and reconstruct the memory of its previous contexts. This role can be played by virtually any text, including, for example, the name of a still living person (e.g., Goethe for the European culture of the 1810s and 1820s), if it bears in the present

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some memory of the past and its name has acquired symbolic significance. From this derives the cultural role of age. In epochs oriented toward a break with the past, a period of active growth is seen as “young,” as in the time of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and in revolutionary epochs in general. Osip Mandelstam, for example, referenced Baratynsky: “I’m still far from a patriarch.” (In Baratynsky’s original: “Not ancient like a patriarch am I.”) Characteristic in this regard is the difference between the symbolization of Tolstoy’s image that occurred during the author’s lifetime and the posthumous symbolization that occurred with Dostoevsky. Regarding the degree of concentration of cultural memory, it is useful to remember the distinction made by Victor Turner between simple and complex symbols. For Turner, simple symbols refer to the most archaic spatial-geometric, oral, gestural, and other forms, while complex symbols refer to complicated religious and cultural symbols. He notes that the former possess a complex and multi-layered content capable of changing their meaning in relation to the context, while the latter, as a rule, have invariant and single-layered semantics. In this way, simple symbols, according to Turner, possess far greater signifying capacity (and from our point of view, greater capacity for cultural memory) than complex ones: It is, in fact, not uncommon to find complex symbol vehicles, such as statues or shrines, with simple meanings, while simple vehicles, such as marks drawn in white or red clay [remember, Turner was working with African material— J. L.], may be highly multivocal in almost every ritual situation in which they are used. A simple vehicle, exhibiting some color, shape, texture or contrast commonly found in one’s experience […], can literally or metaphorically connect a great range of phenomena and ideas. By contrast, a complex vehicle is already committed, at the level of sensory perception, to a host of contrasts that narrow and specify its message. This is probably why the great religious symbolic vehicles such as the cross, the lotus, the crescent moon, the ark, and so on are relatively simple although their significate constitute whole theological systems and control liturgical and architectural structures of immense complexity. (Turner 1987, 494)

The meaning of a symbol is not constant, and so cultural memory should not be seen as a kind of storehouse containing messages that are essentially invariant and always identical to themselves. In this respect, the metaphorical expression “to store information” can be misleading. Memory is not a storehouse of information but rather a mechanism for its regeneration. On the one hand, the symbols stored in a culture carry

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within themselves information related to past contexts (i.e., languages), while on the other hand, in order for that information to be “awakened,” the symbol must be placed in a contemporary context, which will inevitably transform its meaning. Therefore, reconstructed information is always produced in a context of play between the languages of the past and the present. The stronger the connection a symbol has with a single language from the past (e.g., in the case of allegory), then the narrower the field of semantic play and the less productive that symbol will be as a profound generator of memory. The simplest symbols can be associated with basic conceptual markers, such as colors, sounds, and geometric shapes, whereas more complex ones, for instance, those belonging to the symbolics of religion, government (see, e.g., medals), and art are often formed through a combination of simpler ones. The close relationship between symbol and ritual transforms gestures and poses into elementary symbols, which are then consolidated in sculpture and graphic design. Across centuries, these symbols experience the kinds of transformation described above. An interesting example from the history of gestures can be found in Turner’s work. Discussing divination in Central Africa, the ethnographer describes a process in which various figures are placed into the diviner’s basket. The divination is carried out by shaking the basket and then evaluating the final positioning of the figures. As Turner explains: The second figurine we shall consider is called Chamuntang’a. It represents a man sitting huddled up with chin on hands and elbows on knees. Chamuntang’a means an irresolute, changeable person. […] Chamuntang’a also means ‘the man whom no one knows how to take.’ His actions are unnatural. Capriciously, informants say, he will at one time give presents to people, at another time he will act mean. Sometimes he will laugh immoderately with others, sometimes he will keep silent, for no apparent reason. No one can guess when he will be angry or when he will fail to show anger. Ndembu like a man whose behavior is predictable. (A high value is therefore attached to the custom-observing man.—V. T.) They praise both openness and consistency. They hate to be misled by a false or counterfeit demeanor. A man whom they feel is not genuine may very likely be a sorcerer. The theme that what is hidden is probably dangerous and malevolent is once again exemplified. (Turner 1975, 221, 223)

It is not difficult to see that all the basic gestural elements of the Chamutang’a figures in the Ndembu divination ritual are present in Rodin’s Thinker. The symbolism of the gesture of propping up one’s chin

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is so well established that Rodin’s statue needs no explanation. This is all the more notable given that the sculptor’s intended plan was to portray the “first” thinker. Neither the forehead nor the proportions of the figure contain any stereotypical signs of the intellectual—the entire meaning of the work is transmitted through the pose. It is interesting to recall here that the same gestural stereotypes were used by the actor David Garrick in creating his “Hamlet type” (his changing the figure’s position from sitting to standing made preserving the rest of the gestural complex especially important): “Hamlet comes on to the stage sunk in contemplation, his chin resting on his right hand, and his right elbow on his left, and gazes solemnly downwards. And then, removing his right hand from his chin, but, if I remember right, still supporting it with his left hand, he speaks” (Lichtenberg 1938, 16). If we consider that Garrick’s performance created a gestural image of the Hamletian type that continued on the stages of Europe for almost 100 years, then the meaning of such a citation becomes especially significant. What is there in common between the Ndembu’s Chauntang’a, Hamlet, and Rodin’s Thinker? The invariant meaning would be “a person in a state of decision-making.” But for the Ndembu, the decision-making involves a rejection of custom, of a role established for centuries. Such a rejection is viewed negatively, associated either with the semantics of violating the established order, that is, with sorcery (the Ndembu ascribe everything exceptional to malicious sorcery or to positive supernatural intervention) or with such negative human characteristics as hypocrisy and indecision. It should be noted that in European cultures the latter two qualities will be associated with the intellectual, as the antithesis of the industrious. Hamlet is also in the process of choosing a path, but the choice here is equated to an act of consciousness. And consciousness itself is perceived as an opportunity and obligation to choose an action. The semantics of “one choosing a path” changes, in particular, for the opposing member of the opposition. As the antithesis of custom, the thinker is opposed to one who does not think (variant: the bearer of individual consciousness vs. the bearers of collective consciousness). In this case, skepticism, rationalism, and criticism are accentuated. In this situation, the one choosing a path acts as a destroyer, a dangerous innovator. The opposite, however, is also possible: the one choosing a path can serve as the antithesis of one who has already chosen a path, that is, as a prevaricator opposed to someone who is decisive, or as someone reflective as

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opposed to someone who is effective. The opposition in this case is not one of the individual to tradition but of an active individual to a passive one. Here, the reflective individual is associated with indecision, prevarication, and even hypocrisy, as in Turgenev’s famous opposition of Hamlet and Don Quixote, in which the writer perceived the antithesis of two fundamental human types. This analysis reveals both the ability of a symbolic gesture to be significantly transformed, as well as the surprising invariability of its content. Essentially, the entire spectrum of potential meanings is hidden in the figure of the Ndembu diviner. When discussing the opposition of simple symbols to complex ones, the arbitrary nature of this opposition should be kept in mind. Being simple or complex is not a material quality of an expressive structure but a function that establishes a relationship between the text and its user and code. And so, for example, European (primarily, French) culture of the eighteenth century was saturated with symbolic images of Roman antiquity. Transmitted through the writings of Rollin and Montesquieu, and through the plays of the tragedians and the actors’ monologues, details from Roman history and culture became symbols, that is, semantic units of eighteenth-century culture. The metaphorical use of Roman names (during the time of the Revolution, these metaphors were transformed into proper names) made a symbolic formula into a program for everyday behavior for actual individuals. Babeuf took the name Gracchus, Radishchev associated his life’s work with Cato, and Napoleon, with Julius Caesar. What is happening in such cases is the transformation of historical names into cultural symbols belonging to the age into which they have been reintroduced. In each specific instance, we are dealing with a complex symbol ritually defining a given life path. Taken together, however, they represent “something Roman”—a broad and multivalent but entirely real conceptual sign for the eighteenth century. In this sense, the Roman Age as a whole, as well as every individual detail, forms a simple symbol in the eighteenth century, despite the complexity of its field of expression. Things become even more complicated when one symbol “shines through” another, the memory of which, in this case, may be unconscious; this, however, does not prevent it, at specific historical moments or in artistic texts, from being transformed into a conscious link between cultures. The description of tyrannicide in the works of Radishchev is inevitably accompanied by one remarkable detail. The killing of a tyrant is not an

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individual act but a collective one, in which all citizens take part, with each one committing this seemingly superfluous action: “Everyone hastens to wash off his shame in the blood of the crowned tormenter” (Radishchev 1958, 197). In his A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (1790), Radishchev expresses this idea even more concretely in relation to the murder by peasants of their master-tormentor and his sons: “They surrounded their four masters and, in short, beat them to death on the spot. They hated them so much that not one wanted to miss the chance to take part in murdering them” (Radishchev 1958, 98). (The entire episode is given a “Roman” coloration: the sons of the “assessor” commit the same acts as the sons of Lucius Tarquinius Superbus so that the peasant uprising is projected onto the events leading to the birth of the Roman republic.) This multiple murder of the tyrant—“Die, then, die a hundred deaths,” from Radishchev’s ode “Freedom” (1958, 199)—clearly directs us to Plutarch’s description of the death of Caesar: “for all had to take part in the sacrifice and taste of the slaughter. Therefore, Brutus also gave him one blow in the groin. […] For it is said that he received twenty-three [blows]” (Plutarch 1919, 599). This text was, of course, well known to all eighteenth-century writers. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (Karamzin’s Russian translation of which appeared in 1787) and Voltaire’s La mort de César (1736) underscore its relevance. The interpretation of tyrannicide as a ritual sacrifice in the name of freedom and, at the same time, as a Eucharistic act becomes a symbolic code that defined the most important aspects of political thought from the eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. On the one hand, this explains the public vote on the execution of Louis XVI at the Convention Nationale. In the view of France and of history, the deputies to the Convention performed a public ritual in which each individually participated in the death of the king. On the other hand, this specific association of concepts explains the conflation of tyrannicide with communion, that is, with a bloody Eucharistic (“as if tasting sacrificial blood,” in Plutarch’s words) in Pushkin’s poetry of the Kishinev period:      This is another Eucharist […]      We will enjoy happiness      Sharing the bloody chalice—       And I will say, Christ is risen! (Pushkin 1959–1962, I, 145)

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In this way, “Roman” symbolism shines through the political concepts of the eighteenth century, transforming empirical actions into a cultural text, and through that Roman symbolism there shines the ancient symbolics of sacrifice. Introducing Christian symbolism into that archaic image, which preserves the memory of those depths of consciousness about which the eighteenth century could not even conceive, became relevant in the age of Romantic revolutions, when sacrificial angst became associated not with the tyrant but with those who dared to condemn themselves to death in the battle against him. Consider the famous exclamation of the Decembrist Alexander Odoevsky as he entered the palace square: “Let us die, brothers! O, how gloriously we shall die!” Previous cultural states are constantly tossing fragments of themselves— texts, fragments, individual names, and monuments—into the future of the culture. Each of these elements possesses its own volume of “memory,” and each activates a certain degree of its depth based on the context into which it is introduced. Of course, this is not the only aspect of “cultural memory.” The other side of the question should involve analyzing cultural codes that are specifically oriented toward reconstructing the past and preserving the collective’s consciousness of its continuous existence. But that is a subject for another article. (1986)

References Chernyshevskii, Nikolai. 1984. Ocherki gogolevskogo perioda russkoi literatury. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatury. Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. 1938. Visits to England, as Described in his Letters and Diaries, Margaret L. Mare and W. H. Quarrell (ed. and trans.). Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Plutarch. 1919. Lives, Vol. VII.  Demosthenes and Cicero. Alexander and Caesar, Beradotte Perrin (trans.). Loeb Classical Library Edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich. 1959–1962. Sobranie sochinenii v 10 tomakh, D. D. Blagoi et al. (eds.). Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura. Radishchev, Aleksandr. 1958. A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, Leo Weiner (trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Turner, Victor. 1987. “Symbols in African Ritual.” In Perspectives in Anthropology, Herbert Applebaum (ed.), 488–501. Albany: SUNY Press. Turner, Victor. 1975. Revelation and Divination in Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

CHAPTER 11

Some Thoughts on Typologies of Culture

One of the common misconceptions for anyone who thinks about history or about typologies of cultures and civilizations is to think “That never was so it could never have been” or, to put it differently, “It is unknown to me and so it is impossible.” In practical terms, this means that one insignificant—when compared with the general unwritten and written history of humankind—chronological layer that can be studied with the help of well-preserved written sources is taken as the norm for all historical processes, and the culture of that period, as the standard for all human cultures. Let’s look at an example. All cultures known to European scholars have a system of writing. To imagine a developed non-written culture (or a developed non-written civilization more generally) is impossible, and when we do, we do so by unwittingly calling forth images of those cultures and civilizations that are already known to us. Not long ago two prominent mathematicians expressed the notion that insofar as the global Originally published as “Neskol’ko myslei o tipologii kul’tur.” In Iazyki kul’tury i problemy perevodimosti, B. A. Uspenskij (ed.), 3–11. Moscow: Nauka, 1987. The translation here is from Iurii Lotman, Izbrannye stat’i. Vol. 1: Stat’i po semiotike i tipologii kul’tury, 102–109. Tallinn: Aleksandra, 1992. J. Lotman (*) University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia © The Author(s) 2019 Juri Lotman - Culture, Memory and History, ed. by M. Tamm https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14710-5_11

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development of writing occurred only with the invention of paper, the entire “pre-paper” period in the history of culture is an entirely late falsification (Postnikov and Fomenko 1980). There is no sense in arguing with this paradoxical conclusion, but we should consider it a striking example of the extrapolation of common sense into unknown regions. The usual is declared to be the only thing possible. The association of writing with developed civilization, understood as a class-based society with a division of labor and a high level of public works and of architectural, irrigation-related, and other types of technology, appears so natural that alternative possibilities are rejected a priori. Relying on the enormous amount of extent material, one might acknowledge this association as a universal law of culture if it weren’t for the mysterious phenomenon of South American pre-Incan civilizations. The accumulation of archeological evidence paints a truly surprising picture, that of a thousand-year panorama of a series of civilizations that built mighty structures and irrigation systems, raised up cities and enormous stone idols, possessed a high level of craftsmanship in pottery, textiles, and metal-working, and created what are undoubtedly complex systems of symbols, all while failing to leave behind any trace of writing. This fact remains an inexplicable paradox. The hypothesis that is occasionally put forward, namely that all evidence of writing was destroyed by invading conquerors—first the Incas and then the Spaniards—is not convincing as the stone artifacts, unlooted tombs discovered in mint condition, and the pottery and other culinary items that have come down to us would have borne some trace of writing had there been any. Moreover, the historical record shows that no conqueror had the power necessary to wreak destruction on such a scale as to leave no trace of writing at all. One can only assume there was no writing. And so, instead of associating ourselves with an a priori “That’s impossible,” we will attempt to imagine (as we have no other resources) what such a civilization must have looked like if it indeed existed. Writing is a form of memory. Just as an individual consciousness possesses mechanisms to support memory, the collective consciousness, recognizing the need to record certain things for the entire collective, creates mechanisms for collective memory, such as writing. However, is writing the first, and more importantly, the only possible form of collective memory? The answer to this question must be sought with the understanding that forms of memory are produced from that which is subjected to remembering, and that depends on the structure and orientation of a given civilization.

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Our usual understanding of memory assumes that what is subject to remembering (i.e., what is recorded by mechanisms of collective memory) are extraordinary events, that is, singular events or events taking place for the first time, those that should not have taken place at all, or those that seemed unlikely. It is such events that end up in chronicles and annals and become the property of newspapers. For memory of this type, oriented toward the preservation of unusual happenings and events, writing is a necessity. Cultures of this kind constantly increase the number of texts: the body of laws grows through precedents, that is, legal acts that record individual instances—sales, inheritances, rulings on disputes—as a judge is dealing every time with an individual case. Literature, too, is subject to this law. Personal correspondences as well as memoirs and diaries also record “instances” and “events.” Characteristic of the writing mind is an attention to cause-and-effect relationships and the results of actions. What is recorded is not what time the harvesting should begin but the size of the harvest in a given year. Writing is also associated with increased attention paid to time and, as a result, to the emergence of the concept of history. One could say that history is one of the effects of the emergence of writing. But let’s imagine another type of memory, one that aims to preserve information about procedures, not about violations of procedures, about laws, not about exceptions to laws. Let’s imagine, for example, that while observing a sporting event, we weren’t concerned with who would win or what unexpected obstacles would accompany that victory but focused our attention instead on something else—preserving for future generations information about how and at what time such sporting events took place. Here we are dealing not with chronicles or newspaper accounts but with calendars and customs, which fix the order of things, and with rituals, which allow everything to be preserved in the collective memory. A culture oriented not toward increasing the total number of texts but toward constantly repeating texts that are given once and for all requires a differently structured collective memory. Writing in this case is not a necessity. Its role is filled by mnemonic symbols—both natural ones (especially distinctive trees, rock formations, stars, and other heavenly bodies) and ones created by man, such as idols, burial mounds, and architectural structures—and by rituals that incorporate these topographically distinctive formations and sanctuaries. The association with ritual, as well as the general sacralization of memory characteristic of non-written cultures, compels the observer raised in European cultural traditions to identify these topographically distinctive locales as places for carrying out

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the activities of religious cults as we typically understand them. But when one focuses attention on the actual sacred function of these rituals, one is inclined to miss the regulating and governing function of this complex, which consists of a mnemonic (sacred) symbol and a rite. Moreover, the activities associated with this complex preserve for the collective the memory of those actions, ideas and emotions that correspond to a given situation. And so, without knowing the rituals and without taking into consideration the enormous number of calendrical and other signs (e.g., the length and direction of the shadow cast by a given tree or structure, the abundance or absence of leaves or fruit in a given year on a designated sacred tree, etc.), we cannot evaluate the function of the structures in which they take place. One must keep in mind that if a written culture is oriented toward the past, an oral culture is oriented toward the future— hence the enormous role played by augury, divination, and prophecy. Topographically distinctive locales and sanctuaries are not simply places at which to perform rituals that preserve the memory of laws and customs; they are also places for divination and augury. In this respect, making a sacrifice is a futurological experiment for it always involves an appeal to a divinity for help in making a decision. It would be a mistake to think that a civilization of this kind lives in a state of “information drought” insofar as all the actions of individuals are, supposedly, fatally pre-determined by ritual and customs. Such a society simply could not exist. Members of a “non-written” collective constantly find themselves confronting the necessity of making decisions, but those decisions are not made by relying on history, cause-andeffect relationships, or some anticipated outcome; they are made by turning to fortune-­tellers or sorcerers, as many non-written cultures still do. In essence, the need to “consult” (a doctor, lawyer, or elder) is a vestige of that tradition. This tradition stands in opposition to the Kantian ideal of the individual who decides for himself how to think and act. As Kant puts it: Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding with direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. […] It is so easy not to be of age. If I have a book which ­understands for me, a pastor who has a conscious for me, a physician who decides my diet, and so forth, I need not trouble myself. (Kant 1997, 83)

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A non-written culture, with its orientation toward divination and augury, moves decision-making into a supra-individual sphere. And so, the ideal person is considered to be the one who knows how to understand or correctly interpret portents and, as a result, does not know equivocation and acts openly, without concealing his intentions. In opposition to such a culture is one oriented toward the ability of individuals to select their behavior on their own, which requires reason, caution, circumspection, and dissembling insofar as every event is viewed as “happening for the first time.” We find an interesting example of this in Victor Turner’s writings on divination among central African tribes, in particular, the Ndembu. The divination is carried out by shaking a basket filled with special ritual figures and then evaluating the final positioning of the figures. Every figure has a specific symbolic meaning, and the figure or figures that end up on top play a definitive role in predicting the future. As Turner explains: The second figurine we shall consider is called Chamuntang’a. It represents a man sitting huddled up with chin on hands and elbows on knees. Chamuntang’a means an irresolute, changeable person. […] Chamuntang’a also means ‘the man whom no one knows how to take.’ His actions are unnatural. Capriciously, informants say, he will at one time give presents to people, at another time he will act mean. Sometimes he will laugh immoderately with others, sometimes he will keep silent, for no apparent reason. No one can guess when he will be angry or when he will fail to show anger. Ndembu like a man whose behavior is predictable. (A high value is therefore attached to the custom-observing man.—V. T.) They praise both openness and consistency. They hate to be misled by a false or counterfeit demeanor. A man whom they feel is not genuine may very likely be a sorcerer. The theme that what is hidden is probably dangerous and malevolent is once again exemplified. (Turner 1975, 221, 223)

It is not difficult, however, to see that all the basic gestural elements of the Chamuntang’a figure in the Ndembu divination ritual are present in Rodin’s Thinker. The symbolism of the gesture of propping up one’s chin is so well established that Rodin’s statue needs no explanation. This is all the more notable given that the sculptor’s intended plan was to portray the “first” thinker. Neither the forehead nor the proportions of the figure contain any stereotypical signs of the intellectual—the entire meaning of the work is transmitted through the pose. It is interesting to recall here that the same gestural stereotypes were used by David Garrick in creating his “Hamlet type” (his altering of the figure’s position from sitting to

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standing made preserving the rest of the gestural complex especially important): “Hamlet comes on to the stage sunk in contemplation, his chin resting on his right hand, and his right elbow on his left, and gazes solemnly downwards. And then, removing his right hand from his chin, but, if I remember right, still supporting it with his left hand, he speaks” (Lichtenberg 1938, 16). When we consider that Garrick’s performance reinforced this gestural image of the Hamletian type, which continued on the stages of Europe for almost 100 years, then the meaning of such a citation becomes especially significant. What is there in common between the Ndembu’s Chamuntang’a, Hamlet, and Rodin’s Thinker? The invariant meaning would be: a person in a state of decision-making. But for the Ndembu, the decision-making involves a rejection of custom, of a role established over centuries. Such a rejection is viewed negatively. It is associated either with the semantics of violating the established order, that is, with sorcery (insofar as the Ndembu ascribe everything out of the ordinary to malicious sorcery) or with such negative human characteristics as hypocrisy and indecision. Signs and auguries predicting the future are associated with decision-­ making from a collective point of view, leaving the individual with an open and decisive course of action, as described by Baratynsky in his poem “Primety” [Signs] (1839):       Running onto his path from the woods,          A wolf, circling, its fur bristling,       Presaged his victory, and so he threw          His forces boldly into battle. (Baratynskii 1957b, 177)

A society built on custom and collective experience will inevitably produce a powerful culture of divination. This, of necessity, encourages observation of nature, especially celestial bodies, and theoretical reflection related to that observation. Some forms of descriptive geometry can co-­ exist perfectly well with non-written aspects of culture as such, as evidenced by calendrical-astronomical oral poetry. The world of oral memory is filled with symbols. It may seem paradoxical that writing did not complicate the semiotic structure of society; it simplified it. However, the mnemonic symbols represented by material signs are not contained in verbal texts but in the text of ritual. Moreover, they retain a great deal of freedom in relation to that text insofar as their

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material existence continues outside the ritual, and their inclusion in many other rites lends them a high degree of polysemy. Their very existence assumes the presence of a surrounding sphere of oral tales, legends, and songs. And so, the syntactic links between these symbols and various contexts turn out to be “disorderly.” A verbal (in particular, written) text relies on syntactic links, whereas an oral text weakens those links to an extreme. Therefore, an oral culture can incorporate a large number of symbolic signs of a lower order, that is, those located on the border of writing, such as amulets, marks of ownership, counting tools, and signs of mnemonic “writing,” but they resist placing them together in grammatical-­ syntactical chains. In cultures of this type, objects that permit the making of calculations within the limits of rather complex mathematical operations are not a contradiction. It is possible within such cultures to witness the rapid development of magical signs, for use in rituals, that contain the simplest geometrical figures, such as a circle, a cross, parallel lines, and triangles, as well as primary colors. These signs, however, should not be confused with hieroglyphs and letters insofar as the latter gravitate toward a defined semantics and acquire meaning only within a syntagmatic series, producing sign chains. The meaning of the former, on the other hand, is wiped clean and is often marked by internal contradiction; these signs acquire meaning in relation to ritual and oral texts for which they serve as mnemonic signs. The distinct nature of these signs is exposed in the opposition of phraseology (chains of linguistic symbols) to ornament (chains of magical-mnemonic and ritual symbols). The development of ornament and the absence of script on sculptures and architectural monuments are equally characteristic of oral culture. The hieroglyph, or the written word or letter, and the ideal or topographically distinctive locale are definitively antithetical and mutually exclusive phenomena. The former signifies a thought, while the latter recalls it. The former represents a text or part of a text having a monovalent semiotic character. The latter are included in the syncretic text of ritual or are mnemonically associated with oral texts that coincide with a specific place and time. The antithetical relationship between writing and sculpture is beautifully illustrated in the Biblical passage recounting the meeting of Moses and Aaron. The tablets of Moses, which were meant to give the people of Israel a new mechanism to support cultural memory (“a testament”), are antithetical to the syncretic unity of the idol and the ritual (dancing), which embody an older mode of storing information:

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And Moses turned, and went down from the mount, and the two tables of the testimony were in his hand: the tables were written on both their sides; on the one side and on the other were they written. And the tables were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, grave upon the tables. And when Joshua heard the noise of the people as they shouted, he said unto Moses, There is a noise of war in the camp. And he said, It is not the voice of them that shout for mastery, neither is it the voice of them that cry for being overcome: but the noise of them that sing do I hear. And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses’ anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount. And he took the calf which thy had made, and burnt it in the fire. (Exodus 32: 15–20)

Plato offers some interesting material related to our theme in The Phaedrus. Dedicated to the subject of rhetorical art, this work is closely related to the problem of mnemonics. At the very beginning of the dialogue, Plato takes Socrates and Phaedrus outside the city gates of Athens in order to demonstrate the connection between topographically ­distinctive locales, groves, hills and springs, and collective memory as embodied in myths: Phaedrus: Tell me, Socrates, is it not from some place along here by the Ilissus that Boreas is said to have carried off Oreithyia? Socrates: Yes, that is the story. Phaedrus: Well, is it from here? The streamlet looks very pretty and pure and clear and fit for girls to play by. Socrates: No, the place is about two or three furlongs farther down, where you cross over to the precinct of Agra; and there is an altar of Boreas somewhere thereabouts. (Plato 2014, 419, 421)

Later Socrates suddenly proposes to his interlocutor the paradoxical view that writing is harmful to memory. Socrates presents societies founded on writing as without memory and anomalous, while he presents nonwritten societies as normal and in possession of a strong collective memory. Socrates discusses the divine inventor Theuth, who revealed learning to the king of Egypt: but when they came to the letters, “This invention, O king,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.” But Thamus replied,

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“Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practise their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.” (Plato 2014, 563, 565)

It is significant that Plato’s Socrates associates writing not with cultural progress but with the loss of the high status achieved by non-written societies. The relationship of oral texts circulating in and around idols and of topographically distinctive locales with a specific place and time (the idol functions, that is, “comes to life” in a cultural sense, in a specific time, which is ritually and calendrically designated as “its time,” and it gathers local legends around itself) is evident in the absolute distinction between written and non-written cultures in their experience of the natural world. Written cultures are inclined to view the world, whether created by God or Nature, as a Text, and strive to read the message contained within it. The main idea is sought in the written Text—be it sacred or scientific— and that idea is then extrapolated onto the natural world. From this point of view, the meaning of Nature can only be uncovered by the “literate” individual, who searches Nature for laws, not signs. Any interest in signs is viewed as superstition, and the future is determined on the basis of the past, not on the basis of divination and augury. Non-written cultures relate to the natural world differently. Insofar as topographically distinctive locales, sanctuaries and idols “include” within their cultural orbit rituals, sacrifices, divination, songs and dances that coincide with a certain time of year, then these topographically distinctive locales, sanctuaries and idols themselves become associated with a specific location of the stars, the sun and the moon, with cyclical winds and rains, periodic rises in the level of rivers, and so on. Natural phenomena are perceived as mnemonic or predictive signs. The fact that in the Christian Bible God gives a rainbow as a sign of his covenant with Noah while he

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gives Moses written tablets clearly symbolizes the shift in the typological orientation toward different forms of memory. It is easy to see that “folk” medicine and “scientific” medicine are oriented toward two different forms of consciousness—non-written and written, respectively. Insight and a capacity for independent thought were necessary for Baratynsky, at the dawn of the age of positivism, to see in prejudices and signs not lies or barbarism but fragments of an alternative truth dating back to another type of culture:      Prejudice, it is the fragment       Of an ancient truth—the temple fell,       And the language of its ruins       Was indecipherable to its descendants. (Baratynskii 1957a, 175)

It is telling that the poet associates prejudice specifically with a temple, an architectural structure, and not with “an epitaph in an unintelligible language,” the image used by Pushkin (Pushkin 1959–1962, II, 285). Baratynsky’s comparison comes to mind when we reflect on the lost meaning of the pre-Incan architectural structures of ancient Peru. The Biblical texts cited above sketch a familiar picture: non-written and written cultures are presented as two different stages of development— lower and higher. However, can one conclude from this that the historical development that took place in Eurasia along a certain path is the only path it might have taken? The thousand-year existence of non-written cultures in pre-Columbian America offers convincing evidence of the stability of such civilizations, and their impressive achievements clearly demonstrate their cultural capabilities. In order for writing to become essential, there must be a degree of instability, dynamism, and unpredictability, as well as a need for various kinds of cultural translation arising from periodic and long-term contact with other ethnic groups. In this respect, the area between the Balkans and North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, the shores of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, on the one hand, and the steep mountains of Peru, the valleys and passes of the Andes mountains, and the narrow strip of the Peruvian shore, on the other, represent completely different historical basins. The former represents a cauldron of perpetually mixing ethnic groups, ceaselessly replacing one another, which involved the collision of different cultural-semiotic structures, while the latter is characterized by centuries-long isolation, extremely limited trade and military contact with other cultures—ideal conditions for preserving

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cultural traditions. (The end of such isolation was, as a rule, accompanied by the complete disappearance of this or that ancient Peruvian civilization.) The victory of written civilizations in the first case and of non-­ literate ones in the second appears entirely natural. However, the exclusive victory of either culture is an extreme case. In practical terms, we deal with limitations imposed on the oral and written spheres in any given culture. And so, one can assume that in a certain period writing was relegated to the realm of business, while oral ritual was relegated to the poetic-sacred realm. This is precisely how it was possible at the time when chronicles first demanded written records for myths to continue their oral existence for centuries more. In the second half of the twentieth century, the invention of means for recording oral speech has produced fundamental shifts in the traditional literacy of European cultures, and we will, perhaps, be witnesses to interesting new developments in this area. (1987)

References Baratynskii, E. A. 1957a. “Predrassudok, on oblomok.” In Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, E. N. Kupreianova (ed.), 175–176. Leningrad: Sovetskii Pisatel’. Baratynskii, E.  A. 1957b. “Primety.” In Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, E.  N. Kupreianova (ed.), 176–177. Leningrad: Sovetskii Pisatel’. Kant, Immanuel. 1997. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and What Is Enlightenment, Lewis White Beck (trans.). Second Edition. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall. Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. 1938. Visits to England, as Described in his Letters and Diaries, Margaret L. Mare and W. H. Quarrell (trans. and ed.), Oxford: Clarendon Press. Plato. 2014. Euthyphro; Apology; Crito; Phaedo; Phaedrus. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Postnikov, M. M. and A. T. Fomenko. 1980. “Novye metodiki statisticheskogo analiza narrativno-tsifrovogo materiala drevnei istorii” (pre-print version), 1–36. Moscow AN SSSR. Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich. 1959–1962. Sobranie sochinenii v 10 tomakh, D. D. Blagoi et al. (eds.). Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura. Turner, Victor. 1975. Revelation and Divination in Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

CHAPTER 12

The Symbol in the System of Culture

The word “symbol” is one of the most polysemous in the system of semiotics-­related fields.1 The expression “symbolic meaning” is widely used as a simple synonym of signification. In cases where there is some kind of relationship between expression and content or when the arbitrariness of that relationship is highlighted in a given context, scholars often speak of a symbolic function and of symbols. At the same time, Saussure contrasted symbols to conventional signs, stressing the iconic nature of the former. Saussure discussed this in reference to scales, which can serve as a symbol for justice insofar as they represent iconographically the idea of balance, whereas a cart does not. Within another classificatory schema, a symbol is defined as a sign whose meaning is a sign from another order or another language. Opposed to this definition is the tradition of interpreting symbols as the expression of a higher or absolute non-signifying essence. In the first case, symbolic meaning acquires a distinctly rational character and is viewed as a means for adequately translating the plane of expression onto the plane of Originally published as “Simvol v sisteme kul’tury,” Trudy po znakovym sistemam 21, 1987: 10–21. The translation here is from Iurii Lotman, Izbrannye stat’i. Vol. 1: Stat’i po semiotike i tipologii kul’tury, 191–199. Tallinn: Aleksandra, 1992. J. Lotman (*) University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia © The Author(s) 2019 Juri Lotman - Culture, Memory and History, ed. by M. Tamm https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14710-5_12

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c­ ontent. In the second, content glimmers irrationally through the expression and plays the role of a bridge between the rational and the mystical worlds. It is enough to point out that any linguistic-semiotic system—whether produced in the course of cultural history or designed to describe a meaningful object—feels itself to be inadequate if it does not provide its own definition of a symbol. This is not about describing in as exact and complete a manner as possible a certain object that remains invariable in all contexts; rather, this has to do with the presence in every semiotic system of a structural position without which the system does not appear to be complete as certain essential functions cannot be performed. And so the mechanisms meant to support those functions are stubbornly referred to as “symbols,” despite the fact that the nature of those functions, not to mention the nature of the mechanisms supporting them, is extremely difficult to link to some invariant. In this way, one could say that even if we do not know what a symbol is, every system will know what “its symbol” is and needs to know this in order for its semiotic structure to work. In attempting to define the nature of the symbolic function, it is wise to avoid giving any general definition and instead to begin with the notions provided to us intuitively by our cultural experience, and only then to attempt to generalize from them. The most common understanding of a symbol is associated with the idea of some kind of content that, in its turn, serves as the expression of another—as a rule, more culturally valuable—content. A symbol in this case must be distinguished from a reminiscence or a citation insofar as with the latter the “outer” plane of expression/content is not self-­sufficient but functions as a kind of index referencing a more general text to which it finds itself in a metonymic relationship. A symbol, both on the plane of expression and on the plane of content, is always represented as a kind of text, that is, as possessing a single and hermetic meaning and a precisely articulated border, which allows it to be clearly distinguished from the surrounding semiotic context. This last condition appears to us as especially important for “being a symbol.” There is always something archaic in a symbol. Every culture needs a layer of texts that perform the function of the archaic. The density of symbols is usually especially noticeable here. The association of symbols with the archaic is not coincidental; a key group of symbols has a deeply archaic nature and come down to us from a pre-written age, when specific (and, as a rule, elementary in a descriptive sense) signs represented compact

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mnemonic programs of texts and plots preserved in the oral memory of the collective. Symbols have the ability to preserve exceptionally large and meaningful texts in a compact form. But what is more interesting for us is another, similarly archaic, feature: a symbol, representing a completed text, need not be included within a syntagmatic series, but when it is included, it will retain its conceptual and structural independence. It can easily be separated from its semiotic surroundings and can just as easily enter into a new semiotic context. This is related to an essential quality of symbols, namely, that symbols never belong to a single synchronic cut of culture—they always move through this cut along a vertical axis that passes from the past into the future. The memory of a symbol is always more ancient than the memory of its non-symbolic textual surroundings. Every cultural text is fundamentally heterogeneous. Even within a strictly synchronic cut, the heterogeneity of a culture’s languages produces a complex polyglossia. The common belief that the “age of classicism” or the “Romantic age” designates a unified cultural period or at least the dominant tendency of that period is just an illusion produced by the descriptive language we apply. Moreover, the wheels of various cultural mechanisms move at different speeds. The rate of change in a natural language, for example, cannot be compared to the rate of change in fashion, and the realm of the sacred is always more conservative than the realm of the profane. Such change intensifies the internal heterogeneity that is a law fundamental to the existence of culture. Symbols represent one of the most stable elements on the cultural continuum. As an important mechanism of cultural memory, symbols carry over texts, plotlines, and other semiotic formations from one cultural stratum to another. An immutable set of symbols passing diachronically through a culture assumes to a significant degree the function of unifying that culture; as a culture’s memory of itself, symbols prevent a culture from disintegrating into isolated temporal strata. The unity of a basic set of dominant symbols and their persistence in the life of a given culture determines to a significant degree the national and regional borders of that culture. When viewed from this perspective, however, the symbol has a dual nature. On the one hand, in penetrating the depths of a culture, a symbol reveals its invariable essence. In this, we see its iterability. A symbol will act as something alien to the textual field surrounding it, as a messenger from other cultural periods (i.e., from other cultures), and as a reminder of the ancient (“eternal”) foundations of that culture. On the other hand, a symbol actively aligns with its cultural context and is transformed under its

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influence while at the same time transforming it. Its invariable essence is realized in its variations. It is precisely in the variations to which the “eternal” meaning of a symbol is subjected in a given cultural context that this context most vividly displays its own variability. The latter capacity is associated with the fact that the most historically active symbols are characterized by an indeterminacy in the relationship between textual expression and textual content. Textual content always belongs to a more multidimensional conceptual field, and so expression does not entirely contain content but only hints at it. Whether this is due to the fact that expression is only an abbreviated mnemonic sign of eroded textual content or that textual expression belongs to the profane, open, and demonstrable sphere of culture while textual content belongs to the sacred, esoteric sphere, or is related to the Romantic need to “express the inexpressible,” is of no consequence here. What is important is that the meaning potential of a symbol is always greater than any given manifestation; that is, the connections a symbol makes to this or that semiotic context with the help of its expression do not exhaust its meaning potential. This is what constitutes its meaning repository, which allows a symbol to enter into unexpected associations that can alter its essence and deform its textual surroundings in unexpected ways. From this point of view, it is instructive that symbols that are elementary in terms of their expression possess a greater capacity for cultural meaning than complex symbols. The cross, the circle, and the pentagram possess far greater meaning potential than “Apollo flaying Marsyas” due to their separation of expression and content, which is to say, their expression and content are not mutually descriptive. It is precisely the “simple” symbols that form the symbolic core of a culture, and it is their presence that allows us to evaluate the symbolic or non-symbolic orientation of a culture as a whole. This last point relates to the symbolizing or de-symbolizing reading of texts. The former permits texts or portions of texts to be read as symbols, although in their natural context they were not intended to be read as such. The latter transforms symbols into simple messages, so that what appears to a symbolizing consciousness as a symbol appears to a de-­ symbolizing mind as a symptom. If the de-symbolizing nineteenth century saw in this or that person or literary character a “representative” (of an idea, class, or social group), the Symbolist poet Alexander Blok perceived people and happenings in everyday life as symbols, that is, as a manifestation of the infinite in the realm of the finite. (See his reaction to

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the poets Nikolai Kluyev and Valentin Stenich; the latter he described in the article “A Russian Dandy.”) These two tendencies intermingle in very interesting ways in the creative thinking of Dostoevsky. On the one hand, as an attentive reader of newspapers and a collector of news reports (especially related to criminal cases), Dostoevsky saw in scattered newspaper accounts the visible symptoms of hidden social illnesses. The view of the writer as a doctor (as in Lermontov’s preface to A Hero of Our Time), as a naturalist (as in Baratynsky’s “Concubine”), or as a sociologist (in the work of Balzac) transformed the writer into a decoder of symptoms. Symptomology belongs to the field of semiotics, as evident in its previous designation as “medical semiotics.” However, the relationship here between what is “available” (expression) and what is “unavailable” (content) is constant and monosemous, built on the principle of the “black box.” In this way, Turgenev in his novels records the symptoms of social processes with great precision, leading to the perception of this or that character as a “representative.” To say that Turgenev’s Rudin is a “representative of superfluous men in Russia” is to claim that this individual embodies the basic features of that group and that one can evaluate the group based on his character. To say that Stavrogin or Fedka in Dostoevsky’s Demons symbolizes certain phenomena, social types, or societal forces is to claim that the essence of these forces is expressed to some extent in these characters, but that it nonetheless remains not entirely exposed, and so still mysterious. Both approaches collide and intersect in complex ways in Dostoevsky’s creative consciousness. The opposition of a symbol and a reminiscence is constructed differently. While their basic difference was pointed out above, it is appropriate here to mention another: a symbol exists before being included in a given text and exists independently of it. It enters the writer’s memory from the depths of cultural memory and comes to life in a new text like a seed falling onto new soil. Reminiscences, references, and citations, on the other hand, are organic parts of a new text and only function within its synchrony. They move from a text into the depths of cultural memory, while a symbol moves from the depths of cultural memory into a text. Therefore, it is no coincidence that what appears in the process of creation as a symbol (a suggestive mechanism of memory) is perceived by the reader as a reminiscence insofar as the processes of creation and reception are antithetical. In the former, the finished text is the result, while in the latter, it is the point of departure. Let us illustrate this with an example.

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In Dostoevsky’s plans for an epic “poem” based on the life of Ivan the Terrible, entitled Emperor, there is a note in which Vasily Mirovich convinces Ivan, who was raised in total isolation and did not know temptation, to agree to a conspiracy: “He shows him the world (the Neva, and so on) from the attic. […] He shows him the entire world. ‘It’s all yours for the taking Come on!’” (Dostoevskii 1974, IX, 113–114). It is obvious that the theme of tempting someone with the specter of power was associated in Dostoevsky’s creative consciousness with a symbol: the tempter taking the tempted to a high place (a mountain, the roof of a cathedral, or, in Dostoevsky’s case, the top floor of a prison tower) and showing him the world lying at his feet. For Dostoevsky, the biblical symbolism is turned into the theme of a novel, which the reader of the novel then perceives as a biblical allusion. This opposition is, however, relative, and in complex texts such as Dostoevsky’s novels cannot always be clearly drawn. We noted above that Dostoevsky perceived newspaper reports and facts concerning criminal cases as both symptoms and symbols. This relates to key aspects of his artistic and philosophical thinking, the meaning of which becomes clear when we compare the different relationships Tolstoy and Dostoevsky had to the word. Already in the early short story “Cutting the Forest,” Tolstoy reveals a relationship to the word that will remain characteristic of his work throughout his life: “Where did you get your wine?” I asked Bólkhov lazily, while deep in my soul two voices spoke with equal clearness. One said, “Lord receive my soul in peace,” the other, “I hope I shall not stoop, but smile, while the ball is passing,” and at that moment something terribly unpleasant whistled past our heads and a cannon crashed down a couple of paces from us. “There now, had I been a Napoleon or a Frederick I should certainly have paid you a compliment,” Bólkhov remarked, turning toward me quite calmly. “You have done so as it is,” I answered, with difficulty hiding the excitement produced in me by the danger just passed. “Well, what if I have?—no one will write it down.” “Yes, I will.” “Well, if you do put it down, it will only be ‘for criticism,’ as Mischenkov says,” he added with a smile. “Ugh! the damned thing!” just then remarked Antónov behind us, as he spat over his shoulder with vexation, “just missed my legs!” (Tolstoy 1964, 95)

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If we were to speak of the particularities of the Tolstoyan word as displayed in this passage, we would have to note its total conventionality, that is, the relationship between expression and content is relative. A word might serve as a means of expressing truth, as in Antónov’s outburst, or lies, as in the speech of the officers. The possibility of separating expression from content and connecting it to any other content makes the word a dangerous instrument, a convenient condenser of social lies. And so, in those cases when the need for truth becomes a vital necessity, Tolstoy generally prefers to do without words altogether. Therefore, the verbal declaration of Pierre Bezukhov’s love for Hélène is a lie, whereas true love is expressed wordlessly, in “glances and smiles,” or cryptograms, as with Kitty and Levin. The unintelligible “what d’ya call it” of Akim in The Power of Darkness contains truth while eloquence in Tolstoy is always false. Truth is a gift of Nature, and so life is truth only in its natural essence, purified of words (and of social symbolism). Let us look now at some narrative models from Dostoevsky’s Idiot. “There was evidently something else here, some storm of the heart and mind, […] a sort of insatiable feeling of contempt that was completely unaccountable—in short, something highly ridiculous and inadmissible in good society” (Dostoevsky 1955, 66). “Her eyes looked at him as though they were asking a riddle” (67). “He had been horrified by some of the looks she had given him of late, by some of her words. Sometimes he could not help feeling that she was trying to force herself too much, that she was putting too big a restraint on herself, and he remembered how alarmed that had made him” (568). “You couldn’t possibly be in love with him because you’re too proud—no, not proud, I’m sorry—but because you are vain—no, not that, either—because you’re selfish—because your self-love amounts to—to madness” (571). “Those, you see, are very excellent feelings; only, somehow, it didn’t turn out like that—it’s his illness and something else!” (437). While representing the speech of various characters and of the narrator himself, these passages, selected almost at random, are characterized by one common feature: the words do not designate things and ideas but only hint at them while also suggesting the impossibility of arriving at an exact designation. The phrase “and another thing” becomes a marked sign of the entire style of the novel, which is built on endless clarifications and reservations, which, however, clarify nothing and only demonstrate the impossibility of any definitive clarification. In this respect, one can cite the words of the character Ippolit:

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in every idea of genius or in every new human idea, or, more simply still, in every serious human idea born in anyone’s brain, there is something that cannot possibly be conveyed to others, though you wrote volumes about it and spent thirty-five years in explaining your idea; something will always be left that will obstinately refuse to emerge from your head and that will remain with you for ever; and you will die without having conveyed to anyone what is perhaps the most vital point of your idea. (406)

In such an interpretation, this concept, which is so central to Dostoevsky, assumes a Romantic resonance, converging with the idea of “inexpressibility.” Dostoevsky’s relationship to the word is, however, more complex. On the one hand, he not only emphasizes the inadequacy of words and their meanings through a variety of means but also constantly resorts to words that are imprecise or ineffective or to witnesses who do not understand what they have witnessed and so provide notoriously inexact interpretations of the outward appearance of facts. On the other hand, these inexact and even untrue words and testimonies cannot be treated as having no relationship to the truth and so worthy of being simply discounted, as with that entire layer of socially hypocritical speech in Tolstoy’s work. Rather, they constitute an approach to the truth; they hint at it. The truth shines dimly through them, as it shines dimly through all words, except for scripture. In this respect, there is no fundamental difference between the testimony of a competent witness and that of an incompetent one, between that of an insightful witness and that of a stupid one, insofar as the separation of words from the truth and their inadequacy before the truth lie in the very nature of human speech, as does their capacity to lead us toward the truth. It is not difficult to see that such a conceptualization lends words the character not of conventional signs but of symbols. But Dostoevsky’s understanding is closer to the analytical words of Baratynsky than to the Romantic “ineffability” of Zhukovsky:      Alien to clear meaning,       For me it is a symbol      Of feelings, whose expression       I have not found in language. (Baratynskii 1936, 184)

The desire to see profound symbolic meaning in an isolated fact is a feature of Dostoevsky’s novel, but it does not represent the work’s sole organizing tendency.2

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There is some interesting material that allows us to observe the movement of Dostoevsky’s creative thought process. When thinking of a certain personality, Dostoevsky designates it with a name or marks it with some kind of sign that allows him to connect it with a symbol in his memory; he then “plays out” various scenarios, conjecturing how each symbolic figure will conduct him or herself. The multivalence of symbols allows Dostoevsky to vary the beginning, middle, and end of these scenarios, to which Dostoevsky repeatedly returns, selecting this or that course of action. And so, for example, from behind the image of Nastasya Filippovna, there immediately appears the image of la dame aux camellias. (Nastasya is called this in Kolia Ivolgin’s novel while the image is indirectly referenced by Totsky.) However, Dostoevsky perceives this image as a complex symbol associated with European culture, which he transfers to a Russian context so as to observe—and not without some polemically charged pathos—how a Russian Camille would act. But other symbols, or repositories of cultural memory, also played a role in Dostoevsky’s structuring of the image of Nastasya Filippovna. One such symbol can only be provisionally reconstructed. The initial work on The Idiot was begun in the 1860s while Dostoevsky was traveling in Europe. One of the most striking impressions from those travels arose when Dostoevsky visited the Dresden art gallery. References to that visit (in particular, to a painting by Holbein) remained in the final version of the novel. From the diary of his wife for 1867, we know that the first thing she saw upon entering the gallery was “all the paintings by Rembrandt.” She then went through the gallery a second time with Dostoevsky: “Fedya pointed out the best works and spoke about art” (Dolinin 1964, II, 104). It is hard to believe that Dostoevsky was not drawn to Rembrandt’s Susanna and the Elders. This painting, like The Abduction of Ganymede, which was hanging in the same hall (“a strange painting by Rembrandt,” in the words of Pushkin), must have attracted Dostoevsky’s attention with its interpretation of a theme that so troubled the author: a depraved attempt to seduce a child. In this painting, Rembrandt departs radically from the biblical depiction in Daniel 13, where Susanna is presented as an honorable married woman, the mistress of a household, and the “elders” assaulting her virtue are not necessarily elderly.3 Rembrandt, on the other hand, portrays Susanna as an adolescent girl, thin and pale, vulnerable, and without womanly allure, while the elders are characterized by a disgusting

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lewdness, which stands in contrast to their old age. (Compare this with The Abduction of Ganymede, in which the eagle’s inflamed lasciviousness is contrasted to the expression of fear and disgust on the face of Ganymede, who is portrayed not as the mythological youth, but as a child.) The fact that we find Nastasya Filippovna at the beginning of the novel being resold by one “elder,” Totsky, to another (technically to Gana, but it is intimated that it is in fact General Epanchin), followed by the story of Totsky’s own seduction when little more than a child, strongly suggests that Dostoevsky perceived Nastasya Filippovna not only as Camille but also as Susanna. But she is also the “woman taken in adultery,” about whom Christ said: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her,” refusing to judge her: “Neither do I condemn thee” (John 8: 7–11). At the intersection of the symbolic images of Camille, Susanna, and the adulteress, a programmatic bundle emerges, which, when placed within the plotlines of the novel, is unraveled (and transformed) in the image of Nastasya Filippovna. No less probable is that an association between Fonvizin’s Brigadier’s wife and General Epanchin’s wife is also inscribed in the memory of the symbol and its thematic development. More complicated is the case of Ippolit Terentyev, as this character is multilayered; it is likely that various “symbols of life” (i.e., symbolically interpreted facts of real life) are woven together in him.4 One detail, however, draws our attention: Ippolit’s desire before his death to deliver a speech to the people, and his belief that he had “only to talk to the common people for a quarter of an hour out of a window” and the people would agree with him completely and follow him (Dostoevsky 1955, 309). This detail, implanted in Dostoevsky’s memory as a voluminous symbol, was passed down from the moment of Belinsky’s death, which amazed those in his milieu. As Turgenev described it: “Before his death he spoke for two hours without stopping, as if to the Russian people, and often turned to his wife, asking her to remember everything good and to faithfully pass on his words to those who needed to hear them” (Kozlovskii and Tiun’kin 1977, 256). Nekrasov, too, recalled the scene in Song of the Criminals (1856):                              

And finally the time had come… On the day of his death he leapt up from his bed, And once again his mute chest Found strength—a voice burst forth! […] He cried out joyfully: “Forward!” –

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      And proud, and clear, and satisfied:      The people appeared before him       And the sound of the Moscow bells;      His eyes gleamed with ecstasy,       On the square, among the people,      He seemed to stand      And speak…. (Nekrasov 2014, 262–263)

This vivid episode planted in the writer’s memory was turned into a symbol and began to display the general modes of behavior of a symbol in culture, gathering and organizing around itself new experiences, transforming itself into a condenser of memory, and then expanding into a thematic multiplicity, which the author could later combine selectively with other thematic constructs. In the process, the initial image, born with Belinsky, is almost lost as it is subjected to countless transformations. One must keep in mind that a symbol can be expressed in a syncretic verbal-visual form, which, on the one hand, is projected onto the surface of different texts and, on the other hand, is transformed under the reverse influence of those texts. For example, it is easy to see that in his monument to the Third International (1919–1920), Vladimir Tatlin recreated the image of the Tower of Babel from a painting by Breughel the Elder. This association was no coincidence; the interpretation of the Revolution as an uprising against god was persistent and widespread in the literature and culture of the first years of the Revolution. And while in the Romantic tradition of theomachy, the hero of the uprising was the demon, to whom the Romantics attributed qualities of exaggerated individuality, the avant-­ garde literature of the post-Revolutionary years highlighted the enormous scale and anonymity of the uprising (see Mayakovsky’s play Mystery-­ Bouffe). Already in Marx’s image of the proletariat “storming the heavens,” which was very popular at that time, there was a reference to the Tower of Babel myth, but subjected to a double inversion. First, the values attributed to heaven and earth were reversed, and, second, the myth of the scattering of peoples was replaced by a representation of their unification, that is, the Communist International. In this way, a chain is established, beginning with the Biblical text: And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; […] And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower,

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which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth. (Genesis 11: 4–8)

Then we have the painting of Breughel, followed by the pronouncement of Marx, and finally Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International. The symbol acts as an intelligible mechanism of collective memory. Now we can attempt to outline the role of symbols among other signifying elements. A symbol differs from a conventional sign by the presence of an iconic element, which establishes a resemblance between the levels of expression and content. The difference between iconic signs and symbols can be illustrated by contrasting icons and paintings. In a painting, three-dimensional reality is represented in two dimensions. However, the incomplete projection of the level of expression onto the level of content is obscured by an illusionistic effect through which the viewer is made to believe in the painting’s total verisimilitude. In icons (and in symbols, more generally), the non-projection of the level of expression onto the level of content is essential to the communicative functioning of the sign. The content only glimmers through the expression, and the expression only hints at the content. In this sense, we can speak of the merging of an icon with an index insofar as the expression of the icon points to the content to the same degree it represents it. Hence the conventionality of the symbolic sign. And so, a symbol functions as a kind of condenser of all the principles of signification while at the same time extending beyond signification. It is an intermediary not only between different spheres of semiosis but also between semiotic and non-semiotic realities. To no less a degree, it functions as an intermediary between the synchrony of a text and the memory of a culture. Its role is that of a semiotic condenser. To generalize, one might say that the structure of symbols in any culture forms a system that is both isomorphic and isofunctional in relation to the genetic memory of the individual. (1987)

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Notes 1. For a more detailed history and historiography of this problem, see Todorov (1982, 1986). 2. Dostoevsky’s creative thinking is fundamentally heterogeneous. Alongside “symbolic” meaning-making, other modes of reading are implied. Journalism and news reports, as well as many other things, enter into his language, as ideally manifested in his Diary of a Writer. We are concentrating on the “symbolic” layer as it relates to the topic of this article not because it constitutes the only layer in this author’s literary world. 3. According to the Petr Alekseev, “Elders in the Scriptures refer not to the individuals’ age but to their elevated station” (Alekseev 1819, 162). 4. Consider Dostoevsky’s claim in the article “Apropos of the Exhibition” (1873) that reality is accessible to a person only as the symbolic signification of an idea and not in the form of reality “as it is,” for “there is no such reality, never has been because, to man, the substance of things in inaccessible, while he apperceives nature as it reflects itself in his idea after having passes through his senses” (Dostoevsky 1985, 83).

References Alekseev, Petr. 1819. Tservkovnyi slovar. St. Petersburg: N/P. Baratynskii, E. A. 1936. “Svoenravnoe prozvan’e.” In Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, E. N. Kupreianova (ed.), 184. Leningrad: Sovetskii Pisatel’. Dolinin, Aleksndr (ed). 1964. Dostoevskii v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura. Dostoevskii, Fedor. 1974. F.  M. Dostoevskii. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 30-i tomakh. Vol. IX. Leningrad: Nauka. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. 1955. The Idiot, David Magarshak (trans.). London and New York: Penguin. Dostoevsky, Feodor. 1985. “Apropos of the Exhibition.” In The Diary of a Writer, Boris Brasol (trans.), 74–85. Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith. Kozlovskii, A. A. and K. I. Tiun’kin (eds). 1977. V. G. Belinskii v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura. Tolstoy, Leo. 1964. “The Wood-Felling. A Cadet’s Story.” In Leo Tolstoy. Short Stories, Louise and Aylmer Maude (trans.), 76–95. New York: Random House. Nekrasov, Nikolai. 2014. “Pesnia prestupnikov.” In N. A. Nekrasov. Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii. Vol. 1, 257–224. Moscow: Direct-Media. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1982. Theories of the Symbol, Catherine Porter (trans.). Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1986. Symbolism and Interpretation, Catherine Porter (trans.). Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

PART III

History

CHAPTER 13

Clio at the Crossroads

The Romans had a saying: “Nomen est omen.” This axiom, which has come down to us, it seems, from Plautus, is for some inexplicable reason given credence by historical chronologies. Historical chronologies, however, are relative. The boundaries of centuries and decades and of one’s understanding of “the beginning of a century” or “the end of a century” are defined by the accepted point of evaluation, as if it were entirely external to the historical events themselves. However, both historians and people in their everyday lives know that the difference between one century and another, that is, the face of a century, is something real, and people who feel themselves to be the founders of a century do not resemble those who must sum that century up. The time we are living through now is one of summing up, a time of “endings.” The twentieth century is coming to an end, as is the first millennium since the baptism of Rus—which is for all practical purposes the first millennium of Russian culture—and the second millennium of a new European culture. And against that backdrop are more recent “endings”:

Originally published as “Klio na rasput’e,” Nashe nasledie 5, 1988: 1–4. The translation here is from Iurii Lotman, Izbrannye stat’i. Vol. 1: Stat’i po semiotike i tipologii kul’tury, 464–471. Tallinn: Aleksandra, 1992. J. Lotman (*) University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia © The Author(s) 2019 Juri Lotman - Culture, Memory and History, ed. by M. Tamm https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14710-5_13

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the 300th anniversary of Peter’s reforms, which demand urgent reinterpretation, and the 200th anniversary of Karamzin’s Journey from Petersburg to Moscow, which is a good time to reevaluate the results of the Russian emancipation movement. And the 1990s as a whole pose the question of what the French Revolution has given to the peoples of Europe and the world. But, of course, this is not just about dates. The summing up of historical results is unavoidably linked to the question: “Where are we going?” History is a view of the past from the future, a view of what has already happened from the point of view of some concept of “norm,” “law,” or “code”—which elevates that which has occurred to the level of historical fact, compelling us to perceive certain events as meaningful. We should add to this that the basis of historiography lies in the idea that the historical process is governed by laws. But the very idea of law-governed events belongs to scientific thought as a whole and is also subject to change. In its unconscious, popular (or, one might say, everyday scientific) form, which belongs less to the realm of ideas as it does to the scientists’ psychology, the concept of law-governed processes was formulated under the influence of achievements in the natural sciences in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a time of rapid advances in chemistry and physics. One of the fundamental differences between chemistry and alchemy is that alchemical reactions were essentially perceived as a mystery insofar as the effect does not proceed automatically from a cause, but can only occur through the coincidence of certain mysterious circumstances. Such a reaction is unique and unrepeatable. As in art, the master passes on his experience and his knowledge of techniques to the pupil. But simple mastery of those techniques is not sufficient to produce “the philosopher’s stone.” That requires something more. And so failures did not discourage alchemists, just as losses do not stop gamblers. Chemistry, on the other hand, was founded on the idea of simple law-­ governed processes. A chemical reaction is similar to a mathematical formula: what is written on the left side, the parts of a reaction, can be the cause of one and only one effect or result, which is written on the right side. In a test tube, events proceed through time, but the description of those events recorded on a piece of paper has a purely spatial character: there where the result of the process is monosemically predetermined, time for all practical purposes ceases to play a role. These two features—

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the replicability of the process and the predictability of the result—came to be seen as inherent qualities of causality itself. Transferring this conception of causality onto history, which has its roots in the Renaissance, had two important consequences. First, history began to be perceived as a view of the past from the future. A link was established between a story about the past and an image of the “result.” History and utopia become two links in a single chain. Second, there emerged the concept of an ideal model of historical development, a “correct” resolution to the problem of history. Peoples were presented as pupils attempting to solve one and the same problem. Some solved it in a way very close to the ideal algorithm, while others made mistakes; some found themselves in elementary school, while other advanced far ahead. The European Enlightenment in the works of Voltaire and Condorcet defined the vector of historical development as the movement from the darkness of ignorance to the light of truth and enlightenment. As a result, the concept of history was inseparably linked to the idea of progress. The relative place of this or that fact of world history or of entire national cultures on the abstract scale of “superstition—enlightenment” determined how progressive it was. Certain aspects of the scale could and did change, acquiring different interpretations in the work of Hegel or the historians of the Restoration, but the concept of a single historical staircase the upper steps of which were more advanced than the lower steps remained an unavoidable feature of the scholarly approach to history. The emergence of Darwinism and the model of evolution that was derived from it continued to push historiography in the same developmental direction, but with important correctives. While Enlightenment thinkers saw in history the result of conscious efforts by “ignorant” or “enlightened” individuals, nineteenth-century historians began to highlight the significance of objective factors that exceeded the will or consciousness of the individual. Evolution was seen as an expedient but at the same time unconscious process that took place through people but indifferent to their will. From Enlightenment thinkers through the German philosophers—first and foremost, Hegel—to Teilhard de Chardin, one can trace the concept of historical meaning as the movement from unconsciousness to consciousness. Consciousness was understood, however, as the result of an act of self-awareness. Consciousness represented the capacity of a system that has achieved the highest point of development in the thinking subject to

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be aware of its own inescapable laws, but not of moments of choice. And so, the act of self-awareness is conceived as the end of history; but if we understand consciousness as involving the choice of a path, then self-­ awareness turns out to be the beginning of an entirely new stage of history. And so, the concept of “scientific history” has amassed ideas and discoveries as well as habits and prejudices, which together formed a certain complex of ideas the origin of which has been forgotten and its internal contradictions smoothed over. The struggle against Romantic conceptions of history, which opposed the idea of history as a law-governed process to the activity of discrete individuals, pushed historians to conflate objectivity with faceless, unconscious historical processes. This left its mark not only on the historical thinking of Hegel and the historians of the Renaissance but also on the various forms of economic materialism. To counteract them, Marx and Engels, already in their “Thesis on Feuerbach,” formulated the idea of an inverse relationship between economic processes and the spiritual life of a society, pointing out the active participation of the latter in the historical process, alongside the baseline nature of the economy. The relative youth of the humanities, which began only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to assume the qualities of a discipline—investigating its own methods, paying attention to its techniques of scholarly description, critically evaluating its accumulated experience, and searching for its place in the general system of disciplines—has led to a situation in which the influence of material factors on spiritual ones and of objective processes on their subjective expression has been subjected to repeated and profound investigation, while opposing movements have either attracted only late followers of Romantic methodologies or treated those questions in a purely declaratory manner. And so, for example, if we were to limit ourselves to Russia, we could point to a paradoxical situation: it appears self-evident that the historian can be a dilettante in questions of historical psychology or linguistics. The same could be said of other “human sciences.” The history of social institutions, of the struggle of social forces and ideological tendencies, appears to have replaced the history of people, relegating them to the role of extras in the global drama of humankind. While their significance is, of course, not denied, it is like a theater program that lists next to each character the names of several actors who could play this or that role within the play with equal success. “History chose N to play a given role, but the course of history would not have changed had Z played the role. The changes that would have been

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introduced into the role by another actor are treated as incidental insofar as history is concerned only with law-governed processes.” While few people today would formulate their thoughts in this way, the basis of the method involves assembling an eclectic inventory of the individual qualities of historical figures, like coloring in by hand all the black and white plates found in old journals. Moreover, even in the study of “people in history,” scientific methods more often than not refuse to pay attention to the “random” or the “individual.” It is assumed that in order to become an object of historical analysis, an individual must be viewed as a “representative”—of the boyar opposition or the landed gentry, of the Baroque or the Romantic movements. That which makes an individual distinct from such “representatives” is situated outside the discipline of history and, in the best-case scenario, is assigned to specialists in psychopathology or relegated to the murky realm of “individual peculiarities.” And so, the discipline of history opposes the law governed to the random, and declares its object of study to be the former, to which belong such “objective processes” as the development of manufacturing, technological progress, social struggles, the history of political conflicts, and so on. To the latter belongs that which has recently come to be referred to as the “human factor.” But this has not led to a questioning of the equal sign between the concepts of the “subjective” and the “random.” One cannot, however, fail to notice that regularities in history (against the backdrop of regularities dominating in other strata of the world’s structure) behave in somewhat unexpected ways and often present us with paradoxes that are very difficult to explain. A law-governed process that develops over time can be viewed as a narrative text. It is certainly no coincidence that the image of historical narrative has left its mark on our everyday understanding of history, for there exists a relationship of similitude between the chain of real events organized in a cause and effect relationship that lies at the basis of historical regularity and the chain of narrative episodes organized according to the laws of language and the logic of storytelling. Moreover, in every coherent text, just as in any law-governed process, a surplus develops: the more we have seen, the easier it is to predict the trajectory of what is to come. In the field of history, however, the level of unpredictability in regard to events that have yet to occur is extremely low. The results of present-day futurology, even when supported by high-speed statistical analysis, are not much more reliable than the predictions of the Delphic oracles. Such a

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situation is possible only when confounding factors from the outside are introduced into a system that is developing according to internal law-­ governed processes. But those factors introduced from the outside function as chance in relation to the system, and so to acknowledge their constant influence on the result of the process would require paying attention to chance, which is excluded from the list of “historical factors,” and would, it seems, rupture our faith in the very idea of a law-governed history. When in the 1830s European historians declared that the object of history was the study of historical law-governed processes, Nikolai Polevoy, with a neophyte’s enthusiasm, gave himself over to this idea, “like one who’s lost his path / And is directed to go another way” (Pushkin 2000, 55).1 In response, Pushkin, with his usual combination of sobriety and depth, wrote: “Don’t say: it could not have been otherwise. If that were true, then the historian would be like an astronomer and the events of the life of humankind would be predicted in calendars, like solar eclipses. But Providence is not algebra. The human mind, as in the folk expression, is not a prophet but a diviner, who sees the general course of things and can extract from it profound suppositions, which are often in time confirmed, but it cannot predict chance—the powerful and instantaneous weapon of Providence” (Pushkin 1959–1962, VI, 324).2 It is not just the introduction of confounding factors that affects the predictability of historical processes, however. We must discuss here the fundamentally distinct nature of those law-governed processes that take place in history. One can distinguish two types of process in the movement of history. (Of course, this distinction is relative; in real life, these two types intersect and merge with each other.) Processes of the first type are driven by spontaneous laws and are anonymous; that is, people participate in them but are deprived of any choice. And so, this or that individual takes part in the development of language or in the history of economic relationships, but he or she does not create the situation, and the choice of behavior is not dependent on the individual. The other processes take place through the consciousness of individuals and with the help of that consciousness. Here individuals have the opportunity to choose their behavior and invariably align their actions with an image of the goal, a concept of the result. These two types of historical movement also have different relationships to the problem of predictability. For example, the dynamics of demographic development, which plays such an important role in history, belong to domains that are relatively predictable. Predictions in the field of technological development are characterized by a significant

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degree of reliability, whereas in many spheres of socio-political or military activity, the difficulty of predicating is linked to a lack of information regarding the current state of things and, as a result, is not based on principles. In addition, prediction in the realm of art, and generally in all realms associated with individual creativity, is a task of an entirely different order of difficulty. Moreover, even within the creative activity of the individual, there is a deep divide when we speak of the discovery of law-­ governed processes that are unknown to man but that exist before man makes them known in the form of scientific discoveries and the technologies created on the basis of those discoveries, for which the level of predictability turns out to be rather high. There are many instances in the history of science when a discovery was predicted long before the discovery was scientifically possible. No less important are those instances in which one and the same discovery is independently made by different scientists. The same can be said of technology. However, in the field of art, both prediction and the simultaneous creation of identical objects are virtually impossible. Let’s imagine the following thought experiment: the inventor of the loom or the astronomer who discovered a new comet dies in childhood, before making their discovery. It is perfectly obvious that these discoveries or inventions would have eventually been made by someone else. They may have happened sooner or later, but the course of history would not be affected by this. However, if Dante, Pushkin, or Dostoevsky had died in childhood, not only would their works never have been written, but the entire course of Italian and Russian—and, in the end, European—history would have been altered. One can say that in those realms of history where individuals play the role of large particles within the Brownian movement of gigantic, supra-individual processes, the laws of causality appear in their simplest, one might say, most mechanistic forms. But where history appears as an enormous cluster of alternatives, decision-making demands the intellectual strength and will of the individual, requiring us to search for new and more complex forms of causality. Indeed, we need to search for new models of causality rather than return to Romantic formulas of genius as a “lawless comet” or to vague discussions regarding the specificity of artistic creation, which supposedly does not lend itself to the “deadening” analysis of new Salieris. First of all, we must point out that this is a general scholarly problem, rather than one that concerns art alone. A tunnel is being carved out from both sides. At the same time that scholars working in the humanities and,

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in particular, in the semiotics of culture are searching for regularities in cultural processes and attempting to re-think the nature of anti-entropic mechanisms of history, powerful explosions can be heard at the other end of the tunnel, as represented by the work of the Nobel Laureate chemist and physicist, a Belgian of Russian origin, Ilya Prigogine; his work is dedicated to the study of irreversible processes in chemistry and physics and to the role of chance and unpredictability in the structure of the world as such. Our picture of the world acquires an unprecedented level of complexity, and art history, cultural studies, and even the humanities as a whole, are being transformed from the scientific periphery into a generally applicable methodological polygon. A kind of castling is taking place. Causalities, as known to us from mechanics, which were illustrated by the reversibility of dominant law-governed processes and excluded chance from the realm of scientific observation or entirely abstracted it in the realm of statistics, were claimed to represent the structure of the world as a whole, while the “capricious” sphere of individual creativity was charitably relegated to the corner among the rarities and monstrosities in the world’s museum of curiosities. Won’t our customary understanding of law-governed processes turn out to be in the near future like Newton’s physics, a particular case, and that which was on the periphery will be discovered to be the universal structuring principle? History stands before us not as a rolled-up ball of endless thread but as a cascade of spontaneous living matter. Within that cascade there collide mechanisms designed to increase entropy and, as a result, limit choice, reducing alternative situations to an informational zero, and mechanisms designed to increase the number of alternatives, that is, the moments of choice, moments when it is impossible to predict the course of development. Here the intelligence and personality of the individual come into play in making the choice. These are “decisive moments,” according to the poet Tyutchev, or moments of bifurcation, according to Prigogine and Stengers.3 As a result, human intelligence not only passively reflects an exterior reality but is also an active agent in the life of history and the universe. Hence the historical and universal roles of culture as the collective intelligence of humankind. Hence the role of culturology. History is not a unilineal process but a multi-factored stream. When a point of bifurcation is reached, movement appears to stop so as to permit contemplation over which path to take. Allow us to cite Prigogine’s and Stengers’ description of comparable phenomena in the field of chemistry, when “two new stable solutions emerge” at the bifurcation point: “Thus a

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new question: Where will the system go when we reach the bifurcation point? We have here a ‘choice’ between two possibilities” (1984, 161). At that moment in the historical process the intellectual abilities of the individual come into play, allowing him or her to make a choice. Although powerless during the “normal” course of history, these factors turn out to be decisive at those moments when the system is “contemplating a choice.” But once they have interfered with the general course of history, they immediately lend an irreversible character to the changes they’ve wrought. Within a retrospective description, these changes inevitably appear as the only possible direction, the “it could not have been otherwise,” to which Pushkin objected. Regarding dissymmetry in nature, a phenomenon which Louis Pasteur saw as the essence of living matter but one that disturbed the geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky4 and which is still not fully explained, Prigogine and Stengers write: “One common answer to this question is that [dissymmetry] comes from a unique event that has by chance favored one of the two possible outcomes” (1984, 163). In this respect, one could say that, insofar as chance enters the historical process, in particular, in relation to conscious decision-making undertaken by intelligent beings, then the history of humankind can be seen as a profoundly unique phenomenon in the development of the universe as a whole, and, perhaps, as a stage in that development. One can assume that in the future the sphere of active participation of human intelligence in traditionally spontaneous processes will only increase. The nature of the historical process and of historical thinking will change accordingly. Using biological data but posing questions that are of crucial importance for all scholarly disciplines studying evolution, Prigogine points out that near points of bifurcation (moments when future development can with equal probability go in several different directions), there is an apparatus of fluctuation, which involves the rejection of some variants and the selection of others. This liberates evolution from automation and allows Prigogine and Stengers to formulate the following conclusion: “It also seems remarkable that irreversibility emerges, so to speak, from instability […] It is because the future is not contained in the present and that we go from the present to the future that the arrow of time is associated with the transition from present to future” (1984, 277); the future is probably contained within the present as one possibility. The “iron-clad scenario,” the dream of the director Eisenstein, is not a law for evolutionary systems, including history. One of the results of the

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general turn in scientific thinking is that historians have begun to show interest not in events in and of themselves but against the backdrop of all the unrealized possibilities. The paths not taken are for the historian as real as the paths taken. And that which led to the selection of one path and the non-selection of others, beginning with the particle of sand that changed the direction of the cascade, becomes historical fact. But, of course, the concept of a moment of fluctuation that is navigated by individuals in accordance with their understanding of the world, their belonging to a cultural tradition, and their inclusion within a socio-semiotic complex now occupies a central position in the realm of history. Clio is no longer conceived as a passenger on a train that is traveling along a track from one point to another, but as a traveler moving from one crossroads to another and selecting which path to take. It is no coincidence that such an approach has appeared precisely in our time. It is linked not only to the general development of concepts in the natural sciences but also to the specific nature of our age. A time of “endings” is a time of reckoning. We stand at a boundary from which we are taking stock of the previous development of the world. The desire to understand the past forms not only informs the historian’s work but is also a real (emotional) need of the people of our time. The point, however, is not to find a certain formula gleaned from some thinker of the past (we see how people search for a “key” in the work of the Slavophiles, or of Pyotr Chaadaev, Nikolai Berdyaev, or Teilhard de Chardin), but to understand that the history of evolution is not a formula but a mystery, the riddle of history. There is one more thing to consider. Introducing into the theory of evolution the concept of decision-making, that is, of moments at which automatic predictability ceases to function, introduces another element into the historian’s arsenal. The idea that spontaneous processes in which people act as the instruments of historical regularities are the only real ones in history pushes the question of moral responsibility outside the boundaries of science. Karamzin considered this naïve and “unscientific.” This question returns no longer with a moralizing aura but as one of the most important components of culture, powerfully influencing the choice of humanity’s path into the future. Archaic symbols condense thousands of years of human experience. Closed figures, such as the circle, triangle, and square, symbolize higher superhuman powers; the cross and the crossroads already in Sanskrit texts

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signified choice, fate, and the foundations of humanity: reason and ­conscience. The crossroads represents choice to the traveler. Clio now stands at the crossroads. (1988)

Notes 1. The first citation is taken from lines spoken by Salieri in Pushkin’s short play Mozart and Salieri (1830) and clearly alludes to the following comment made by Pushkin regarding Polevoy’s History of the Russian People: “Mr. Polevoy was forcibly struck by the merits of Barante and Thierry and followed their line of thought with the boundless enthusiasm of a young neophyte. Captivated by the fact that truth brought before us in the artless simplicity of a chronicle had the vivid quality of fiction, he fanatically denied the existence of any other kind of history” (Pushkin 1986, 241). (Translator’s note). 2. This citation is taken from Pushkin’s essay “On the Second Volume of Polevoy’s History of the Russian People,” also written in 1830 (Pushkin 1959–1962, VI, 321–324). (Translator’s note). 3. Prigogine and Stengers define the concepts of bifurcation and fluctuation in the following way: “Whenever we reach a bifurcation point, deterministic description breaks down. The type of fluctuation present in the system will lead to the choice of the branch it will follow. Crossing a bifurcation is a stochastic process, such as the tossing of a coin” (1984, 177). 4. See Vernadsky (2007, 117–121).

References Prigogine, Ilya and Isabelle Stengers. 1984. Order out of Chaos. Man’s New Dialogue with Nature. Toronto: Bantam Books. Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich. 1959–1962. Sobranie sochinenii v 10 tomakh, D. D. Blagoi et al. (eds.). Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura. Pushkin, Alexander. 1986. Pushkin on Literature, Tatyana Wolfe (ed.). London: The Athlone Press. Pushkin, Alexander. 2000. Mozart and Salieri, Nancy K. Anderson (trans.). In The Little Tragedies, Nancy K. Anderson (ed.), 55–65. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Vernadsky, Vladimir I. 2007. Geochemistry and the Biosphere. Frank B.  Salisbury (ed.); Olga Barush (trans.). Santa Fe: Synergetic Press.

CHAPTER 14

A Divine Pronouncement or a Game of Chance? The Law-Governed and the Accidental in the Historical Process

When historians are working with specific source material, they tend to be satisfied with Leopold von Ranke’s formula, that the goal of history is to reconstruct the past. Despite all the naïve clarity of the task, however, its execution turns out to be extremely difficult, if not generally impossible. The concept of “reconstructing the past” assumes the existence of procedures for explaining and collecting facts and for establishing regular associations between them that are applicable to all fields. Moreover, facts are assumed to be something primary, that is, existing outside the historian and before being subjected to analysis. They are given. But where does this leave the historian? A historian is fated to deal with texts. Standing between an event “as it was” and the historian is a text, which fundamentally alters the scholarly Originally published as “Iz’yavlenie Gospodne ili azartnaia igra? (Zakonomernoe i sluchajnoe v istoricheskom protsesse),” Alma Mater 3 (8), 1992: 4–5. The translation here is from Iurii Lotman, Istoria i tipologia russkoi kul’tury, 342– 349. St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo–SPb, 2002. J. Lotman (*) University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia © The Author(s) 2019 Juri Lotman - Culture, Memory and History, ed. by M. Tamm https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14710-5_14

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situation. A text is always created by someone and represents a past event translated into another language. One and the same reality differently encoded will yield different—often contradictory—texts. Extracting a fact from a text or an event from a story about an event requires an act of decoding. And so, whether this is acknowledged or not, the historian begins with the semiotic manipulation of his initial material—the text. If these operations are carried out unconsciously and the researcher, satisfied with the authenticity of the document, considers that his or her knowledge of the language and intuitive sense of authenticity, developed over the course of his or her professional life, are sufficient for understanding the text, then, as a rule, the historical audience is replaced by a “natural consciousness,” which upon inspection turns out to be the consciousness of the historian himself or herself with all the attendant historical-cultural prejudices. From the point of view of different cultures and genres, and even within the borders of a single culture, the same event can be judged worthy or not of being recorded in writing and thus transformed into a text. And so, for example, in Scandinavian medieval chronicles and in Russian annals, military confrontations, disputes, and bloody events are recorded. But if nothing like that happened, then it was considered that no events had occurred. In Icelandic sagas and in other similar texts, they say that “everything was calm,” while in Russian annals, the chronicler would enter the year and then either leave an empty space or write, “It was peaceful.” The idea of what constitutes a historical event is the product of a given type culture and is itself an important typological indicator. And so, when historians pick up a text, they must distinguish between what constitutes an event from their point of view and what was an event worthy of remembering from the point of view of the author of the text and his or her contemporaries. In this way, historians find themselves from the very start in a strange position. In other disciplines, researchers begin with facts, while historians arrive at facts as the result of analysis and not as an initial point of departure. Things are even more complicated, however, when it comes to explaining law-governed processes. The fact that a text is the point of departure for historical research has various consequences that directly influence the way in which we represent the historical connections between events. Every text is first and foremost an utterance in a natural language and, as a result, is invariably organized according to the laws structuring a given language. However, in the article

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“Quest for the Essence of Language” (1965), Roman Jakobson, while highlighting elements of iconicity in natural language, noted the tendency of listeners to perceive formal links as rich in content and to impose the structure of the language onto the structure of the object. Even more essential are the laws for textual construction on a super-­ phrasal level, that is, the laws of rhetoric. As soon as we move beyond the confines of the phrase, into more expansive units, constructing a “correct” text presumes a narrative, which has its own logical laws. In order to discuss an event, it is necessary to organize that discussion according to the laws of narrative logic, that is, to place episodes in a defined sequence, to insert the narrative into extra-textual reality, and to reconstruct synchronic events, which, perhaps, have no connection to one another, in a sequential and coherent chain. Finally, at the highest level, a text must be ideologically encoded. The laws of the political, religious, and philosophical order, genre codes, and representations of etiquette, which the historian must reconstruct on the basis of those very texts, occasionally falling into a logical vicious circle, all lead to supplemental encoding. The difference in the level of consciousness and in the goals of the author of the text and of the historian as reader of the text creates a high threshold for decoding. The desire to overcome the many challenges listed above conditioned to a certain extent the emergence of a new direction in French historiography over the past 50 years, which is today referred to as the Annales School, or as New History or history of “la longue durée.” The direct impulse behind the emergence of this new direction in scholarly research was the obvious crisis in the positivist vein of “political history,” which began in the second half of the nineteenth century, as well as the theoretical paucity of the field. The desire to liberate history from “the actions of rulers” and the “biographies of great men” generated interest in the life of the masses and in anonymous historical processes. When listing the precursors of this view of history, Jacques Le Goff mentions Voltaire, Chateaubriand, Guizot, and Michelet. To that list we would add Lev Tolstoy, who insisted that true history takes place in private life and in unconscious mass movements, and who never tired of ridiculing apologias of “great men.” Associated with this new direction is the slogan, “Human history without humans.” The requirement to study the faceless, collective historical impulses that direct the actions of the masses, who are not conscious of the forces influencing them, defines the novel orientation of this school,

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which led these historians to venture far outside the usual research topics. This movement introduced a breath of fresh air into the discipline of history and enriched it with a series of studies that have become classics in the field. Nevertheless, not all the principles of this school can be accepted without objection. History is not only a conscious process, but neither is it only an unconscious process. It exists in the mutual tension between the two. If “political history” disregarded one side of the binary historical process, then the new history has disregarded the other side. Any dynamic process that involves human beings vacillates between the pole of constant slow change (on which the consciousness and will of the individual have no effect; in fact, they are usually not observable to contemporaries as their time frame exceeds that of a single generation) and the pole of conscious human activity accomplished through the exertion of individuals’ will and intellect. To separate the one from the other—like North from South—is impossible. Their opposition is a condition of their existence. Just as one can distinguish anonymous mass processes in the brilliant individuality of a Byron, one can find elements of creative singularity in the actions and personalities of individual participants in the “mass cultural movement” that was Byronism in early nineteenth-century Europe. Everything that is done by humans and with their participation cannot fail to belong, to some extent, to the anonymous process of history and cannot fail to belong to some extent to an individual source. This is determined by the very essence of the individual’s relationship to culture—at once isomorphic to the whole and necessarily only a part of that whole. The varying degree of participation of unconscious human effort at various levels of a single historical process is responsible for the different valuations of chance, on the one hand, and of the creative possibilities of the individual, on the other. The task of “liberating history from great men” can turn into a history without creativity or a history without thought and freedom. The freedom of thought or the freedom of will represents the possibility of choosing a path. In this regard, Hegel and the Annales School historians, while antipodes in so many respects, come surprisingly close. The historiosophy of Hegel is built on the concept of movement toward freedom as the goal of the historical process. But the primordially predestined quality of the goal removes any question of freedom, and this clearly follows from the arguments of the German philosopher. It is no coincidence that Hegel is convinced that the world of reason and of self-conscious will is not left to chance.1 For Hegel, the spirit

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r­ ealizes itself through great men, while for the new historians, anonymous forces governing historical development manifest themselves through unconscious mass phenomena. In both cases, historical action is devoid of choice. Behind the methodology of the Annales School, one can see that great scientific mindset built on the conviction that where determinism ends, so too does science. From Laplace’s notorious demon to Einstein’s conviction that “God does not play dice,” we see a desire to free the world from chance or, at least, to banish it from the realm of science. We have already discussed the deformations to which extra-textual reality is subjected when transformed into a textual source for the historian. We have also discussed the ways historians attempt to avoid this danger. Another source of the deformation of reality occurs not at the hand of the author of the source document but as a result of the actions of the historian-interpreter. History develops along the vector of time. Its direction is defined by movement from the past to the future. The historian, however, views the texts under investigation from the present to the past, pretending that the essence of the chain of events is not altered when we look at them from the direction of the vector of time or from the opposite point of view. In his seminal work The Historian’s Craft, Marc Bloch gave symmetrical titles to two of the chapters, Understanding the Present by the Past and Understanding the Past by the Present, as if to underscore the symmetry in the direction of time for the historian. Moreover, he believed that a retrospective view allows the historian to distinguish the essential from the accidental. Comparing the historian’s reconstruction of the past with film, Bloch presents the following metaphor: “But in the film which he is examining, only the last picture remains quite clear. In order to reconstruct the faded features of the others, it behooves him first to unwind the spool in the opposite direction from that in which the pictures were taken” (Bloch 1992, 38–39). We can see immediately that all the frames in this film except the last one turn out to be entirely predictable and, as a result, entirely superfluous. But this is not the point. It is more important to note that this deforms the very essence of the historical process. History is an asymmetrical, irreversible process. If we use Bloch’s image, it would be a very strange film that, when run in the opposite direction, did not lead us to the initial frame. This is the core of our objection. According to Bloch— and this is the natural consequence of a retrospective view—an event from

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the past must be viewed by the historian as not only the most probable event but as the only possible one. If we begin with the idea that a historical event is always the result of the selection of one out of a number of alternatives and that in history the same conditions do not yield the same results, then we need different methods by which to approach the material. This requires a different type of historical method, according to which the chosen paths would be presented surrounded by bundles of unrealized possibilities. Let us imagine a film that portrayed the life of a person from birth to old age. After viewing the film retrospectively, we would say that this person had only one possible path and that, with an ironclad determinism, this path ended exactly how it was supposed to end. The falsity of this view becomes evident when we view the frames moving forward, at which point the film becomes the story of unrealized possibilities, and in order to expose something profound about the essence of life, a series of parallel alternative films would be required. It is possible that in one version the hero dies at 16 on the barricades, while in another, at 16 he writes a denunciation of his neighbor and sends it to the secret police. While hiding from the Jacobin tribunal, the French philosopher Condorcet spent several weeks before his suicide working on a book about the progression of history, which was filled with all the optimism of the Enlightenment. Bloch found himself in a similar situation as a member of the anti-fascist Resistance. His execution prevented him from completing the work cited above, which completely ignores the question of individual action and responsibility as historical categories. This is further proof that ideas have staying power and exhibit a propensity to reproduce themselves. They are more conservative than the behavior of individuals and are slower to change under the influence of circumstances. And so, history is an irreversible (nonsynchronous) process. In order to analyze the essence of such processes and to understand what they mean when applied to history, it is extremely important to consider the analysis of such phenomena put forward by Ilya Prigogine, who studied dynamic processes in chemistry, physics, and biology. His works are profoundly revolutionary for scientific thinking as a whole, as they introduce chance events into the field of science and, moreover, reveal their functional place in the general dynamics of the world. Dynamic processes, which are produced from non-equilibrium conditions, take place along a determinate curve. However, in accordance with the distance from entropic points of equilibrium, the movement of such

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processes approaches critical points at which the predictability of that movement breaks down. (Prigogine calls these bifurcation points, from the Latin bifurcus, meaning “two-pronged” or “split,” indicating that this point offers alternative continuations of the curve.) At such points the process reaches a moment at which a clear prediction of the future becomes impossible. The subsequent development of the process is the manifestation of one out of several equally plausible alternatives. One can only indicate that a shift is possible into one of several different states. At that moment, a decisive role can be played by chance, but with the understanding of chance as a phenomenon from another causal series, not as self-­ originating. As Prigogine and Stengers explain, “Self-organization processes in far-from-equilibrium conditions correspond to a delicate interplay between chance and necessity, between fluctuations [from the Latin fluctus, or ‘swirling,’ ‘tempest’; Horace uses this word to signify storms: “O navis, referent in mare to novi fluctus!”—J. L.] and deterministic laws. We expect that near a bifurcation point, fluctuations or random elements would play an important role, while between bifurcations the deterministic aspects would become dominant” (1984, 176). In this way, the accidental and the law-governed cease to be antithetical, but appear as two possible states of a given object. When moving along a determinate field, the object is a point within a linear development, but when it finds itself in a fluctuating space, it functions as a continuum of potential possibilities, with chance playing the role of a trigger mechanism. While contributing to a general theory of dynamic processes, Prigogine’s ideas can also be very productively applied to historical movement. They can be easily extrapolated to the facts of world history with its complex entanglement of spontaneous unconscious movements and individual, conscious ones. In 1929 the physicist Leo Szilard published an article with the declarative title “On the Decrease of Entropy in a Thermodynamic System by the Intervention of Intelligent Beings,” signifying that at bifurcation points not only does the mechanism of chance come into play but also the mechanism of conscious choice, which becomes a very important objective element in the historical process. Understanding this in a new light is essential to historical semiotics in order to analyze how a historical individual faced with a decision sees the world. In a certain sense, this is close to what the new historians refer to as mentalité. However, taking into account the results of their research in this field and comparing them with those of Russian scholars, such as Vladimir Toporov, Boris Uspenskij, Vyacheslav

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Ivanov, Andrei Zalizniak, Alexander Piatigorsky, Elena Paducheva, and Margarita Lekomtseva, among many others, in reconstructing various ethno-cultural types of consciousness, convince us that the historical semiotics of culture represents the most promising way forward. When analyzing the historical process as a vector, bifurcation points appear as historical moments at which the tension between opposing structural poles is at its highest, and the entire system exits the state of equilibrium. At such moments, the behavior of certain individuals, and that of the masses, ceases to be automatically predictable, and determinism is relegated to a secondary plane. These moments force us to think about historical movement not as a trajectory but as a continuum, capable of being resolved in a potential series of variants. These nodes, which possess a low level of predictability, are moments of revolution and radical historical shift. The choice of a path depends on a set of random circumstances, but, to an even greater extent, on the consciousness of the actors. It is no coincidence that in such moments words, speeches, and propaganda assume great historical significance. If before a choice is made there exists a situation of indeterminacy, then after a choice is made, a fundamentally new situation emerges, for which the choice made has already become essential, a situation that functions as a given for any subsequent movement. What is chance before the choice is made becomes determinate afterward. A retrospective orientation intensifies this determinacy. For all subsequent movement, that choice becomes the first link in a new chain of law-governed processes. Let us examine the behavior of the individual. As a rule, such behavior is actualized according to several stereotypes (traditions, laws, rules of etiquette, etc.) that define “normal” behavior and predict the course of an individual’s actions. However, the number of stereotypes and their grouping in a given society is significantly greater than the number that is actualized by any one individual. Some of the possible choices are fundamentally rejected, others turn out to be less desirable, while still others are viewed as possible variants. At the moment when historical, social, and psychological tension reaches a high point and when the individual’s view of the world dramatically shifts (as a rule, under conditions of great emotional tension), then the individual can change stereotypes, as if leaping into another behavioral orbit, which is entirely unpredictable under “normal” conditions. Of course, it may be “unpredictable” for a given individual, but entirely predictable in another sense. For example, this individual

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might assume the behavioral norms of a theatrical hero, a Roman, or a historical personage. For historians who imagine this individual to be like a character from a classical drama, always behaving so as to preserve “unity of character,” it was natural to imagine a sans-culotte exactly as he was portrayed by Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities. Hence their great surprise in discovering that the people who stormed the Bastille and took part in the September Massacres were on the whole upstanding members of the bourgeoisie, of average means, and respectable fathers of families. Of course, if we examine the behavior of the crowd at that moment, we discover a certain repeatability in the fact that many individuals altered their behavior, choosing what in other circumstances would have been a completely unpredictable “orbit.” What is predictable in average numbers for the “crowd” turns out to be unpredictable for the individual. From this we might conclude that individual behavior is characterized by a low level of predictability, which distinguishes it from mass behavior. Such an assumption, however, seems premature. The historian knows empirically that the behavior of the crowd is often no more predictable than that of a single individual. Of significantly greater interest in such cases is the notion of Prigogine and Stengers that, in the vicinity of bifurcation points, a system has the tendency to shift to a regime of individual behavior. The closer to the norm, the more predictable the behavior of the system. There is, however, yet another side to this problem. Where it is possible to predict the next link in a chain of events, one could claim that no choice among equally probable variants is available. But consciousness always involves choice. And so, when we exclude choice (and unpredictability, which is perceived by the outside observer as chance), we are excluding consciousness from the historical process. But this distinguishes historical law-governed processes from all other types, and so it is impossible to understand them when we exclude the conscious activity of people, which includes semiotic activity. Creative thinking is especially illustrative in this respect. Creative consciousness makes possible the emergence of a text that is unpredictable according to automatic algorithms. The low level of probability, for example, that Byronic romanticism would have appeared without a Byron is, however, a determining factor only at the moment of its emergence. Moreover, in the realm of culture, the more unexpected a given phenomenon is, the greater its influence on the culture will be following

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its emergence. An “improbable” text becomes a reality, and the subsequent development of the culture proceeds from that, as from a fact. Its ­unpredictability is erased and the originality of the genius is transformed into the routine behavior of imitators, just as Byron was followed by Byron wannabes, and Beau Brummel, by dandies all across Europe. In a retrospective reading, the dramatic discontinuity of the process is removed, and Byron is represented as “the first Byron imitator,” the follower of his followers, or as often referred to in historical studies of culture, their “precursor.” Friedrich Schlegel, in his Philosophical Fragments, included the dictum, “The historian is a prophet looking backward.” This wise observation gives us a new way to differentiate between the position of the diviner predicting the future and the historian “predicting” the past. No diviner or soothsayer would describe the future monosemically as something inevitable and having only one possible outcome. Prediction is either built on the principle of two-phase relativity (of the variety “if you do this, then that will happen”) or it is formulated with deliberate unpredictability so that additional interpretations are necessary. In either case, the prediction will always contain a reservoir of unpredictability, of inexhaustible choice among several alternatives. The historian, as someone “looking backward,” differs from the soothsayer, in that the historian “removes” indeterminacy; for the historian, things that did not occur de facto could not have occurred. The historical process loses its indeterminacy, that is, it ceases to be informative. Therefore, we can conclude that the necessity of relying on texts leaves the historian unavoidably facing a double distortion. On the one hand, the syntagmatic directionality of the text transforms the event by placing it into a narrative structure while, on the other hand, the contradictory directionality of the historian’s gaze deforms the written object. (1992)

Note 1. As Hegel states in his Introduction to the Philosophy of History: “Spirit does not toss itself about in the external play of chance occurrences; on the contrary, it is that which determines history absolutely, and it stands firm against the chance occurrences which it dominates and exploits for its own purpose” (1988, 58). (Translator’s note)

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References Bloch, Marc. 1992. The Historian’s Craft, Peter Putnam (trans.), Manchester: Manchester University Press. Jakobson, Roman. 1990. “Quest for the Essence of Language.” In his On Language, Linda R. Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston (eds.), 407–421. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 1988. Introduction to the Philosophy of History with Selections from The Philosophy of Right, Leo Rauch (trans.), Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett. Prigogine, Ilya and Isabelle Stengers. 1984. Order out of Chaos. Man’s New Dialogue with Nature. Toronto: Bantam Books. Szilard, Leo. 1964. “On the Decrease of Entropy in a Thermodynamic System by the Intervention of Intelligent Beings.” Systems Research and Behavioral Science 9 (4): 301–310.

CHAPTER 15

Technological Progress as a Culturological Problem

Abrupt changes in a society’s system of scientific and technological concepts occur often in the history of human culture. There are moments, however, when these changes become so far-reaching that they result in the total transformation of peoples’ way of life and of their cultural understandings. Such periods are typically referred to as scientific or technological revolutions. In the early 1960s Thomas Kuhn wrote in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: “Examining the record of past research from the vantage of contemporary historiography, the historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.” He then concludes: “Of course, nothing of quite that sort does occur; […] outside the laboratory everyday affairs usually continue as before” (Kuhn 1970, 111). Only 20  years have passed since then, but today there are few who would subscribe to this good-natured view. There are, of course, constant changes in science and technology that contribute to the slow accumulation of materials for explosions, the echoes of which Originally published as “Tekhnicheskii progress kak kul’turologicheskaia problema,” Trudy po znakovym sistemam 22, 1988: 97–116. The translation here is from Iurii Lotman, Semiosfera, 622–638. St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo–SPb, 2000. J. Lotman (*) University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia © The Author(s) 2019 Juri Lotman - Culture, Memory and History, ed. by M. Tamm https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14710-5_15

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are heard far outside the walls of laboratories and scientists’ offices. Can we say that after the invention of paper or gunpowder or after the scientific mastering of electricity, life “outside the walls of the laboratory” continued along its usual course? Nevertheless, even those changes, the consequences of which have been so great, are only intermediary stages when we look at such vast epochs as the Neolithic revolution, the invention of writing, the invention of printing,1 and the revolution in science and technology we are experiencing today. The changes that took place during those periods had such broad influence that it is impossible to name a single aspect of human history that was not profoundly affected by them. Moreover, those changes fundamentally affected the life of the entire planet, which is a part of the universe; and so, their results have reached far beyond laboratory walls. Studying the effects of these great revolutions today is not merely academic. The desire “to see into the future” is a general human characteristic, which becomes especially acute in periods of crisis. At the same time, we must acknowledge that long-range historical prognoses remain highly unreliable. The reason for this lies in the fact that, on the one hand, the historical development of humankind, as a distinct type of structure, includes mechanisms for cutting out the superfluous. If this were not the case, the historical path of humankind, which is thousands of years old, would have an excess of information and so become completely predictable, fatally excluding any form of agency. On the other hand, the complex nature of the laws of historical causality excludes the possibility of unambiguous predictions, requiring greater caution in building futurological models, which are haunted by alternatives. These circumstances force us to pay particular attention to analogous events from the past. In this way, we can study actual effects. Studying the effects of periods of great crisis, when individuals themselves and their surrounding world are entirely changed under the influence of abrupt revolutionary shifts in the realm of science and technology, leads first and foremost to the conclusion that every time the spatial boundaries of these shifts expands, their temporal limits progressively shrink (that is to say, the changes themselves proceed at a faster pace). This means that—for the average participant—in these events, the experience of these shifts as catastrophes becomes progressively more acute. While issuing a caveat beforehand regarding the schematic nature of any conclusions, which are predicated on the very nature of bounded communication under conditions of notoriously incomplete information, we must

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take note of the revolutionary changes in fields related to the storage and circulation of information. A dramatic increase in informational possibilities was directly reflected in the organization of social labor, while an increase in memory capacity was reflected in the assessment of the results. The most immediate consequences tend to recur: Once in possession of powerful new means of communication, society initially puts them to old ends, thereby broadening its opportunities quantitatively. And so, for example, non-written cultures could not organize a complex administrative apparatus, and therefore needed to limit their mental constructions.2 The advent of writing (of course, in the context of other social and technological innovations) made possible such grandiose projects as the building of cathedrals, pyramids, and other non-utilitarian structures, involving monstrously wasteful expenditures. At the same time, the administrative apparatus was improved, but this also led it to expand beyond the limits of what was socially necessary. Oral memory had a limited capacity, and so, strictly established what was necessary to preserve. What was unnecessary was forgotten. Writing allowed for the preservation of the unnecessary and the infinite expansion of memory capacity. Excavations on the site of the ancient Syrian city of Ebla (from approximately 2000  BCE) have uncovered enormous palace archives of cuneiform tablets. The tablets that have been retrieved and analyzed have to do with the management of the economy, which is in clear disproportion to the relatively modest size of Ebla’s actual production. This was a major agricultural and trading center of its time, and its production and sales activity was, for those times, significant. But its archive was enormous even by present-day standards. The development of archaic bureaucracy was, however, only an immediate consequence of writing. A more profound and directly contradictory consequence of writing, one that introduced fundamental changes into the culture, was the inauguration of an era of individual creativity. Previously, only that which had passed through the censorship of collective memory to become a part of tradition was preserved. The possibility of recording things opened the door to individual creativity, which abruptly altered the status of the individual. From this moment on, civilization would be associated with ideas of individuality and individual creativity. Tradition would be assigned the function of preserving, whereas individuality would become the yeast of history, its dynamic source. Invention became an everyday fact, rapidly accelerating the pace of historical change.

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We can observe a definite parallel between the invention of printing and all the scientific and technical shifts of the Renaissance. A spontaneous economic process led to the formation of early capitalist relationships in Western Europe, and the development of communication technology, improvements in navigation, and the building of roads transformed irregular trading contacts into stable national markets. It is no coincidence that the borders of markets and the borders of states as political entities clearly gravitated toward linguistic borders, nor is the fact that a unified language ends up being an essential feature in the shift from the diverse political borders of the Middle Ages to those stable European borders, which, through all their variations, have persisted through the wars of the modern period. It is precisely in the age of printing that local dialects and sacred languages, such as Latin, Church Slavonic, and classical Arabic, whose borders were neither political nor national but confessional, were replaced by a standard national language. But it is not the purpose of this article to enumerate all the consequences of the shift to the Renaissance. The Renaissance was perceived by the people who lived through it as, primarily, a time of extended (seemingly endless) possibilities. The impossible, unrealizable, and forbidden became possible, realizable, and permitted. The voyage of Ulysses in Canto 26 of Dante’s Inferno is still a daring, heroic, and sinful dream. Having crossed the Atlantic Ocean, Ulysses is shipwrecked off the rocky shores of Purgatory. But Cortès in Lope de Vega’s La Arcadia is already an entirely different kind of hero: “I Cortès […] with my brilliant victories gave to Spain the palm of victory, and to the king, limitless lands” (1777, 206–207). The broadening of possibilities was perceived first and foremost as a numerical increase. For example, improvements in shipbuilding made long-distance voyages possible. Unknown lands were discovered, and the world expanded. Improvements in the technology of casting bronze led not only to the sculptural masterpieces of Donatello, Cellini, and Leonardo da Vinci, but also to improvements in artillery, which, along with the invention of granular gunpowder around 1480 and the production of shots of standard weight and shape, changed the nature of warfare. The significance of these inventions far exceeded their immediate military and technical applications. (Pushkin loved the maxim of Antoine de Rivarol: “L’imprimerie est l’artillerie de la pensée” [The printing press is the artillery of thought]. It is no accident that Pushkin considered ending his drama Scenes from the Times of Chivalry, which was dedicated to the fall of the Middle Ages, with a scene featuring the symbolic victory of gunpowder and printing over the knights’ armor and castles.)

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Printing extended the realm of science, and improvements in the technique of etching, and the invention of copperplate engraving, attributed to Dürer and transformed into a high art by Rembrandt, connected the concepts of “drawing” and “copying.” Uniqueness and mass production were paradoxically combined in the culture of the Renaissance. The atmosphere of rapid progress in science, technology, and culture generated a psychology of optimistic faith in the ominipotence of the human mind and admiration for man’s ingenuity, power, and limitless capabilities. Miranda, the heroine of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, who was raised on an uninhabited island, having contact with no one but her elderly father, exclaims upon catching sight of sailors shipwrecked by a storm (among whom were old and young men, virtuous men, and murderers): “How beauteous mankind is!” (Shakespeare 1966, XV, 172). Deification of the creative powers of the individual had, however, an opposing side: Nature came to be seen as either raw material or as hostile territory to be conquered and remade. Francis Bacon in his utopian novel of 1626, The New Atlantis, depicts an ideal society governed by Solomon’s House, a council of wise men, or a kind of academy of sciences. The father, or head, of Solomon’s House declares: “The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible” (Bacon 1861, 156). The efforts of scientists are directed toward altering the natural order of nature: “And we make by art, in the same orchards and gardens, trees and flowers, to come earlier or later than their seasons, and to come and bear more speedily than by their natural course they do” (159). They also conduct experiments “that thereby we may take light what may be wrought upon the body of man” (159). Also, “By art likewise, we make [animals] greater or taller than their kind is; and contrariwise dwarf them, and stay their growth: we make them more fruitful and bearing than their kind is; and contrariwise barren and not generative” (159) He then makes clear: “Neither do we this by chance, but we know beforehand, of what matter and commixture what kind of those creatures will arise” (159). This desire to expel chance from the world was typical, and Renaissance thinkers hoped to accomplish this with the help of automatized machines, which they showed a marked inclination to design. The spread of clocks, made possible by “the invention of the coiled spring—in 1459(?)—[which] was truly revolutionary for it made possible the manufacture of portable clocks, and soon watches, which gave to every individual something that had never before been possible—the ability to constantly measure time”

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(Delumeau 1967, 200). A sense of time entered the consciousness of individuals and the ideology of the age. Shakespeare’s Prospero, in The Tempest, embodies this sovereignty over the forces of nature and the expulsion of chance from the world. The desire to overcome nature and chance aroused in the Renaissance intellectual an interest in astrology, so that the image of a great scientist was often associated with that of a great sorcerer. Prospero has banished chance, and so knows the future: “The direful spectacle of the wreck […] I have with such provision in mine art so safely ordered” (1966, 27). But, all the same, he notes: “I find my zenith doth depend upon a most auspicious start” (40). It is no coincidence that Doctor Faust, who sold his soul to the devil, became in the popular imagination the incarnation of the Renaissance idea of man’s triumph over nature.3 But in an etching by Rembrandt, Faust is presented as an inquisitive scientist subduing the mysteries of nature. Marlowe’s Faust sells his soul to the devil while dreaming of gigantic projects, such as connecting Europe and Africa by building a bridge over the sea. But Renaissance engineers did in fact accomplish engineering feats that led people to see them as magicians. Between 1391 and 1398, the Stecknitz Canal was dug connecting Lauenburg to the Elbe and opening navigation routes from the Baltic Sea basin to the North Sea, tunnels were dug through the Alps, and rivers were diverted. In 1455  in Bologna, Aristotele Fioravanti moved a 400-ton bell tower 18  meters, and in 1475–1479, while overseeing the construction of the Cathedral of the Dormition in Moscow, he applied a hoist to lift construction materials. In the mechanical fantasies of Leonardo da Vinci, just as in Agostino Ramelli’s engineering encyclopedia Various and Ingenious Machines, published in Paris in 1588, real machines and actual projects mingled with grandiose technological chimeras. The Renaissance laid the foundations for the European civilization that was to follow. It formed the basis of the culture of humanism, with its concept of the value of the individual and its wonderful art. At the same time, new impetus was given to the idea of nationalism, and the medieval universe was replaced by national languages and national cultures, and nation-states, with centralized mechanisms of government, began to form. Improvements were made not only to technological machines but also to the machinery of state. The technology of management—from the bookkeeper’s accounting to the machinery of state power—also underwent revolutionary change. Printing, the construction of roads, and

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improvements in modes of communication by land and sea fundamentally changed peoples’ psychology of communication. But this bright picture assumes a darker tone when we look closer. The Renaissance created its own myth of progress, which was adopted by the Enlightenment, and for a long time defined a scholar’s conception of history. According to this myth, everything dark, fantastic, and violent was the heritage of the Middle Ages, which was responsible for the Inquisition, the racial persecutions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, witch-­ hunts, and bloody religious wars. The Middle Ages produced the fascination with magic, astrology, alchemy, and other “secret arts.” The enlightened and humanist Renaissance was presented as a warrior fighting against those monsters and passing on the torch of reason to the Rationalists and the Enlightenment thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, a number of facts contradict this model. First of all, it should be noted that technological progress immediately instilled not only delight but also horror. (In fact, technological progress was initially associated with military technologies; the word engineer, which was apparently first used toward the end of the sixteenth century by Salomon de Caus, who is credited with discovering the power of steam, signified at the time an inventor of military machines.) This was especially true with regard to artillery, considered an invention of the devil. The great historian of the Renaissance, Francesco Guicciardini, called it the devil incarnate. Ludovico Ariosto saw in it the end of the noble art of war and dreamed of a return to “traditional” weapons. The humanists of the Renaissance cursed the very technology they had invented. They were especially frightened by its “unscrupulousness,” that is, its ability to serve either side. For example, Mohomet II would have been unable to take Constantinople in 1453 if Hungarian engineers hadn’t provided him with artillery. Another dimension, however, frightened the humanists even more. The development of science and technology and of all fields of knowledge did not decrease the irrational unpredictability of life as a whole, but rather increased it (hence the passion with which people of the Renaissance dreamed of rational utopias). Instead of expelling chance from the world, the scientific and technical revolution created a new reality in which, for the individual of the time, unpredictability reigned. Niccolò Machiavelli, one of the greatest minds of the Renaissance, rejected astrology and divine intervention, reducing the fate of the individual to a struggle between chance and will. Great men “owed nothing

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to fortune but the opportunity which gave them matter to be shaped into what form they thought fit” (Machiavelli 1950, 20). “Opportunities gave these men their chance, and their own great qualities enabled them to profit by them” (21). Elsewhere he writes: “Fortune is a woman, and it is necessary, if you wish to master her, to conquer her by force” (94). Machiavelli calls this ability to conquer fortune “high virtue” (virtù), using a word that comes from the Latin virtus, signifying courage, valor, and virtue, to designate the victory over chance, even when that victory was won at the price of successful villainy. The Renaissance was not only an age of Titans, a collection of biographies of individuals such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Dürer, and Erasmus. This was a new age in human relationships and in the organization of thought and everyday life. In the Middle Ages, childhood was not valued, women were feared, iron was esteemed almost as highly as precious metals, and books were the property of monasteries. The Renaissance introduced humanist ideas of education and, in family life, the cult of the child. Women were declared the noblest creations of God, becoming an object of adoration by artists and poets, and were given entrée into learned circles. Popular books and inexpensive etchings entered the life of the average person, and iron products—such as scissors, knives, forks, locks, bolts, and the steel parts for carriages and horses’ harnesses—became a part of everyday life. Carriages raced across the roads of Europe, watches and firearms became the routine accoutrements of the traveler, and sailors now had use of improved navigation devices. But how did the individual experience this rapidly changing world? In the realm of tradition and authority, ecclesiastical and parental power had to give way. The new way of life demanded decisive people with initiative. Talented individuals were needed, and they sprang up everywhere. The “new man” of the Renaissance—for it was primarily he who fell within the historian’s field of vision—felt victorious. His slogan became, “Don’t miss an opportunity.” Even the sorcerer Prospero says: “If now I court not, but omit, my fortunes will ever after droop” (1966, 40). But this philosophy of success also encouraged a spirit of adventure seeking and amorality. Machiavelli could describe with calm satisfaction how Cesare Borgia achieved political success by combining cruelty, cunning, and treachery, destroying his enemies in one fell swoop. But for the average reader, the Renaissance tyrant was represented in the image of Dracula, the hero of a popular German tale. Ten editions appeared in German (two written in low German) about this “one great monster,”

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who ruled at the end of the fifteenth century. This “brochure was widely read, and especially in those circles of readers who did not have private libraries” (Varbanets 1964, 188). In the mirror of popular literature, the Renaissance man had two faces: Faust and Dracula. The rapid change that took place in all aspects of life, in its basic social, moral, and religious values, over the course of two to three generations, which historically speaking is a paltry amount of time, engendered feelings of uncertainty and disorientation in the vast majority of the population, resulting in a sense of fear and encroaching danger. Only this can explain the period’s mass psychology, which is of such interest to historians, as well as the phenomenon of mass hysteria that gripped Western Europe from the end of the fifteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth, and that has yet to be fully explained. Typically, displays of fear, such as witch-hunts, which did not distinguish between Catholic and Protestant countries, stopped at the border of the classical Renaissance. For example, Russia in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries did not know such psychosis; the isolated instances of witch-hunts that occurred in Ukraine were clearly associated with the Renaissance and Baroque spirit of the West, which only confirms our observation.4 This period was full of turbulent social movements. But if historians of ideology were truly interested in the actual class content of these movements, then they would not ignore the psychological forms adopted by the ideas of the time. One cannot forget that ideas are manifested and assume specific meaning not on the pages of annotated scholarly editions of historical documents but in the psychological atmosphere of their time. In the atmosphere of the Renaissance, hope and fear—the limitless expanse associated with the former and the feeling that the ground was shifting beneath one’s feet associated with the latter—were tightly interwoven. This was the atmosphere of the scientific and technological revolution. Fear was produced by a loss of orientation, but those who experienced it did not understand it as such. They searched for specific people to blame, the ones who had ruined their lives. Fear craved embodiment. This was manifested first and foremost in a fear of science and of the scientist who was portrayed in popular consciousness as a malicious sorcerer-magician, with the devil peering out from behind his back. This relationship to science was supported not only by a growing sense of uncertainty among the masses but also by more objective phenomena. Renaissance science was drawn to the esoteric. For example, Solomon’s House in Bacon’s New Atlantis is a secret society: “We have consultations,

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which of the inventions and experiences which we have discovered shall be published, and which not: and take all an oath of secrecy, for the concealing of those which we think fit to keep secret” (1861, 165). Da Vinci’s mirror writing and his love of writing in the form of rebuses exhibit the same propensity to shroud science in mystery. For the inhabitants of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, science was not characterized by that which would become its defining features in the Enlightenment: the verifiability of its results and the clarity of its methods. The very diversity of interests among Renaissance scientists was associated with the devil as the “master of a thousand arts” and as the source of all knowledge. Caesarius of Heisterbach in his Dialogue on Miracles recounts the words of an abbot who had heard firsthand the story of another abbot who in his youth had been a student in Paris: “Now since he was of slow intelligence and weak memory, he was scarcely able to grasp or retain any knowledge whatever, and so he became a butt to all, for they judged him little better than an idiot” (Caesarius 1929, 39). Satan appears to him during a period of illness, offering him “knowledge of all the arts,” but the student resists the temptation (Speranskii 1906, 98).5 Caesarius’s work was written in the thirteenth century, but even into the Renaissance the average person felt closer to a devout “idiot” (derived from the Greek, idiota in the Middle Ages referred to a lay person, someone uneducated or without a knowledge of Latin) than to a scientist who had entered into a pact with the devil. Another source of danger for someone torn from traditional norms were religious and ethnic minorities. The church had always persecuted heretics, but in the period under discussion hatred toward heretics assumed the characteristics of mass psychosis. When norms of life are shaken, the one who speaks, dresses, thinks, or prays differently from everyone else instills fear. Race-based persecutions erupted across Western Europe. All the fears of the age, however, merged in a third: the fear of sorcery. Scientific and technological progress, the secular “pagan” nature of Renaissance culture, shook people’s faith in God. In many spheres of life, God ceased to be necessary. Machiavelli and Bodin created an entirely secular theory of government, in which there was no longer any place for the divine; Copernicus and Galileo for all practical purposes removed God from the universe. Neither religious nor moral concerns stopped Pope Alexander VI in 1495 from entering into a deal with the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II to poison Cem, the sultan’s brother and rival (and the pope’s guest), for 3000 ducats.

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The humanists pushed God out of the way to make room for Man. But, in the popular consciousness, that place was occupied by Satan. Historians call the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the “golden age of Satan” and an “explosion of Satanism.” The popular mood of panic peaked in 1575–1625. (This was the time when Bacon wrote his treatises Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning and The New Organon, and Jean Bodin wrote his Six livres de la République (Six Books of the Commonwealth); it was also the time when Giordano Bruno, Copernicus, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Rembrandt were all active.) Belief in the power of the devil became an idée fixe. In his Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, Martin Luther wrote: “Therefore all the gifts of body and mind that you enjoy—wisdom, righteousness, holiness, eloquence, power, beauty, or wealth—are only the instruments of the devil’s infernal tyranny over you, by which he forces you to serve him and to advance his kingdom” (Luther 1963, 9). Fear of the devil, which became the incarnation and image of the tragic situation in which people found themselves in the sixteenth century, was accompanied by a wave of treatises on Satan, witches, and their malevolent activities.6 This wave washed over enlightened humanists, as well. Leonid Pinsky, a noted authority on this period, described Bodin as “a free-thinker and even an atheist” and his Heptaplomeres as “anti-Christian,” the secret “bible for non-believers” (Pinskii 1961, 109).7 Bodin, however, was also the author of the treatise De la démonomanie des sorciers (On the Demon-mania of Witches), in which he laid the theoretical foundations for the necessity of burning witches at the stake. The medieval Church in the West had always persecuted witches, and historians stressed the responsibility of the Roman Curia by rightly pointing to the sad role played by the papal bull “Summis desiderantes,” issued by Innocent VII in 1484, and the infamous treatise Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), written by the Dominicans Heinrich Krämer and Jacob Sprenger and published in 1487. Gustav Roskoff notes that during the last five years of this fanatical period, 48 people were burned as witches, but from the end of the sixteenth to the beginning of the seventeenth century in many German towns up to 50 “witches” were burned in a year (Roskoff 1869, II, 294, 308). Contemporaries remarked that many villages were left without any women at all, which led to a sharp decline in population. The pandemic of fear stretched from Sweden and Scotland in the North to Italy in the South, and from Hungary in the East to Spain in

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the West. In the name of battling the devil, mass executions occurred in Mexico.8 Seized by this hysterical fear, the middle classes were drawn into the hunt for witches. Jean Delumeau is right to remark that “everything far away, new or changing inspired fear” (1978, 49). But while analyzing the wave of denunciations that arose in this atmosphere or fear and suspicion, Delumeau also notes: “During the epidemic of demon mania that ravaged Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a central role was played by hostile relationships between close neighbors: neighboring villages, competing clans, and within communities” (Delumeau 1978, 51).9 Worsening economic conditions generated lawsuits over real estate, with envy and malice prompting accusations of witchcraft, while fear and suspicion created an atmosphere in which every denunciation automatically turned into a sentence. Every new burning intensified the atmosphere of fear, while feeding the temptation to line one’s pockets at the expense of the next victim. This entangling of motivations created a snowball effect. But while a thousand fires blackened the skies over Europe, a redistribution of wealth took place and many people in power were replaced, as no one was safe from an accusation of witchcraft.10 The atmosphere of fear led to the simplifying of legal procedures and the replacing of traditional medieval norms for protecting the rights of the accused. Virtually all limitations on the use of torture were removed. An extracted confession was considered proof of guilt. Legal scholars, such as the famous Saxon jurist Benedict Carpzov, demonstrated on the basis of scientific data that customary legal procedures were not applicable to the prosecution of witches. As the humanist Bodin wrote: “No one would ever be accused or punished out of a million witches if parties were governed, as in an ordinary trial, by a lack of proof”; “for it is a most powerful presumption that when a woman is reputed to be a witch, she is one; and this is enough to sentence her to the question” (Bodin 1995, 218, 198). A guarantee of immunity was denied not only to the accused but also to their lawyers. When the scholar Erasmus attempted to demonstrate in a scholarly treatise that witches were mentally ill women deserving of pity not execution, Bodin accused him of participating in witchcraft. The archbishop-­elector of Trier, Johann von Schönenberg, displayed particular zeal in persecuting Protestants, Jews, and witches, burning at the stake the rector of the university, whom he accused of treating witches with indulgence. The prince-bishop of Bamberg, Johann Georg Fuchs von Dornheim, burned at the stake the chancellor, five Bürgermeisters, and many city administrators for the same reason (Trevor-Roper 1967,

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150–152). Under these conditions, one must recognize the courage of those rare defense attorneys, such as Agrippa von Nettesheim, who attempted to clear “witches.”11 The primary victims of witch-hunts were women. The reasons for this are many. In the psychosis of mass fear that has occurred in the most diverse historical situations, one can observe features of a repeating “mythology of danger.” The notion arises of a pact within some secret, close-knit group directed “against everyone else.” A particularly acute sense of alarm is produced when members of the group, who recognize each other by secret signs, become unknowable. They are exposed not by juridical means but by the “gut feeling” of the judge or accuser. In the first century BCE, Marcus Minucius Felix, himself a Christian, collected rumors about Christians and refuted them in his dialogue Octavius. There, we find: “They recognize one another by secret signs and marks; they fall in love almost before they are acquainted; everywhere they introduce a kind of religion of lust, a promiscuous ‘brotherhood’ and ‘sisterhood’ by which ordinary fornication, under cover of a hallowed name, is converted to incest” (Minucius Felix 1960, 337). The idea of an alien group along with a feeling of disorientation produces a sense of threat. Women in the Middle Ages were in the position of a minority, not in a quantitative sense but in social and cultural one. This alone was enough to compel people under new social conditions to view them with suspicion. However, the age of the Renaissance did not pass European women by— they assumed a more active role in social life. They became much more of a “new person” than did the average male, at least in the sense that they took a greater step forward. For the disoriented masses, however, any woman who displayed even somewhat unusual behavior became the embodiment of the encroaching “kingdom of Satan.” In order to understand the logic behind this unprecedented persecution of women, we must establish who was under the greatest danger of being considered a witch. The historian Alan Macfarlane, who studied this question on the basis of English documents, has come to the conclusion that no economic factor can explain the persecution of witches (Macfarlane 1970, 98–100). Delumeau, noting that old women made up a high percentage of the victims of witch-hunts, associates this with the Renaissance cult of beauty and loathing of physical ugliness (Delumeau 1967, 426–427). On the basis of a fair amount of data, it is possible to conclude that, in addition to old women, young women and girls from the earliest ages, “foreign” and sick women, as well as the most beautiful

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and the ugliest women, were also in danger. For example, among the marginal notes found on the lists of those executed in Würzburg in 1629, we find “the most beautiful woman in Würzburg,” or a woman who was “too finely” dressed. Also burned at the stake was the head councilman Baunach, who was described as “the fattest man in Würzburg.” Burned, too, were the finest musician, a blind girl, and the poorest and richest inhabitants.12 Extremes, representing a destabilizing violation of norms, incited particularly intense fear. Technological development did not lessen the atmosphere of fear; it, paradoxically, intensified it. For example, scholars have noted the role of printing in the epidemic of Satanism. Thanks to the printing press, there was a boom in literature on witches, on a scale that would have been impossible in the Middle Ages. The infamous Hammer of Witches was republished many times in the sixteenth century, and the circulation of this codex of the inquisition reached 50,000—a book that was initially produced for the internal use of a group of prosecutors became a work of popular literature—and Sigmund Feyerabend’s Theatrum diabolorum (1569), an encyclopedia of devilmania consisting of 33 books, reached a distribution of 231,600. Works by Luther and Calvin, which were filled with fear of the devil, also circulated in enormous numbers. The original version of Bodin’s On the Demon-mania of Witches underwent multiple editions between 1580 and 1604, and was translated into Latin and German, among other languages. It is impossible to calculate the circulation of “popular” trade books, like those dealing with Faust and Dracula. Analysis of trial documents, however, reveals that many women accused of witchcraft display in their testimony a clear familiarity with the published literature of this kind, which in turn shaped their confessions. One can state with certainty that this epidemic of fear could not have achieved such a pan-continental reach in the separate, isolated societies of the Middle Ages. The latter half of the seventeenth century through to the beginning of the eighteenth was a period of relative stability, during which a new system of economic relations emerged, life became more stable, and the atmosphere of fear dissipated, leading to a rapid change in the psychological climate. One of the particular features of individual behavior in an atmosphere of fear is a fundamental change in the logic governing that behavior. And so, when such an atmosphere dissipates, what seemed possible and natural only yesterday becomes impossible and incomprehensible. This is precisely how one might explain the psychology of “awakening,” which characterized the age of the Enlightenment. People

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in the eighteenth century felt as if they had awoken from a deep sleep (see the etching by Goya The Sleep of Reason). The loss of a psychological link to the immediate past produced a desire to break from it chronologically, relegating it to the distant past. And so, the cultural myth of the Enlightenment situated the religious wars and witch trials deep in the Middle Ages, which was how the positivist thinkers of the nineteenth century continued to perceive things. When studying the psychology of social groups in periods dominated by fear, the historian uncovers the spontaneous reproduction of certain forms of societal thinking. For example, after analyzing the mass psychology of the era of the French Revolution, Michel Vovelle concluded that it was governed by: […] the myth of conspiracy [which], as a mobilizer, was malleable enough to be put to any end; from conspiracy by aristocrats or a plot by foreign powers mobilizing the “supporters of Pitt and Cobourg,” as they were called, at the start of the war, this label was subsequently applied to the Girondists, the Dantonists, and the Hébertists, until the bourgeois republic of the Directorat [1795–1799] depicted with flexible iconography a conspiracy by anarchists, understood as the Babouvists, who were partisans of the law or of “agrarian sharing,” that is, the redistribution of property. In the propaganda of years IV and V of the Revolution [1795–1796], the image of a terrorist, or a man with a dagger, replaced that of the aristocrat of the first years of the Revolution. (Vovelle 1985, 63)13

This same author offers a vivid example of how this was reflected in the consciousness of the peasant movement for the taxation of grain that took place in the agricultural regions between the Loire and Seine rivers: For the authorities, the idea of a counter-revolutionary conspiracy was always present, confirmed by the presence of priests at the head of the peasants who wanted to put a tax on grain at the markets, but… even if the movement hadn’t been incited by them, why couldn’t it be the work of the “anarchists”? And then the absurd claim was put forward of the existence of an alleged brother of Marat. […] And why wasn’t it the secret action of Philippe Égalité [the Duc d’Orleans], the cousin of the king and then a deputy at the Convention, who was given to intrigue? […] But the proponents of taxation by the people also had their own explanatory scenarios. In opposition to the figure of the anarchist, they put forward the figure of the hoarder—who was no less counter-revolutionary—whose granaries they were ransacking. (Vovelle 1985, 63)

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It is interesting that the image of conspiracy assumes features that were repeated over the course of centuries and that reproduce profoundly archaic models of secret sects. For example, Titus Livius, or Livy, in Book 39 (Chapters 8–19) of his history of Rome, describes an investigation of secret bacchanals in Rome. These gatherings were characterized, first and foremost, by the fact that they took place at night, in total darkness and in deepest secrecy. The major role was played by women or by men who are “very like the women” (1936, 262). After having gathered in the dark of night and having intoxicated themselves with wine, the participants in the secret society (according to the version of their denouncer, the Consul Postumius) gave themselves over to wild and decadent sexual relations and carried out bloody sacrifices, murdering those who attempted to avoid participating in the orgies insofar as, “To consider nothing wrong […] was the highest form of religious devotion among them” (1936, 255). It is curious to note that the picture painted by Livy is almost perfectly replicated in the hostile rumors surrounding the gatherings of early Christians, as presented by Marcus Minucius Felix in his Octavius. Livy and Minucius Felix use almost the exact same expressions to describe these nighttime gatherings: the perversions carried out in total darkness (both stress an aversion to light), the violent punishment of renegades, and the ability to recognize one another by secret signs. Minucius Felix adds a ritual murder of a child and the sacrificial use of the child’s blood. According to Livy, bacchanals were spreading like “an infectious disease,” while, according to Minucius Felix’s version, Christianity was spreading like “weeds.” This schema will be subsequently repeated in the most varied historical contexts. It clearly functions in the descriptions of witches’ sabbaths provided at witch trials. (Both Livy and Minucius Felix stress the dominant role of women and representatives of suspicious ethnic minorities.) We can thereby draw a paradoxical link between events. A fast-moving explosive process in the field of science and technology unsettles customary ways of life, altering not only the social structure of the epoch, but its psychological structure as well. This entails various consequences, which generate typical, historically repeatable conflicts. First, new possibilities for organizing social life arise as the capacity for memory and record keeping is expanded, and with that the possibility of predicting results. Second, the potential of individual creative activity also increases. These tendencies can lead to conflict and in their final manifestations may generate either stagnation or destabilization. Third, the turbulent possibilities represented by

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creativity and rapid change to customary ways of life are disorienting for the majority of the population. The customary ceases to be effective, which generates general feelings of stress and fear, reanimating deeply archaic models of consciousness. Against the backdrop of scientific progress, a psychological regression may take place, turning potential opportunities into uncontrolled consequences. Science increases the potential to predict events, while real life might display total unpredictability. Catastrophic consequences, however, are not called forth by technological progress alone. The study of technology shows that great scientific and technical revolutions are inevitably accompanied by semiotic revolutions, which decisively alter the entire system of socio-cultural semiosis. We must note, first and foremost, that the material world surrounding the individual, and filling his or her cultural space, has not only a practical function, but a semiotic one as well. An abrupt change in the material world alters the established norms individuals use semiotically to comprehend the world. For example, the poet Fyodor Tyutchev, after traveling across Europe by train in 1847, noticed a change in his sense of space. Before, if cities were points between fields, now fields were tiny points between almost continuous cities. “Les villes se donnant les mains” (cities are clasping each other’s hands), he wrote in a letter to his wife (2015, 739). Artillery and transportation-related technologies, roads, and navigation fundamentally altered centuries-old conceptions of space. If in painting realism was built on an illusion, with proximity and thickness on the canvas imitating distance and depth, then the cannon ball made the distant close, and the increasing frequency of travel transformed the strange into the everyday and the illusory into the real. But the individual who experienced the expansion of space in a painting and the compression of space in travel was the same. As a result, the language of spatial modeling lost its absolute quality; it was now dependent on the pragmatics of genre and on the specific realm of modeling. New things, that is, things outside of tradition, took on heightened symbolic resonance. The semiotics of things generates a mythology of things. And so, on the one hand, a mythology of gold, luxury, and magnificence was born, which combined with the myth of the expert, the skilled craftsman, and the god-like creator. (Benvenuto Cellini claimed there was a radiant light above his head, which he could show to those who were worthy of it.) On the other hand, there emerged a folk mythology of diabolical gold, and of the diabolical nature of everything made

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through creative effort. A hatred of art combined with a hatred of gold became a foundation of folk mythology. However, the semiotic revolution was manifested most profoundly in the realm of language and communication. It is no accident that the greatest scientific and technical revolutions take place on the border of communicative technologies: writing, printing, broadcasting, recording, and computing. Each of these periods is marked not only by a change in communicative technology but also by a fundamental change in the status of language, and its place and prestige in society. The nature of linguistic referentiality and the pragmatics of speech undergo profound changes in each of these periods. In the Middle Ages, the Word, pronounced in a sacred language and divine in nature, enjoyed absolute authority. Unlike the word in everyday speech, the Word could only be true and was entirely isolated from the sway of human will. It allowed for interpretation on the part of the listener insofar as the listener was imperfect, but it excluded ambiguity on the part of the speaker (i.e., God and those through whom He spoke). Indeed, it had meaning, but it did not have pragmatics. Pragmatics could arise only in the mouth of an individual delivering the divine Word, but as one got closer to the meaning, all pragmatics had to be removed. The word in the Renaissance became human. It acquired complex referentiality. It became obvious that a word could acquire different meanings depending on one’s intentions. The word became crafty, like politics, and meaningful in and of itself. Its connection with everyday life often subjected it to the law of concealing meaning rather than revealing it. The medieval world could be incomprehensible (by the layperson, the simpleton, or the “idiot,” who didn’t know Latin), but the one who did not understand knew that the unknown meaning was fixed. The very impossibility of using sacred language for everyday speech made referential relationships extremely stable. The Word could not be an object of play. The Renaissance word, however, was nationalized, merging with folk and everyday speech. It became comprehensible, but at the same time this comprehensibility introduced relativity, represented by the speaker’s pragmatics, the variety of speech genres, and the chaotic system of referencing in everyday speech. In the Middle Ages the Latin Word and the vernacular word were separated, as were Aristotelian logic and the logic of everyday life, as well as ideal and everyday norms of behavior. The concepts of goodness and truth lay outside real life, and so were fixed.

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The Renaissance rehabilitated the word in the vernacular. The word with a capital letter, the singular Word, possessing the highest authority and transparent referentiality, was replaced by the everyday vernacular word. The word was democratized, losing its authority, reliability, and trustworthiness. The word became crafty. The listener feared deception and suspected it. Everyday speech was the bearer of everyday logic, which rose from the lower spheres of life to the highest rung of wisdom. The dubious quality of oaths, attempts to confuse the addressee, and the hidden pragmatics of speech complicated the relationship between speech and reality, generating a completely new relationship to the word. J. R. Searle defined the act of referencing “as the relationship between the intention of the speaker and the recognition of that intention by the addressee” (Artiunova 1982, 14).14 But everyday speech can conceal intentions as well as reveal them. And so, in a destabilized world in which people had lost their faith in the word, they found themselves in a situation where the word was being deliberately turned into a lie, and so began associating the word not with God but with the devil. At the same time, advances in illusionistic painting resulted in its replacing the icon. The light of the absolute shining through visible forms gave way to pseudo-reality, relative through and through. As in twentieth-­ century cinematography, realism intensified the illusory. Even everyday objects, once they’d become objects of artistic manipulation and entered the realm of art, lost their crude authenticity and assumed a crafty, ambiguous semiotic existence. Folk consciousness responded to this in two ways: with a cult of confused articulation, on the one hand, and with a desire to return to the “simple” and authoritative word of the Bible, on the other. This hunger for the authoritative word was expressed both in heresies and in the teachings of the Reformation. At the same time, humanists displayed a longing to return to the classical forms of Latin, a dead language, as if writing in Latin could relieve them of their agonizing distrust of the word. Whether invoking the authority of the Apostles or of Cicerone, the end result was the same. At the same time, in the consciousness of people seized by panic, who had lost their faith in the stable foundations of their world, the desire to subdue and “dogmatize” the word resulted in the spread of demagoguery. The prohibition against casting any doubt on the word led, for example, to the fact that at witch trials an accusation was already a verdict. Doubting the veracity of the spoken word meant siding with the devil. Once a

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denunciation had been made and an accusation formulated, the investigation had only one additional step: to get the accused to confirm with her own words the words of her accuser. Gossip and rumor were liberated from the question of who uttered the words and for what reason. The accuser’s words were now above suspicion. This is connected to the new authority of the printed word. It is interesting to observe that during the time when witches were being prosecuted, the print media did not dispel rumors but reinforced them. This can be compared to the fact that in the twentieth century the mass culture created by the commercial film and television industries does not dispel popular myths but cultivates them. Every abrupt change in human history unleashes new forces. The paradox here lies in the fact that movement forward can stimulate the regeneration of archaic cultural models and models of consciousness, generating scientific benefits as well as epidemics of mass fear. And so, analysis of the socio-cultural, psychological, and semiotic mechanisms that go into effect at such moments is a task that is not merely academic. (1988)

Notes 1. Despite the enormous consequences of these inventions, we are using them only as signs to signify entire epochs (the epoch in which history emerged and the epoch of transition from an ancient and medieval world to the early modern period, the latter commonly referred to as the Renaissance). Singling out printing is, therefore, a somewhat relative move. 2. This last statement is correct only in the most general sense and requires a caveat. One cannot propose that pre-literature societies did not have complex forms of memory. The high level of development of mnemonics was reflected in the preservation of enormous epic texts. And the existence of collective memory, preserved with the help of rites and rituals and the designation of a special institute of “memory keepers,” is supported by a large amount of evidence. And so, for example, prewritten cultures in the Peruvian highlands created irrigation systems and structures, the building of which required a significant degree of organization. Moreover, these civilizations were probably prewritten. Natural landmarks and heavenly bodies were evidently used as mnemonic signs to support cultural memory. The advent of literacy apparently consigned to oblivion the developed cultures of oral memory. In Plato’s Phaedrus, the inventor of writing, Theuth, says to the Egyptian king: “This invention, O king, will make the Egyptians

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wiser and will improve their memories.” To which the king replies: “For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves. […] You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding” (Plato 2014, 565). Referencing the cyclical movement of the stars for instructions regarding agricultural work is very common among prewritten peoples. The expression “the book of stars” (Baratynsky) was not a metaphor for them. (For more on this, see Chap. 11 in this volume.) 3. See Zhirmunskii (1978) and Anikst (1983). 4. For more on this, see Lotman (1996) and Kovacs (1973). 5. The plot of the story, however, is somewhat more complex than Speranskii presents it. According to Caesarius, the devil initially offers the student a stone that would give him “all knowledge.” The student accepts the stone but then confesses his sin and throws the stone away at the advice of his confessor. For this, he is later raised from the dead and eventually becomes the abbot of the monastery of Morimond (Caesarius 1929) (Translator’s note). 6. See Delumeau (1978), Roskoff (1869), Janssen (1894), and Osborn (1893). 7. Compare the woeful misunderstanding of the phenomenon of “demonomania” on the part of nineteenth-century positivists, such as Bandrillart: “Absurd, fanaticism, ridiculous, disgusting—this is what should be written in the margins of every page of this deplorable book” (Bandrillart 1853, 189). 8. See Todorov (1984), in which he examines the question of cultural confrontation. For a broader look at the question, see Chaunu (1969). 9. Scholars studying the subject of witches in Africa have emphasized the connection between internal family quarrels and accusations of witchcraft. They also note that the abrupt introduction of Western civilization into traditional African societies exacerbated the problem, producing outbursts of “demonomania.” See also Macfarlane (1970, 167). 10. For more on this, see Naudé (1625). 11. For more on von Nettesheim, see Orsier (1911), Briusov (1913), and Nauert (1965). 12. See Roskoff (1869, II, 339–341), Soldan (1880, I, 298), and Janssen (1894, VIII, 528). 13. This symbolic return of the “dagger” as a political symbol had a reverse influence on the practice of conspirators. Consider the murder by the stabbing of Alexander von Kotzebue by Karl Ludwig Sand and of the Duke of Berry by Louis Pierre Louvelle, or the regicide of the Russian tsar planned by Mikhail Lunin in 1816. Incidentally, when the pistol appeared on the

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field of battle in 1544, “it quickly won success and from the second half of the sixteenth century became the preferred weapon in political murders” (Delumeau 1967, 187). The “return” of the dagger decreased efficiency, but this only highlighted the symbolic function of the act. 14. See Searle (1969, 72–94).

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Luther, Martin. 1963. “Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians.” In Luther’s Works, Vol. 26, Jaroslav Pelikan (trans.), 5–12. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House. Machiavelli, Niccolò. 1950. The Prince and the Discourses. New  York: The Modern Library. Macfarlane, Alan. 1970. Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England. A Regional and Comparative Study. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Minucius Felix, Marcus. 1960. Octavius, Gerald H. Hendall (trans.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Naudé, Gabriel. 1625. Apologie pour tous les grand personnages qui ont été faussement soupçonnés de magie. Paris: François Targa. Nauert, Jr., Charles. 1965. Agrippa and the Crisis of the Renaissance. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Orsier, Joseph. 1911. Henri Cornelis Agrippa: Sa vie et son oeuvre d’après sa corréspondance (1486–1535). Paris: Bibliothèque Chacornac. 1911. Osborn, Max, 1893. Die Teufelliteratur des XVI Jahrhunderts. Acta Germanica. Organ für deutsche Philologie, hrsg von R. Henning und J. Hoffory. Bd. III, Hft. 3. Berlin: Mayer and Müller. Pinskii, Leonid. 1961. Realizm epochi Vozrozhdeniia. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura. Plato. 2014. Euthyphro; Apology; Crito; Phaedo; Phaedrus. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Roskoff, Gustav. 1869. Geschichte des Teufels. Leipzig: Neudruck der Ausgabe. Searle, J. R. 1969. Speech Acts. An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shakespeare, William. 1966. The Tempest. In The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, Edmond Malone (ed.), XV: 1–186. New York: AMS Press. Soldan, Wilhelm Gottlieb. 1880. Geschichte der Hexenprozesse, revised by Dr. Heinrich Heppe. Stuttgart: Cotta. Speranskii, Nikolai. 1906. Ved’my i vedomstvo: Ocherk po istorii tserkvi i shkoly v Zapadnoi Evrope. Moscow: Tipo-litografiia T-va I. N. Kushnerev and Co. Tyutchev, Fiodor. 2015. Pis’makh 1820–1849. Moscow: Media Direct. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1984, The Conquest of America. The Question of the Other, Richard Howard (trans.). Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Trevor-Roper, Hugh. 1967. Religion, the Reformation and Social Change, and Other Essays. London: Macmillan. Varbanets, Natal’ia V. 1964. “Nemetskaia broshiura ‘Ob odnom velikom isverge’ – Leiptsigskoe izdanie 1493-ogo g.” In Povest’ o drakule, Ia. S.  Lur’e (ed.) 185–193. Moscow and Leningrad: Nauka. Vovelle, Michel. 1985. La mentalité révolutionnaire. Société et mentalités sous la Révolution française. Paris: Messidor/Éditions sociales. Zhirmunskii, Viktor M. 1978. “Istoriia legendy o Fauste.” In Legenda o doktore Fauste, Viktor M. Zhirmunskii (ed.), 357–505. Moscow: Nauka.

CHAPTER 16

The Time of Troubles as a Cultural Mechanism: Toward a Typology of Russian Cultural History

Discussing the unique features of the Russian revolution, Vladimir Lenin wrote that all bourgeois revolutions go through a stage of preliminary, spontaneous preparation, when their economic structure experiences a “gestation” period within the economy of the previous order. Unlike those revolutions, the socialist economic structure, according to Lenin, did not experience a period of gestation. As a result, the transition from capitalism to socialism was understood, according to this model, as a unique phenomenon, an explosion, destroying the foundations of the previous social structure and creating a new, until then impossible, order atop the rubble. The goal of this article is to show that this was not a unique phenomenon, the particularities of which were determined by a situation “unprecedented in the history of humankind”—namely, the shift from a Originally published as “Mekhanizm Smuty (K tipologii russkoi istorii kul’tury),” Studia Russica Helsingiensia et Tartuensia 3, 1992: 7–23. The translation here is from Iurii Lotman, Istoria i tipologia russkoi kul’tury, 33–46. St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo–SPb, 2002. J. Lotman (*) University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia © The Author(s) 2019 Juri Lotman - Culture, Memory and History, ed. by M. Tamm https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14710-5_16

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class-based society to a classless one—but rather this transition exhibited one of the defining features of all binary systems, in particular, that of the Moscow-Petersburg period. Therefore, we should speak not of the specificity of this transition from one economic order (capitalism) to another (communism), but rather of a certain constant in the development of binary social structures. The dynamics of ternary systems are characterized by a relative gradualness. This, of course, does not preclude the periodic eruption of explosive (revolutionary) moments. However, the very nature of revolution in binary and ternary structures is different. In ternary structures, the distribution of elements is uneven. A conflictual pair functions on the surface of this historical social configuration. It is this pair that lends an epoch its basic resonance. Dramatic upheavals and confrontations between two cultural strata are the first to attract the attention of contemporaries as well as of historians. The third element of a culture in such cases finds itself in a spontaneous state. It is concealed in the depths of the conflict and as a rule abuts one of the dominating tendencies, at times painting itself in its colors and assuming its program. But in these critical moments of crisis, when the struggle between dominant forces reaches an impasse from which they can find no way out and the specter of catastrophe begins to take shape in the consciousness of the people, then this “third force” suddenly moves to the surface, already sufficiently developed to assume a leading role in history. In such structures an explosion does not have the character of a general catastrophe, for there lies within it a creative force: it cleans out the Augean stables of history and opens a path to a new stage. Such is the example of the French Revolution, which shocked its contemporaries with its catastrophic character and, to a significant degree, became for historians the definitive model of revolution. The upheavals produced by political conflicts, the terror, and the revolutionary wars largely obscured the “third force,” which before its time lay concealed in the depth of events. The Great Terror, the mass destruction of aristocrats’ estates, the peasants’ seizure of feudal lands, and the emergence of a bourgeois economy were all processes that had begun before the revolution, and while they continued into the revolution, they did not combine with it. So it is no accident that the victory of the counterrevolution and the subsequent collapse of the French empire failed to halt the transfer of feudal lands into the hands of the peasants. Balzac’s Old Grandet and Pére Goriot managed to navigate all the political upheavals of this catastrophic age,

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and when the flood receded, it turns out they were the ones on the ark. And so, a moment of explosion contains both destructive and constructive tendencies. By destroying certain layers of the social order, it clears the way for others. The moment of explosion has a different character in binary systems. Here the opposing tendencies must confront each other without a third option. In such cases, change inevitably assumes the character of a catastrophe and displays itself in one of two ways: in a desire to reject the change entirely and to establish the utmost stability in the emerging structure or in a desire for the complete apocalyptic destruction of the existing order and for the establishment of an equally apocalyptic ideal order in its place. China would be an example of the first path, and Russia of the second. This is in fact the system described by Dostoevsky in Demons. The author claimed to be describing a “Russian” theory of revolution, but actually he drew a picture of the Chinese model of revolution: a socialist society that has taken equality to an extreme and periodically undertaken the complete reordering of the entire system, creates a kind of psychological vent, experiencing the explosion as an extreme liberation of anti-social forces. After this explosion, however, the society returns to its initial state of stasis. Such explosions negate social dynamism rather than contributing to it. Strictly speaking, such an explosion is itself a form of stasis. The other type of binary system is associated not with immobility but with extreme unpredictability. While in the first type, the cultural-psychological constant does not change, in the second type, it becomes the site of chaotic change. Both of these seemingly opposing tendencies grow out of the same soil of binary structures. A binary system was consolidated in Russian history after the end of the Kievan period and included the Moscow and Petersburg periods, as well as the second Moscow period, which followed the October Revolution and ended with the signing of the protocol for the dissolution of the Soviet Union into independent states. This period can be defined in basic terms as the consolidation, flourishing, and destruction of the empire, and was most fully expressed during the Petersburg stage, symbolically framed by the two Muscovite stages. This entire period is characterized by the binary structure of Kievan Rus, which wove together Scandinavian and Byzantine influences. Flourishing at the historic crossroads of the East and West, it created a unique combination of Christianity and chivalric culture. This i­ nterweaving

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of such diverse cultural structures was not subsequently repeated in Russian history.1 The next stage bore a binary character. All of the sociocultural systems that replaced one another on the territory of Russia between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries were distinguished by certain common features, which are all the more obvious precisely because each new stage declared its uniqueness by rejecting any links to previous stages and declaring itself to be the start of a new era in the history of humankind—or at least of Russia. Of course, to draw geographic boundaries between the spheres of ternary and binary structures is only possible within very crude schematizations. Within the framework of individual national cultural systems, we can see their integration, comingling, and confrontation. At the same time, we can speak of certain historical-­cultural dominants that define the face of a given culture at every historical moment. Elsewhere we have noted that Western European culture was dominated by the contract, a legal concept with its roots in Roman jurisprudence, whereas in Rus, the principle of “total surrender of oneself” was much more characteristic (see Chap. 4 in this volume). A binary structure does not recognize even relative equality between the opposing sides, which would allow the opposing side to claim if not the right to truth, then at least the right to existence whenever a conflict arises in the sphere of politics, religion, science, or art. The very idea of hybridity is alien to the psychology of the binary, which would define it as a lack of principle, opportunism, or faith. And so, the binary system recognizes only unconditional victory. Maximalism is another defining characteristic of binary structures. Conflicts, no matter how they unfold, turn into a confrontation between good and evil. This has to do with the essential contradiction lying at the foundation of such systems. On the one hand, a moment of explosion is conceived as a transition from a kingdom of vice to the realm of truth. The idea of creating a paradise on earth is one of the most characteristic features of binary structures. Hence the typical deification of earthly power as the force that can accomplish this miraculous transformation. Whether that force is embodied in a preacher, a monarch, or a terrorist is not terribly important in such a scenario. What is essential is the idea of a final transformation of the earthly order. This situation, however, contains an initial contradiction. The transition from a kingdom of Evil to “the thousand-year kingdom of God on Earth” is conceived as the instantaneous result of a salutary explosion that reorders the entire world. At the same time, it is stressed that the absence

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of a transition period produces the need for some kind of pause before the leap into another order. The victory of ideals is postponed into the more or less distant future, while in the present an abrupt worsening of conditions must take place. The heavenly kingdom of Christ must be preceded by the kingdom of the Antichrist. In this respect, the principle of binary structures has deep roots in the apocalypse and in a host of maximalist mystical teachings: And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were by reason of the smoke of the pit. And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power. And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads. And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he striketh a man. And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them. (Revelation 9: 1–6)2

This time of extreme sin, hunger, and destruction is followed by the birth of the New World: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Revelation 21: 1–2). The apocalyptic idea of a transition to goodness through evil is, as mentioned above, regularly repeated in various mystical teachings, confirming the ultimate victory of an earthly paradise. But we also find this idea in revolutionary writings. Consider, for example, the slogan of the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party: “Through defeat onto victory.” Every onslaught was experienced by revolutionaries as an eschatological offensive by evil before the inevitable final victory. Hence the mythology of the “last and decisive” battle. The poetry of destruction and redemptive sacrifice is also associated with this. Consider, for example, the words of Alexander Odoevsky at the moment he entered Senate Square during the Decembrist Revolt: “Let us die, brothers! Ah, how gloriously we will die!”

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This also lies at the basis of Stalin’s conception of revolution. The victory of the revolution in Russia inevitably led to a strengthening of the forces of reaction in capitalist countries. The most extreme expression of this was fascism. Therefore, the victory of good (in this case, the revolution) led to an intensification of evil (the forces of reaction). This compelled the socialists not only to postpone the withering away of the state, as assumed in classical Marxism, but also to consolidate the state. The logical conclusion of this consolidation was the transition to state terrorism. Therefore, between the initial victory (the triumph of socialism “in one country”) and the final victory (the triumph of socialism throughout the world), there was a period of intensification of the most class-based antagonisms, with the elimination of those antagonisms declared as the ultimate goal. A binary system inevitably develops spasmodically. The absence of a concealed, gestating third component makes it so that an explosion will result in the total collapse of the social structure. Within the limits of the historical time period we are analyzing, such collapses occurred between the reigns of Ivan the Terrible and Alexei Romanov (reaching its summit in the Time of Troubles), and between the reign of Peter the Great and our current moment, marked by the disintegration of the empire into independent states. The moment of explosion is characterized by the expulsion of an entire bundle of potential continuations. The subsequent historical process appears to make a selection: certain tendencies are suppressed, while others undergo further development. Immediately after the explosion, however, the number of potential future paths is enormous. Then a process of selection takes place. It is important to stress that the process of selection occurring immediately after an explosion has a random, unpredictable quality. Subsequently, however, another factor comes into play: conscious human activity, which is directed at suppressing certain aspects of reality, declaring them non-existent, while maximally cramming the remaining elements into an ideal model of reality that is then imposed upon history. When considering these processes, it becomes obvious that the historian must study not only the events that actually took place and that were retrospectively canonized but also all the potential paths that remained unrealized. In this respect, it is worthwhile to recall the innovative work of Aleksandr Isachenko. His polemical tone, inspired by the state of Slavic Studies in the early 1970s, should not obscure the scholarly significance of his argument.

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In view of the theoretical significance and the brevity of his theses, we will cite them in full: What if Novgorod had defeated Moscow in 1478 (On one unrealized version of the history of the Russian language) It is completely obvious that history is not written in the conditional mode. However, the conviction that what actually happened “had to have happened” just as it did must be acknowledged as unconvincing. It is easy to be a prophet in hindsight. History always has several versions on call. And there is no reason to believe that what actually occurred must have been a manifestation of “the progressive course of history.” The entire development of Russia would have been completely different if at the end of the fifteenth century Novgorod instead of Moscow had led the unification of the country. And that possibility truly existed. Novgorod of the fifteenth century was almost a European city; it knew neither the corruption that emerged in the part of the country occupied by the Tatars nor the Asiatic customs of the Moscow grand dukes and boyars. Relying on ancient republican-democratic traditions and supporting vigorous trade and political relationships with the countries of Western Europe, Novgorod at the head of a unified Russia would not have permitted the fateful isolation of the country from the spiritual and technological progress of Renaissance Europe. The ideas of Humanism and of the Reformation would not have stopped at the Polish border but would have profoundly altered the face of Muscovy, introducing the country to the major sources of European thought. It is entirely probable that, under the influence of the Reformation in Novgorod, the first translation of the Bible would have taken place not into the almost incomprehensible language of Old Bulgarian but into the living Russian language (consider the literary activity of the “Judaizers”). The reactionary activities of the Balkan immigrants who pulled Moscow back toward Byzantium would have not taken root under conditions of Europeanization; true literature and not just literacy in the Russian language would have appeared two and a half centuries sooner, and the literary language itself would have reflected not so much the mumbling of the Moscow women who make communion bread, but the language of the enlightened Novgorodians. The literary language would have developed not in the hothouse conditions of Slavic culture or in the musty milieu of the uncultured clergy, but in the democratic atmosphere of a free city, spiritually open to the West as well as the East. The thoughts we have proposed here are only an intellectual experiment allowing us to glimpse through the actual course of history one possible variant that appears especially distinct against the backdrop of all that did not occur. (Isachenko 1973, 85–86)

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The collected volume in which this article appeared was sent to the publisher in the fall of 1972 and included works written at the very end of the 1960s through the beginning of the 1970s. We are drawn to make this chronological note because, synchronically, in 1968, the British film If appeared, directed by Lindsay Anderson, in which events that are presented to the viewer as real are situated in a field of possible variants. That which occurs is only one thread in a larger bundle of possibilities. Chaadaev, too, contemplated the correlation of real history with its unrealized possibilities. Such a viewpoint can be moved from the realm of hypothesis into the realm of historical research when we look at the different historical paths of nations as a choice among all possible paths. In this respect, the “Prussian” or “Italian” path toward unification can be examined as data for comparative study. Such an approach to scholarly research is not unprecedented. For example, Sergei Platonov, in his 1923 monograph The Time of Troubles: A Historical Study of the Internal Crisis and Social Struggle in 16th- and 17th-Century Muscovy, prefaces his analysis of the Time of Troubles with a typological comparison of the “Moscow” and “Novgorod” paths. And although the historian’s conclusions are different from those of Isachenko, the nature of their scholarly thinking is comparable. One could offer other examples as well. Eschatalogical thinking replaces process with catastrophe. From this follows the striking divergence between historical reality and historical consciousness. Every period that experiences an explosion evaluates itself in the terminology of the apocalypse as something that has never occurred before and that is comparable to nothing else. The time of Peter the Great was experienced within these categories. The consciousness of the time was structured on the opposition of the “old” and the “new.” One position considered the “new” to be the source of evil, while the other considered the “old” to be the source of evil, but both positions were articulated within this terminology. And so the historian is surprised to discover that bold innovation takes place at times under the moniker “old,” while the “new” often turns out to be a simple renaming of old traditions. A binary structure is organically associated with the concept of explosion. Within that structure, an explosion will assume a global and all-­ encompassing character. Everything that preceded it is subject to destruction, while that which is created in its place is imagined not as a continuation but as the negation of everything preceding it. The unexpectedness, the unpredictability, and the catastrophic nature of the process

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do not frighten those taking part in it. They fear the opposite: that the destruction will not be global in nature. And so, for example, Alexander Blok calmly accepted the extremes of revolutionary excess, condemning the intelligentsia for having lost the ability to hear the music of the revolution.3 The subsequent resurrection of petty bourgeois values—and of the order of everyday life as such—at the beginning of the New Economic Policy (NEP) period, led Blok to despair and was one of the direct causes of his death. One memoirist wrote that the sounds of the popular music emanating from the newly opened bars and restaurants literally drove Blok crazy. For him, the music of the restaurants had replaced the music of the revolution; everyday life had defeated the tempest. Of course, Blok’s views were hardly shared by all the members of the Russian intelligentsia. In fact, Blok was shocked by the “deafness” of such long-time literary associates as Zinaida Gippius, with whom he had much in common. Blok was eventually led to criticize revolutionary events not because of the excesses of popular reprisals but because of attempts by intellectuals (in particular, the Bolsheviks) to control the revolution. It is no accident that in that period, Blok, with his usual political vagueness, stated his party affiliation as Socialist Revolutionary. His political views, however, did not remain unchanged and, it seems, began to undergo some fundamental shifts in the final months of his life. This compels us to take a different look at the role of the times of troubles in Russian history. The period of the consolidation and rapid rise of the Muscovite state was characterized by relative stability. In real politics, a process of rapid development was taking place, and this process was not devoid of conflicts and confrontations. However, as a whole, the process developed continuously in one direction. The dominant tendency was the consolidation of a unified state, with unlimited autocratic power at the top. The natural result of this process, according to the general logic of European historical development, should have been a transition to a more “civilized” political structure. This, in turn, would have been tied to economic development and a convergence with European civilization. The process could have occurred relatively painlessly, as it did, for example, in Austria, or it could have been accompanied by revolutionary upheavals, as it did in France, but in all cases it would have had the character of a single logically unfolding process. In this sense, it is telling that the historians of the French Annales School have not unconvincingly described these historical events as subject to slow and continuous development.

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From this point of view, it makes sense to draw a distinction between revolutions and times of troubles. The first is characteristic of ternary systems, while the second is typical of binary systems. When revolution is referred to as the midwife of history, this means that a child has already been formed in the womb before the moment of birth. A ternary system at the moment of explosion brings to the surface that which had already spontaneously formed inside it. A binary system posits a moment of complete destruction between the “old” and the “new,” which entirely excludes a spontaneous period of consolidation of the new. In this sense, a time of troubles is a regularly occurring, law-governed phenomenon in Russian culture. In fact, throughout the existence of the empire, times of troubles have occurred at the end of the sixteenth through the beginning of the seventeenth century, from the end of the seventeenth through the beginning of the eighteenth century, from the end of the eighteenth through the beginning of the nineteenth century, from the end of the nineteenth through the beginning of the twentieth, and in the period we are living through today. Despite the differences among these historical events and the fundamentally different social forces (with different positions and programs) taking part in them, typologically, they all share some general traits: the notion that the current crisis is the “end of history” and the “start of a new era,” that after this time of troubles an ideal order will be established, and that the future course of development will, in principle, be opposed to the general European pathways. The reign of Ivan the Terrible logically exhausted the possibilities of unlimited state power. The words of one of his elite administrators, “You, Sire, are like God,” expressed the very essence of the Muscovite principle of power.4 The governing practice of Ivan the Terrible was an attempt to realize this idea. The sources suggest that the end of a direct line of succession in the Riurik dynasty during the reign of Ivan the Terrible was a historical accident, which only happened to coincide with a crisis in the principle of unlimited state despotism (see Platonov 1970). But we cannot agree with this view. The voluminous material on the history of despotic governmental structures testifies to the fact that the murder of an heir or its symmetrical inversion—the murder of the ruler by the heir—is not an exception but a regularity, defining a specific type of transfer of power. Certain nuances related to the personal traits of Ivan and his desire to test the limits of his power do not alter the basic features of the phenomenon. A causal link exists between a crisis of despotism and the end of a direct

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line of succession. It is instructive to see how the crisis of succession at the turn of the sixteenth century and the idea of limiting autocratic power were interconnected. Following Ivan’s death, the idea of an elected tsar emerged. As Platonov rightly points out, Tsarevich Dmitry did not become a victim of his father’s rage simply because he had no right to the throne, having been born of a marriage that was not legally recognized. The idea of Dmitry’s ascension to the throne appeared only after his death and was associated not with his legal rights but with a completely different tradition—the myth of the murder of the virtuous child. It must be particularly stressed that attempts to limit inherited despotic power sprang from various mutually hostile social forces. This was the voice of the age, and not the expression of the interests of a specific social group or class. It is, therefore, interesting to examine the series of experiments carried out by Russian rulers to limit their power. The reign of Boris Godunov, which began in 1598, was accompanied by a complex ritual that had no precedent in Russian tradition: that of inviting the tsar to assume the throne. It is especially significant that after a coordinated series of supplications was carried out by the folk, the government, and the church, according to the sources, Godunov completed the series with a characteristic gesture. Turning toward the crowd, he raised a shirt above his head and ripped it. This was a unique type of vow— to share with the folk the shirt off his back. The tsar limited his own power with this ceremonial public promise. The False Dmitry had no sooner allowed Prince Vasily Shuisky to return from exile than Shuisky, together with Golitsyn, secretly approached King Sigismund of Poland with a proposal to elect Prince Vladislav to the Muscovite throne. The terms discussed in subsequent negotiations on the subject changed. In one version, Vladislav’s power was subjected to such great limitations that it could no longer be called autocratic. In another version, representing the interests of the hereditary nobility, or boyars, the rights of the civil service nobility to participate in state rule were limited. However, all these variants had something in common: there could be no talk of autocracy as interpreted by Ivan the Terrible. These social groups argued amongst themselves as to who should gain from limiting the tsar’s power, but they were unanimous that it should be limited. In this sense, the behavior of the “boyar tsar” Vasily Shuisky is especially significant. Even before assuming the throne, Shuisky had perfected the strategy of relying on the rebellious crowd:

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The Shuiskys were among the first Muscovite politicians to adopt the habit of calling upon the square. Under Boris they had incited “some trading muzhiks” to request Tsar Feodor, “for the sake of off-spring,” to divorce Tsarina Irina. After Boris’s death Vasily Shuisky, by testifying to the genuineness of the imposter, had raised the mob against the Godunovs and thus destroyed them. Soon thereafter he had tried to rouse the very same mob against the pretender, for which he had nearly paid with his life. (Platonov 1970, 90)

Even more remarkable is that Shuisky introduced into his coronation vows, to the surprise of the boyars, an oath to the people. We should also point out Shuisky’s ceremonial promise to punish only those personally responsible so as not to bring disgrace onto all their family and friends. Platonov sees this as a traditional gesture of mercy on such a ceremonial occasion, devoid of any deep significance. But, clearly, we cannot agree. Ivan the Terrible was indisputably not a good man, but his desire to execute not only the guilty party but all of the guilty party’s relatives can be explained not by any personal traits of the tsar but by the notion that the individual is not a legal entity—and, as such, an object of mercy or punishment—but rather the collective, including the courtier’s family, servants, and even livestock. Such fundamental concepts as primogeniture and family honor were built on this conviction. A boyar would go to the executioner’s block in order to avoid accepting a lowering of his place at the tsar’s table. From the point of view of the “enlightened” consciousness of the nineteenth century, this is ignorance, but in medieval thinking, this was the natural consequence of the idea that anyone in your service is a relation. The idea of individual responsibility proclaimed by Shuisky is one of the boldest innovations of that transitional time. The authority of the people as a source of power grew during the Time of Troubles to such an extent that it was formally mentioned in Kuzma Minin’s title.5 Popular election by the assemblies of the land became the legal basis for the Romanov’s right to rule. During the countless upheavals, palace coups, and times of troubles, the appeal to the people as a source of power was continuously repeated. For example, in the struggle between Sophia and Peter for the throne, this idea resurfaced. The degree to which the idea of hereditary right to the throne was shaken is evident in one small detail. After finding himself in an almost hopeless situation during his failed campaign in the Balkans, Peter freed

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the Senate from the obligation to follow his orders in the event of his capture. As if forgetting the fact that he had a rightful heir (the tsar’s relationship with his son Alexei was in fact far from one of mutual hatred, and on the whole they remained loyal to one another), Peter instructed the senators to “select from among yourselves someone worthy of the throne.”6 The right to hereditary inheritance was so shaken in his consciousness that in a moment of desperation, he simply forgot about it. The result of the time of troubles in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries should have been Russia’s transition to a regulated legal-­ autocratic state, like, for example, in Sweden. This, however, did not occur. A paradoxical political order developed, characterized in a quip attributed to Madame de Staël: “In Russia the government is a despotism, mitigated by strangulation”—with strangulation being a veiled reference to the murder of Paul I.7 The subsequent development of Russia was built on an irreconcilable contradiction. On the one hand, European principles of absolutism lay at the very foundations of government. This meant that discourse related to the divine nature of sovereign power was transformed into a poetic metaphor. In fact, it signified a somewhat modified European idea of absolutism. On the other hand, a binary structure was preserved, which inevitably led people to perceive the metaphor as reality. As a result, the Russian state of the eighteenth century was from the very start built on a series of irreconcilable contradictions, fraught with catastrophe. The foundation was completed with the building of a “regular” government of the European variety on the basis of serfdom. If absolutism in Europe was accompanied by economic development and secretly prepared the way for a complete transformation of the social order, then something almost completely the opposite took place in Russia. The Europeanization of everyday life and consciousness among the educated members of society and Russia’s inclusion among the European family of nations were accompanied not by the weakening of serfdom but by its rapid consolidation. Toward the second half of the eighteenth century in Russia, forms of feudal dependency, which had already disappeared in Europe, developed to such an extent that in some cases serfdom approached slavery. It is impossible to build an economy of the European variety on such soil, and Russia, which had experienced a boom in manufacturing and technology in the eighteenth century, saw economic development quickly come to a stop. By the time of the Crimean War, Russia had become one of the largest but also one of the most backward countries in Europe.

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Another important effect was the emergence of a contradiction that made a “normal” resolution of the problem essentially impossible. Subsequent development along a European path required the freeing of the serfs. While obvious to most of the Russian rulers from the mid-­ eighteenth century to the first half of the nineteenth century, and to a host of civic leaders, this task ran into an insurmountable barrier. Catherine II, Alexander I, and Nicholas I, as well as such perspicacious courtiers as Count Speransky and Count Kiselev, understood perfectly well the dangers posed by serfdom and how imperative it was to find a solution to the problem. That serfdom also had critics in the Russian emancipation movement goes without saying. Along the path to reform, however, some insurmountable obstacles arose from the very foundations of the social order. A binary system, which offers only the choice between organization and chaos, forced all hopes for the emancipation of the serfs to be placed on the government. In this way, the government in Russia acted as a progressive force. Consider Pushkin’s words to Grand Duke Michael: “You, Romanovs, are all revolutionaries.” At the same time, a host of contradictions arose. The development of revolutionary ideas led to an anti-government mood, and the government’s vacillation killed any hope of reform. But even more important was the fact that Russian liberals (“noble” revolutionaries, such as the Decembrists) found themselves facing a difficult choice. In order to carry out a reform of serfdom, they would have to overcome the opposition of the nobility, and this demands a strong government. The Decembrist Nikolai Turgenev at the end of the 1810s said that one could not demand a republic in Russia until serfdom had been eliminated. On the other hand, people like Count Alexander Dmitriev-Mamonov believed that a free nobility capable of opposing the despotism of the state was a guarantee of popular freedom insofar as the power of the nobility was based on its connection with the peasants; and so, eliminating serfdom would rend asunder the unity of the nobility and the people, thus removing any limits on the despotism of the state. The Decembrists, during a later and more mature period in the development of their movement, attempted to overcome this contradiction by uniting within a single political program freeing the serfs and adopting a constitution. However, in the end, the fateful split of these political ideas could not be overcome. This dead-end situation had yet another characteristic feature: no new government from Peter to the February Revolution continued what the previous government had begun, but rejected it. Elizabeth I based her

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right to the throne by referencing Peter, leaving out the names of the two previous rulers, while Catherine II began by ceremonially striking the reign of her husband from Russian history. Paul I did the same in regard to her reign. When Alexander I solemnly vowed “to rule according to the heart and laws of our grandmother, Catherine II,” the reign of Paul I was declared non-existent. And Nicholas I, believing his brother was responsible for the Decembrist uprising and the tragic beginning of his reign, essentially severed the line of succession connecting them. The same occurred at the beginning of the reign of Alexander II, Alexander III, and Nicholas II. It is significant that such an absence of succession is also typical of revolutionary movements; in every case, the forces of repulsion are stronger than the line of succession. In this way, the political history of Russia is built along a chain of revolutions. The development of bourgeois forms of economy, the rapid economic progress of the final decades of the nineteenth century, and the formation of the intelligentsia—that is, all the economic and cultural processes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, taken together—created the potential for a transition to a ternary system. If Dostoevsky and Tolstoy were interested in the sinner’s transformation into a righteous person, then Chekhov essentially ignored this problem altogether as his heroes cannot be described with a binary language. It was this that led his contemporaries to accuse him of political indifference and a lack of principles. Chekhov’s path, however, was not allowed to continue. Blok’s path— that of maximalism—won out. The year 1917 marked the beginning of the third and final stage in the history of Russia’s binary system. One of the fundamental lines of development between a binary and a ternary system lies in the fact that the former possesses a host of advantages if it is taken as an ideal and not as a practical program. When transformed into political practice, however, it inevitably devolves into extreme forms of despotism. The famous words of Christ, “But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh from evil” (Matthew 5: 37), cannot be separated from “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 19: 36). The political manifestation of a binary structure is the hopeless attempt to create the kingdom of God on earth, which, in reality, produces only extreme forms of despotism. Hence the indisputably positive significance of binary structures in the secondary layer of culture—in the realm of ideas and art—and the no less significant danger

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posed by attempts to actualize these structures in political reality. This defines both the allure and the weakness of the Russian form of culture. Life without Tolstoy and Dostoevsky would be morally and spiritually poorer; but life according to the ideas of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky would be unrealizable and monstrous. The final stage in the history of the period under investigation ended with the tragic results of applying the ideals of a binary system to real historical practice. The period of war communism was the first attempt to “abolish” history. At the basis of this experiment lay the eschatological belief that history had ended. The words of Engels were often repeated to the effect that previous epochs had studied history, while the proletarian revolution would replace the study of history with its remaking. By the beginning of the NEP, the failure of those utopian plans had become evident. Russia was at a crossroads. One road involved acknowledging the failure of those attempts and moving slowly toward a “normal” path of development. Lenin was evidently entertaining such notions during his final months, convinced that NEP was “long-term and serious.”8 At the same time, the ideas of the Changing Signposts Movement were developing in a similar direction. This opportunity, however, was lost, and the traditional binarism of Russian consciousness, which was used to the “uncompromising” separation of political forces into friend and foe, good and evil, prevailed. “You’re either with us or against us” and “If the enemy does not surrender, destroy it” became the slogans of the time. Such a consciousness required the presence of an enemy and constantly produced one. Only the appearance of a real enemy during the Second World War put a temporary halt to the production of enemies that were imaginary but politically necessary to the system. The final period in the development of Russia’s binary structure, as one might assume, is occurring at the present time. However, a transition to another kind of system involves such deep historical traditions that all hopes for a rapid breakthrough in that direction only demonstrate the stability of binary thinking. All the plans to affect deep socioeconomic and psychological change in a given number of months or year are too reminiscent of all the “five year plans in four years,” that is, the notion that by strong and decisive action one can overcome the objective course of history and that a rejection of explosions can be accomplished by means of explosions.

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In a natural state, binary and ternary systems are distributed across different cultural layers. Ternary systems find their most natural application in practical and empirical realms of culture insofar as development there is limited by the material possibilities of the process. Binary systems find their ideal soil in the realm of speculative models, theoretical constructs, and artistic fantasies. However, this natural distribution does not always obtain in practice. On the one hand, in certain cultures, for example, protestant ones, the cult of common sense, moderation, and reason dominates. From a practical point of view, these qualities become virtues and provide the basis for the principles on which civic ideals are built. The opposite situation arose in Russian culture. The idea of maximalism and the rejection of “vulgar” moderation from the realm of artistic consciousness were transferred to the realm of practical behavior. Ivan Turgenev, with his usual sensitivity to social moods, expressed this in the verses of his hero Mikhalevich in The Nest of Gentlefolk: I gave myself to new feelings with all my heart, And my soul became as a child’s! And I have burnt all that I adored, And now adore all that I burnt. (Turgenev 1917, 89)

The conflation of extremism with principled behavior and a suspicion of gradual change are features of Russian social life of the nineteenth century, so precisely captured by Turgenev. The problem of transitioning from a binary to a ternary point of view arose, as we have seen, during the Time of Troubles at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Every time this transition encountered unsurmountable obstacles, however, the government experienced one crisis after another and was painfully torn from its transition to a European (i.e., ternary) order, and this attempt ended every time with a new crisis. In fact, Russian development is facing the same problem today. The difficult, almost fatal, nature of these transitions is conditioned by the fact that these two structures are characterized by mutual untranslatability. From the point of view of a binary system, a ternary system represents chaos and decline (hence, e.g., the systematically repeated idea of the “rotting” West). But from the point of view of a ternary system, a binary system is a catastrophe, and so the transition from one system to the other is experienced psychologically as a death. Today, the crisis Russia

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is experiencing is, on the one hand, the same kind of crisis that has been repeated in various forms but with a common core from the time of Peter the Great to the present. On the other hand, we are experiencing an essentially new situation in that today the question of transitioning to a general European ternary structure has assumed Hamletian proportions: “To be or not to be.” (1992)

Notes 1. Consider, for example, the organic combination of Christianity with paganism, chivalry with folk influences of the steppe, and of Western with Eastern voices in The Lay of Igor’s Campaign. This openness to various currents in world culture produced incomprehension in scholars who were assessing the work using Muscovite rubrics, leading many to conclude the work was forged. 2. All translations from the New Testament are taken from the authorized or King James version (London: Everyman’s Library 1998) (Translator’s note). 3. Lotman is referring here to Blok’s essay of 1918 “The Intelligentsia and the Revolution,” in which he writes: “And the spirit is music. Socrates’ daemon once ordered him to obey the spirit of music. With your whole body, your whole heart, your whole consciousness—listen to the Revolution” (Blok 1966, 371) (Translator’s note). 4. For more on this, see Uspenskij and Zhivov (2012), Uspenskij (2012), and Lotman and Uspenskij (1984). 5. Kuzma Minin (d. 1616) was a prosperous meat trader in the city of Nizhny Novgorod at the time of the Polish invasion of Russia in the early seventeenth century. Minin became a national hero for his role in defending Russia. He was subsequently made a nobleman and a member of the Boyar Duma by the newly elected Romanov tsar Michael. Minin was mythologized as a populist in works of art, such as Mikhail Peskov’s 1861 Appeal to the People of Nizhny Novgorod by Citizen Minin in 1611 and Konstantin Makovsky’s 1896 Minin on a Square in Nizhny Novgorod Calling the People to Sacrifice (Translator’s note). 6. In any case, the idea of hereditary power should have obliged Peter to at least mention his reasons for excluding Alexei from the line of succession. 7. The quip “En Russie le gouvernement est un despotism mitigé par la strangulation” is often attributed to Mme de Staël, but it is likely a distillation of several comments made by the Swiss writer (see Pushkin 1986, 47n) (Translator’s note).

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8. Consider Kornei Chukovsky’s rendering of Gorky’s words in 1921: “The talk was trivial. ‘What’s Moscow like?’ Gorky asked. ‘All bazaar and bureaucracy,’ Fedin answered. ‘It’s like landing in a spider’s web,’ said Gorky. ‘Lenin’s supposedly scored a brilliant victory. He says straight out we’ve to put off Communism for twenty-five years. You’d think they’d object, but no, they agree’” (Chukovsky 2005, 93). The mention of 25 years sounded at that time like an eternity.

References Anderson, Lindsay (dir.). 1968. If. London: Memorial Enterprises. Blok, Alexander. 1966. “The Intelligentsia and the Revolution.” In Russian Intellectual History: An Anthology, Marc Raeff (ed.), 364–371. New  York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Chukovsky, Kornei. 2005. Diary, 1901–1969, Marian Schwartz (trans.). New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Isachenko, Aleksandr. 1973. “Esli by v 1478 godu Novgorod porazil Moskvu (Ob odnom nesostoiavshemsia variante istorii russkogo iazyka).” In VII Miedzynaroodowy kongres slawistów w Warszawie 1973. Streszczenia referatów i kommunikatów, Witold Doroszewski et al. (ed.), 85–86. Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe. Lotman, Ju. M. and B. A. Uspenskij. 1984. “Echoes of the Notion ‘Moscow as the Third Rome’ in Peter the Great’s Ideology.” In The Semiotics of Russian Culture, Ann Shukman (trans. and ed.), 53–67. Ann Arbor: Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan. Platonov, Sergei. 1970. The Time of Troubles: A Historical Study of the Internal Crisis and Social Struggle in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Muscovy, John T. Alexander (trans.). Lawrence: University of Kansas Press. Pushkin, Alexander. 1986. Pushkin on Literature, Tatyana Wolff (ed.). London: Athlone Press. Turgenev, Ivan. 1917. A House of Gentlefolk, Constance Garnett (trans.). New York: P. F. Collier & Son. Uspenskij, Boris. 2012. “Tsar and Pretender: Samozvanchestvo or Royal Imposture in Russia as a Cultural-Historical Phenomenon.” In Boris Uspenskij and Victor Zhivov, “Tsar and God” and Other Essays in Russian Cultural Semiotics, Marcus C. Leavitt, David Budgen, and Liv Bliss (trans.), 113–152. Boston: Academic Studies Press. Uspenskij, Boris and Victor Zhivov. 2012. “Tsar and God: Semiotic Aspects of the Sacralization of the Monarch in Russia.” In Boris Uspenskij and Victor Zhivov, “Tsar and God” and Other Essays in Russian Cultural Semiotics, Marcus C. Leavitt, David Budgen, and Liv Bliss (trans.), 78–112. Boston: Academic Studies Press.

CHAPTER 17

Afterword: (Re)constructing the Drafts of Past Mihhail Lotman

In general, the evolution of Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School may be presented as follows. From the semiotics of text, it evolved into the semiotics of culture, and from that, into the semiotics of mental processes and the semiosphere. In conjunction with that, the center of attention shifted from the semiotics of space to the semiotics of time. In the beginning, there was the semiotics of text. Text as a semiotics object offers certain challenges (Lotman 2000). On the one hand, text is not an independent phenomenon in classical structuralism; it is the result of the realization of language. Natural language is a sign system; therefore, a text is made up of signs. This, however, does not mean that a text is a sovereign semiotic phenomenon which cannot be reduced to the simple sum of signs present in it. On the other hand, a text could be interpreted as a single sign, and this could be done from the perspective of Peirce, rather than Saussure (according to Peirce, the relation between representamen and object is not possible without an interpreter). That is, ­meaning is not inside a sign as it is signified (an inseparable part of a sign), but is associated with a sign (representamen) in an act of communication (Piatigorsky 1962; Lotman and Piatigorsky 1968). These two points of view are not easy to reconcile. M. Lotman (*) Tallinn University, Tallinn and University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia © The Author(s) 2019 Juri Lotman - Culture, Memory and History, ed. by M. Tamm https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14710-5_17

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The Prague Linguistic Circle (foremost Nikolai Trubetzkoy, but also Roman Jakobson) devised a method of linguistic analysis based on binary oppositions. However, it was Claude Lévi-Strauss who already in the 1940s, in cooperation with Roman Jakobson, looked into the possibility of using a “phonological method” in mythological and anthropological research (Lévi-Strauss 1958) for analysis of different cultural phenomena. In his analysis of Baudelaire’s sonnet “Cats,” coauthored with Roman Jakobson, he applied the method to a literary text (Jakobson and Lévi-­ Strauss 1962). The idea of applying methods from structural linguistics to the study of artistic texts was a characteristic feature of the Tartu-Moscow School. In his early works on semiotics (1963–1973), Juri Lotman demonstrated that the peculiarity of a literary text is that it cannot be reduced to natural language: each work of art is both a construction of its language and a message in that language (Lotman 1963). This notion later spread to every type of text. Even though the fundamental importance of external associations of a text was declared already during the first stage of the development of the school (Lotman 1964, 164–181), the immanent aspects of text is the primary focus. The study of the external associations of text emerged from the description of the immanent qualities of text: both the internal and external associations of text are specific to a particular text. Herein lies the fundamental difference in comparison with both cultural-historical and Marxist theories—in both approaches, text (a work of art) takes on a passive role with respect to its context: text is a result of sociocultural conditions. According to Lotman’s approach, text is active. One can draw parallels here, with the Umwelt conception devised by Jakob von Uexküll. Just as a living organism creates its own specific Umwelt, text creates its own unique context, with its systems of connections lying outside the text (Kull and Lotman 2012; Lotman 2002).1 Text is active. With this claim, Lotman steps into a covert polemic, and not just with Saussure, but also with Jakobson. In his famous model of communication, Jakobson (1960) differentiates six relevant components of communication from the perspective of semiotics: sender, receiver, context, code, channel, and message. Many have questioned why Jakobson’s model does not include, for instance, noise, as Claude Shannon’s model does. Umberto Eco (1976, 32–36), for example, tries to improve Jakobson’s scheme by adding this. The thing is that Shannon’s and Jakobson’s schemes of communication are not compatible. Shannon offered an engineering solution to the problem of communication, and he

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did not care for the content of the information. To the contrary, Jakobson abstracts his scheme from technological problems and focuses merely on the semiotic. From his six components of communication, Jakobson derives the six most important functions of language as a semiotic system. Lotman proceeds from there, but makes some revisions. First, he shows that noise can also play an active semiotic role (Lotman 1964, 191–192), but he emphasizes that no component of communication is primary with respect to the text. Text, as a realization of language (and he agrees with Jakobson here), might contain something that language cannot foresee, and language evolves via texts: “In actual cultural history we often encounter cases, where an appearance of a text precedes the formation of language and stimulates the latter” (Lotman 1992a, 27). Jakobson, however, assumes that context, sender, and receiver (at least these components of communication) exist before the act of communication, before the text. This understanding, which is in accordance with common sense, is simplistic. To Lotman’s mind, a text can create its own audience, meaning, and receiver (Lotman 1982a). The text modifies the receiver (Lotman 1977b, 1982a). The text not only stems from context but also expands the context of the given text, changing it. When it comes to the channel (contact), then one can deduce even from Jakobson’s own treatment that a text not only requires pre-existing contact but also creates it (the phatic function). The fact that a text creates its own universe, creates its own sender, receiver, code, context, and contact, is a description of a communicative situation from the inner perspective of text. But that does not mean, of course, that this point of view is the only possible one. On the contrary, it assumes the existence of other points of view, without which it is incomplete. No text is isolated, existing in a cultural vacuum. Originality as a significant parameter in an artistic text demands a background and a distinction from other texts of the past and of the contemporary moment (see the chapter about the energy of text in Lotman 1977a, 190–197). This means that the text is greater than its immediate message. Even more, both the structural characteristics of the text and its message are dependent on the cultural context; even the genre of the text may change. And thus, for example, a large portion of medieval Russian hagiography and even practical texts (juridical texts, chronicles, etc.) are perceived as works of art. The sender and receiver of a text share, at least in part, a context that is recorded in their memory. But a text itself also has a memory, which

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c­ontains fragments and figures of various other texts and can be larger than the combined memories of the sender and receiver (Lotman 1990, 11–19; cf. also Zolyan 2016; Lachmann 1990). According to Lotman, a memory of a text is not a metaphor but a precise term. The memory of a text comes from the ability of the text to condense information (Lotman 1992b). Here, Lotman relies on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of genre memory. In analyzing the novels of Dostoevsky, Bakhtin shows that they may contain aspects that Dostoevsky himself was not—and could not possibly have been—aware of. These things were not in his (the author’s) memory, and yet they are represented in his texts. Who, then, is the bearer of this information? Bakhtin proposed that it was the genre. Bakhtin himself relied on the work of his ideological opponents, the Marrists, and, primarily, on Olga Freidenberg’s book The Poetics of Plot and Genre (1936). Lotman, however, shows how the external associations of a text (quotes, reminiscences, allusions, hints, etc.) bring fragments of other texts into a text, often not as willful constructions of the author. For example, Osip Mandelstam’s poems contain very archaic themes, structures, and figures that not only he but also other scholars of the time had no idea of. These were Indo-European figures and etymologies that were reconstructed only in the second half of the twentieth century (Lotman 2011). One can proceed to a lower level and show that not only texts but also the words within it can have a memory. Words are able to remember not only their own history (e.g., etymological) but also the history of neighboring words from previous contexts. The Acmeists consciously exploited this, calling the device “introducing words”: a word remembers its neighbors from previous texts (Akhmatova 1990; Zolyan and Lotman 2012, 69). A text is always connected with other texts, forming a structure that in modern terms could be called hypertextual. What is important, however, is that this structure can, with certain modifications, be analyzed with the same methods used to study intratextual structure. This raises a question, namely, what is the ontological status of this hypertextual structure. According to Lotman, this is the most important part of culture. Every text, including hypertexts, requires an addressee, a reader (more of the addressee problem will be addressed later in the chapter). One could conclude from this that culture is formed out of texts and their receivers. This was how Russian culture was interpreted by Mikhail Gasparov, an outstanding philologist who was closely involved with the Tartu-Moscow School, even though he worked within the positivist paradigm. When Gasparov called Russian culture a community of Pushkin’s readers, he was

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not trying to say something original or aphoristic. Pushkin is significant to any bearer of Russian culture. They might revere Pushkin or hate, but Pushkin is important to them in any case, even to those who never read him. In the same vein, German culture might be defined as the readership of Goethe, English culture as a readership of Shakespeare, and so on. Even so, it is somewhat different to what Lotman had in mind. To him, culture itself is subjective. A culture creates, reproduces, and constantly reads its own texts (Semenenko 2012, 100–103). Here lies a certain parallel with human memory: a person’s memory is not separate from the person, and the person remembers who they are by constantly consulting their memory, reproducing and modifying it. So, too, does a text. It changes over time, losing a part of its information while expanding it at the same time. If we read Shakespeare, many of the political allusions that were evident to his contemporaries are lost on us. For us, these things simply do not exist in the text. Even so, we see much in Shakespeare’s texts that his contemporaries did not notice. Hamlet is, for instance, something completely different and more innovative for German Romantics than for the audience in early seventeenth-century London. Sturm und Drang’s Shakespeare breaks canons of classicism of which the historical Shakespeare could not have been aware. Today’s reader of Hamlet finds ecological and gender issues, the problem of alcoholism, and so on. The text changes and grows. Lotman liked Heraclitus’ idea of the self-increasing logos (Lotman 2004, 159), but for him, it meant the text, not the psyché. A text cannot be reduced to language for a second and perhaps even more important reason. Namely, according to Lotman, all artistic texts and a large portion of non-artistic texts are multilingual, or at least bilingual, by nature. The fact that a written text is a semiotic superstructure was already proposed by Jakobson (1971, 340), who argued that a written text is in essence an intersemiotic translation because visual and acoustic signs are fundamentally different semiotic systems and a text encoded with a phonemic alphabet is something fundamentally different from a logogrammatic text. But here, Lotman goes deeper. A verbal text contains various codes within it. On the one hand, it might be a story, the realization of a narrative; on the other hand, every text has a certain tropological structure, but tropes have a fundamentally different semiotic orientation. The basis for many tropes is the transmission of visual information by verbal means; already the Greek eidos [“to apprehend, see”] has visual connotations. See the English word image or the Russian obraz. It is an

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intersemiotic translation, where the iconic sign is transmitted with the help of symbolic signs. Every artistic text is characterized by the tension between iconism and symbolism (Lotman 1990, 36–62). The text—unlike language—has the properties of a thinking structure and intellect (at least human intellect) and contains a whole series of properties that brings it closer to text. In the 1980s, Lotman collaborated intensely with psychologists and psycholinguists from Leningrad, who were studying the functional asymmetry of the brain. This collaboration was useful for both sides. The psychologists found a semiotic perspective for their work, while Lotman found empirical support for his theory. As a member of this group, the renowned psycholinguist Tatyana Chernigovskaya claimed, now that the enthusiasm of the time had significantly subsided, that several conclusions were drawn in haste, but that concerns the psychophysiological aspect. What remained were Lotman’s semiotic models (see Davtian and Chernigovskaya 2003). These represent the basis for a cognitive semiotics. The characterization of culture as a collective intellect requires elaboration of the intellectual processes and mechanisms involved. In semiotic studies of intellect, Lotman warned of the danger of anthropomorphism. Parallels should be drawn with at least two different forms of intellect. First, parallels with primitive forms of intellect, and second, parallels with human intellect. Lotman was fascinated by insects since childhood and seriously considered pursuing a career in entomology. The world of insects was captivating and mysterious to him. It is clear that they have forms of intelligent behavior, but Lotman thought that it would never be possible for us to actually engage in dialogue with insects, which means that we may never fully understand them: “[W]e do not know what insects are, we do not even know what constitutes an individual there: is it a hexapod or is it an organism that is formed from these specimens. This world, which is well researched entomologically, is intrinsically sealed from us” (Lotman 1994, 458). And later, again in his memoirs, which he dictated in the year of his death: The mysterious world of insects, which I find intimidating and captivating, arouses a strange feeling in me even now—I think it is precisely insects, with their exceptionally slow evolution and startling power to survive, who will be the final population of our planet. There is no doubt that they are endowed with their own intellectual world, but that world will always be closed to us. (Lotman 2014, 15)

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Recent studies in the fields of artificial intelligence and biosemiotics allow the problem of the hive mentality to be presented in a more positive light. The so-called social insects (ants and bees, and maybe even unicellular organisms) have their own forms of communication; intelligence is in their nature, but this intelligence is not localized in any one specimen. This is referred to as swarm intelligence, which cannot be compared to human intellect because in the case of both bees and especially ants, it can be described with fairly simple algorithms and probably lacks any degree of freedom. Even so, the problem lies not so much in the complexity of the intellect, but in its physical localization. This is what characterizes the swarm as a whole, that is “smarter” than any individual specimen belonging to the swarm. What is more, one can claim, at least with bees, that their behavior cannot be reduced to just instinct because they are capable of learning, and what is learned by one specimen turns into collective wisdom. Swarm intelligence also develops in human culture, but here the relationship between the individual specimen and the swarm is much more complicated and diverse. However, this represents an important challenge, not just to cultural semiotics, because many phenomena of culture (and certainly not just primitive culture as the internet might be the most disturbing example) are subject to the logic of the hive mentality. If one were to draw a parallel from the world of culture, then it is not the metaphor of linear text, but of myth, that is more productive. But that is a topic in its own right. One of the important advantages of semiotics is that similar or even the same semiotic mechanisms might serve as the basis for what appear to be very different phenomena. Text and intellect are, ontologically, completely different objects, but the same semiotic principles may apply to them. But these mechanisms are also characteristic of culture as a whole. Analogies with the human mind involve several aspects. The most important of these is the asymmetrical functioning of different semiotic mechanisms. Here we can draw an analogy with the functional asymmetry of the hemispheres of the human brain. Different types of signs are concerned with different types of procedures and different channels of communications. As demonstrated by Jakobson, acoustic signals tend toward symbolism, while visual signals tend toward iconism. In both the human brain and culture, processes of an ekphrastic type are important, that is, the translation of iconic information with symbolic signs, and vice versa. This is a constant process of intersemiotic translation that occurs both in the consciousness of a

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s­ingle human and in the culture as a whole. The proportions of these mechanisms, however, do not form a constant; they vary across cultures. When we talk about the semiotic similarities between text and intellect, then, it is important also to emphasize their fundamental differences. Unlike text, the (human) intellect is a reflexive structure: it is capable not only of producing and emitting information, but also of contemplating its own intellectual activity. A text generally does not do that. To be fair, the Russian Acmeists—especially Mandelstam—tried to create an approach to understanding reflexive texts. Mandelstam, for example, claimed that in Dante’s Divine Comedy, the commentary is not an addendum written later by an unknown person but an organic part of the text, which grows out of the text itself (Mandelstam 1987, 151). It is unclear whether this interpretation of Dante is historically valid, but for Mandelstam and Akhmatova, it was a strategy for generating text: every poem, and even every fragment of every poem, is a part of what they called the “poetic text of the world” (perhaps today, it would be more correct to call it a hypertext), where texts and fragments of different eras are tightly interconnected and by reciprocal reflection explain and comment on one other. Even so, reflexive texts do not constitute a general phenomenon, but the capacity for reflexivity is an inseparable part of the human intellect. It is interesting to note that models of cultural semiotics are also relevant in the field of biosemiotics, addressing its most fundamental questions (Alexandrov 2000). It is known that life is not definable in chemical or biological terms: biology as a science begins when life is already present (this was already acknowledged by Charles Darwin). According to Kalevi Kull, John Deely, and others, life is a semiotic phenomenon. Kull (1998) defines life as a self-reading text. The concept of creation also turned out to be productive, as in Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana’s concept of autopoiesis (Maturana and Varela 1980). Every culture is like an artistic text insofar as it is at once a language and a message (text) in that language. Culture, which semiotically represents a system that constantly interprets and renews itself, is yet another type of text. If culture is a self-reading text, then the next step is to explain which texts are involved and to create a cultural typology on the basis of those findings. The most general typological parameters are as follows. First, is a text cyclical or linear? “Cyclical” might not mean recursive, but only that the beginning and end are unmarked, and so the presentation or reading of the text may be started at any random place. Usually, texts of this kind are indifferent to any possible controversy involving versions that are

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incompatible with one another. Myths are texts of this kind. Linear texts, on the other hand, are represented not only by narratives but by any kind of logically constructed texts whose beginning and end are explicitly marked (Lotman 1990, 131–142). Texts of this kind try to avoid any discordance. In an extremely simplified manner, this opposition could be described as “mythological versus discursive.” The next differentiation is between a text and a metatext. Here we can distinguish between cultures that are based on texts and exemplars and those that are based on metalanguages and grammatical systems, that is, explicitly formulated rules, traditions, norms, and laws (Lotman 1975). The former are typically referred to as “primitive,” “savage,” or “traditional” (although every one of these epithets is incorrect). Even the best of the aforementioned epithets, “traditional,” is meaningless as every culture is traditional. The second type of culture can form new models originating from already existing rules, both modifying and renewing them. Just as no text can exist in a total vacuum, so every culture in its normal existence is connected with other cultures. (There are some completely isolated cultures that are believed to be the remnants of a society that survived some kind of catastrophe.) Cultures are in dialogue with both their contemporaries and their past. From this, Lotman came to formulate his idea of the semiosphere, or the semiotic space in which every culture and text function. The aforementioned topics represent the main directions of Lotman’s thinking in the field of cultural semiotics. First of all, one should mention that special thinking forms the basis of almost every semiotic idea of Lotman. In the 1960s, he studied topology, and so forms and metaphors related to space permeate many of his works. He even claimed that space was more important in the study of culture than time. Moreover, when we talk about time or even when we present different models of time, we use spatial forms: whether time is represented by different types of vectors, such as an arrow or a river, or time is represented as a cycle using a wheel, we discuss time in spatial terms. Space can also be discussed using temporal terms (e.g., a three-day journey), but metaphors of that kind are much more limited. Time and space are not separate from each other, and I am not referring here so much to space-time as defined by Minkowski and Einstein, but rather to Bakhtin’s chronotope. But here, Lotman makes an important distinction. Time and space are not symmetrical or equal from the standpoint of culture. Space is more important and universal than time. In his theoretical works, Lotman only touches on the topic in

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­ assing, but it is discussed in greater depth in a letter to his student Larisa p Fialkova (15 July 1983). The letter compares Gogol’s chronotope to that of Bulgakov’s: The placement of spatial and temporal models into the same series is arguable in and of itself and belongs to the 20th century (the age of the Theory of Relativity). For Bakhtin as a product of modernist culture, time is like a fourth dimension of the chronotope, as it is for Einstein, who is also a modernist. But for Gogol and, more broadly, for medieval culture, which was very important to Gogol, it is not so. Space is noticeably more universal. Time began with the fall of man2 and will end with the horn of the archangel, while original space is eternal (the space of Plato’s ideas, but not their shadow in the material world). […] Bakhtin bases his ideas on those of physics (Theory of Relativity) and views time and space as phenomena of a single series (this goes back to a Kantian perspective). We, however, […] based our approach on mathematical (topological) terms of space: in this sense, space is an abundance of objects (points), with a relationship of continuity lying between. In that sense, one can talk about semantic space, ethical space, temporal space and even the space of physical space. From this viewpoint, space is the universal language of modelling. Note that in everyday language we express temporal categories using spatial language (forthcoming, following, time flies, time has stopped, etc.) whereas spatial concepts are impossible to express in temporal terms. (Lotman 1997, 720)

The semiosphere in Lotman’s formulation is a semiotic space in which time is an important dimension (cf. Randviir 2007; Nöth 2014). Whereas in Lotman’s earlier works the focus was on the spatial (the field of meaning forms a space with certain parameters, and cultural space is by nature semiotic), the temporal plays an increasingly important role in his later works. The parameter of time was already important during the period in which he focused on text, because the author and the reader of a text are separated not just by space but also by time. What is more, the parameter of time in a text is different for the author and for the reader (Lotman 1990, 63–81). The reader has a complete text and, even in academic publications where earlier plans, drafts, and version are shown, they are separate from the main body of the text (usually meaning the last version) in space, but not in time, because they are in the same volume of works. In the case of the author, however, a final version is often absent, and different versions that differ temporally often coexist simultaneously in the author’s consciousness. (Lotman analyzed Pushkin’s works thoroughly in this regard.)

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Moreover, the author (not only Pushkin, but also Mandelstam) often does not remember which version is “final,” and so the process of text creation may remain unfinished, something the reader would not typically notice. The second aspect involves the orientation of the text with respect to time and the reader. This is of particular concern in the type of writing we now refer to as documentary. Lotman elaborated the difference between medieval chronicles and present-day historical writing in the following way. If one were to exclude the introductory part, which talks about the creation of the Earth and the descendants of Adam, then the medieval chronicler (especially in medieval Russian chronicles, but obviously this is not applicable to them alone) addresses his description of current events to the future or to eternity. He does not of course actually write of real-­ time events, as this is not reportage, but of those events he perceives to be contemporary for him. He does not know nor is he particularly interested in who his reader is. He describes events “the way they are,” meaning, he does not acknowledge the nature of his own subjective position. The historian, however, writes of past events to a contemporary reader. It is a fundamentally different type of writing. The events described in the chronicles are constant. No matter how distant the reader’s future, it is still one and the same text (at the same time, of course, the reading strategies and interpretations of the text are subject to change). For the historian, on the other hand, it is important to consider not only the situatedness of past events but also his own present. As noted by Robin G. Collingwood— whose The Idea of History (1946) was highly regarded by Lotman, although he did not agree with all the ideas expressed therein—the historian must turn to past events over and over again not because those events have changed since the previous treatment, but because the historians themselves are in a different context from that of their predecessors. Therefore, the science of history can never achieve an exhaustive treatment of the past. What Collingwood does not account for, however, is that in culture, time, like space, is not an “objective” reality but a semiotic construct (cf.  Lotman 2017). In different cultures and in different periods of the same culture, different models of time may dominate. If we speak about European culture or cultures, then there are primarily two models of time: cyclical and linear. For the most part, these models exist simultaneously, but their proportion differs during different periods and in different regions. The day-night cycle, lunar cycles, seasonal cycles, and so on exist with the metaphor of time as flow. A significant factor affecting how a

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culture approaches time is language. In language, there is no cyclical or linear time. The models of time are based on categories of verbs. In most languages, these are the present, past, and future tenses, but in Estonian language, for example, there is no grammatical future or at least not a special tense for it. The present and past are not symmetrical. There are always more categories of the past tense, and the past is structured in more grammatical detail. It is also important to differentiate between objective and subjective times (see the differentiation of discourse on the historical plane and the plane of speech in Benveniste 1966, 1970). Objective times are related to some specific date, which acquires the status of an event attribute, for example, the French Revolution in the year 1789, and this marker in time is constant and does not change in time. Such objective times are not confined to the past; one could talk about plans for the year 2020, for example. The situation, however, is completely different with events that occur in an hour or tomorrow, or which happened yesterday or a month ago. These markers are not constant but variable, and their meaning is related to the speaker’s position in time. In most natural languages, subjective time is constructed in more detail than objective time. Here, too, the asymmetry of the future and past reveals itself, as in the differentiation of various past tenses in the English language as opposed to the vagueness of expressing the future with grammatical means. In European languages, the system of verb tenses typically includes the present, imperfect, perfect, pluperfect, and future. In rare cases, such as Latin, there are two futures: future I is symmetrical with the imperfect, while future II is symmetrical with the perfect. The present, simple past, and simple future are purely subjective tenses, as they are dependent on the moment of the act of speech. The present perfect, past perfect, and future perfect are indirectly connected to the moment of speech, but a relationship remains even here. This explains another fundamental difference between a chronicle and historical discourse. The time of the chronicle is purely objective, whereas the time of the historian’s text is subjective, albeit in a concealed manner, for, even if the story involves only definitive dates and not what happened the day before yesterday, the implicit author’s position inevitably creates a subjective temporal perspective. The aforementioned is just one of the paths that led the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School to study the problematics of memory. Both chronicles and histories are a part of literary culture. Culture codifies its memory in external carriers, which requires literacy. But the memory of the past is also

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fixed in text in cultures that do not know the written word (these cultures are often referred to with the misleading epithet “oral”), which, as Lotman remarks, are not necessarily underdeveloped or primitive. To use Lotman’s later terminology, the development of alphabetic writing represents an explosion, which was not anticipated by the preceding culture. Some South American Pre-Columbian cultures achieved high levels of societal development but left no written texts. These cultures are of not just historical but also cultural semiotic interest, as they show the possibility of an alternative course of history (Lotman 1990, 245–253). These cultures have different means for preserving information. The conflict between oral and literary culture is recorded in Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus (Lotman 1990, 251–252). No semiotic mechanism can function as an isolated system that is in a vacuum. An unavoidable condition of its work is its location in the semiosphere—in semiotic space. Each semiotic monad can, due to its separation and semiotic particularity, enter into a convergent relationship with other monads, forming a new unit at a higher level. (Lotman 1993, 370)

The semiosphere, just like culture, is a space of communication. Roman Jakobson’s model of communication (Jakobson 1960) can be considered a standard one in semiotics. From the standpoint of Tartu-Moscow semiotics, however, it has several shortcomings. The main one is its static property. The model can be interpreted in such a way that the creation of a message requires a pre-existing language, a sender and a receiver, as well as their mutual experience (context) and contact. In fact, Jakobson’s own study of the phatic function contradicts this model insofar as at least some phatic messages not only regulate existing contact, but also create it. Therefore, contact is not a prerequisite for a message but can also be a consequence of it. And the same applies to every other function of language and every other component of an act of communication. In a series of earlier writings, Jakobson stressed that Saussure’s thesis of the primary nature of language over speech is not generally true. Sometimes language does indeed precede speech, which is especially true with artistic language and artistic speech. However, a language evolves via speech. The same is true with context. A prerequisite of communication is indeed the existence of a certain context between the speaker and the listener, but this context changes during communication, and one of the purposes of communication is to mutually enrich the context. But Lotman does not stop

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there, but shows that even the receiver may not always precede the text, for the text can create its own receiver. What is more, the text also creates its own author as the creator of the given text. This last point deserves a closer look. Lotman distinguishes between two channels of communication and, in accordance with that, two different types of communication. One channel is “me – them,” and the other is “me – me” (Lotman 1973). Shannon’s and Jakobson’s models of communication, among others, describe various aspects that can be associated with the “me – them” type of communication. Here, too, we should make some distinctions. The first is when an author of a book or newspaper article creates a text that is available to an audience with whom they may not have personal contact. The second is when the sender directs the text to a familiar addressee, and the third is a dialogue situation (here one could talk of a “me  – you” type of communication3). It is different in the case of autocommunication (the channel “me  – me”). Lotman distinguishes between different cases here: first, when one writes down events of the past in order to remember them and read them in the future. Second, when one writes down events of the future in order to fulfill them in the future (e.g., a shopping list). Third, when one creates a text in order to better comprehend oneself (e.g., diaries and confessionals). Whereas in the first two cases the aim is to change the context, in the third, the aim is to change oneself. The text transforms its addressee. A separate type is represented by those figures of speech and writing for which no addressee appears to exist. These may be even unexpressed thoughts, but also mechanical scribbles, thinking out loud, and so on. In this case, the text is often invaded by random incidental elements that may at some point become meaningful, such as thinking while train wheels make noise in the background or while examining an ornament. In his later works, Lotman focused more and more on time and history. Processes that occur in time are asymmetrical and irreversible. Lotman was greatly influenced here by Ilya Prigogine’s study of thermodynamic processes (Prigogine 1978). The deterministic model has traditionally been used in descriptions of the past, implying that what happened was supposed to happen (“history does not know the conditional mood”), whereas the future is vague, characterized by different scenarios with different degrees of probability. The present moment is a semiotic explosion, where the bundle of possibilities is reduced to a single reality, rendering all unrealized possibilities unreal. Here, Lotman takes an interest in two

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aspects. First, the problem of the present: how and why are possibilities that a moment ago seemed as likely or even more likely left unrealized? Second, what is the semiotic status of unrealized possibilities? Here, it turns out that possibilities and models that are non-existent from the standpoint of political history could be, from the perspective of cultural semiotics, very much alive. Lotman relies here too on studies of literary texts. He drew attention to the fact that texts—and especially literary texts—are not one and the same for the author and the reader. The reader receives a finished product, where all plans, drafts, and versions have been discarded. For the author, on the other hand, the text exists in all its variability and quite often the author will come back to an already published text, change it, or restore parts that had previously been edited out. Even so, versions, plans, and scrapped parts may remain. But what about history? In his study of Russian history, Lotman distinguishes between two types of historical period: first, periods of mostly stable growth; second, times of troubles. Every period of turmoil represents a semiotic explosion, where many different evolutionary possibilities appear, such as the Time of Troubles from 1598–1613, the revolutions of 1917 and the subsequent civil war, and perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s (Lotman 1992c). Unrealized and discarded sociopolitical models retain their relevance for a shorter or longer duration. If one were to talk about events of recent years, then one of the most excruciating problems for Russia is the independence of Ukraine. For a myriad of reasons, which are not appropriate to discuss here, the independence of the Transcaucasian, Central-Asian, and Baltic states in the early 1990s was relatively painless for Russia and Russian culture, and this holds somewhat true even for Belarus, but the independence of Ukraine was completely unacceptable. As a renowned Russian national culturologist told me, Russia feels phantom pain with regard to Ukraine. It is like an amputated leg that does not “actually” exist, but that hurts nonetheless. And this pain is completely real. There are many examples of such phantom phenomena, with actual consequences in cultural history. The idea of a single objectively known past, which is based on a linear model of time, belongs to a certain age and cultural context. Current studies of time and the cultural semiotic models built on the basis of those studies attest not only to different interpretations of the past but also to different pasts. It is especially obvious in situations of conflict between cultures. Albanians and Serbs, Armenians and Azerbaijanis, Ukrainians and Russians have different pasts, which cannot be integrated into one

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connected narrative and cannot be judged with the categories of true or false. Alternative pasts may also be the basis for alternative presents. Therefore, variability and pluralism characterize not only the future but also the past. (Consider a popular Russian saying from the beginning of this millennium: nothing is as unpredictable with us as the past.) The past is a reconstruction, a semiotic model that is constructed based on certain rules which the builders themselves may use unconsciously. Here, a certain symmetry can once again be noted between the past and the future. Lotman writes of the nineteenth-century archaists (meaning Russian conservatives of the time) that their ideal was a past Russia, and this ideal had to be recreated in the future. At the same time, they clearly acknowledged to themselves that their ideal Russia was truly ideal—this past had never actually existed. By their logic, “the old times can and must be invented and constructed, not identified via documents” (Lotman 1993, 366). The past had to be constructed in order for it to be realized in the future. Their construction of the past is based on modern (especially Rousseauian) ideas of the vices of a new age, against which they fought. It is important to distinguish between those models of the past that are created by a culture in order to describe itself (we call those implicit models) and metamodels that are created by a historian or cultural semiotician. The latter are models whose principles are explicitly expressed. Implicit models, which presume the existence of a past independent of historians’ subjective position and their narrative strategies, differ from semiotic models in regard to the most fundamental term of all, namely the fact. A fact is not a self-explanatory given thing, the minimal element in any historical storytelling. A fact is a result of reconstruction, and Lotman shows in a series of short articles, how it is possible to establish truths even from the most unreliable of sources (Lotman 1976, 1979a). This was at about the same time that Michel Foucault was reaching similar conclusions in his “archeological” research. The difference between Lotman and Foucault is that for the latter, the past did not exist at all; it dissolved into various discursive strategies. The identification of a fact depends on the kind of narrative and rhetorical structures the researcher has used. From the standpoint of semiotics, a fact can be characterized by two closely interrelated features. First, a fact can be verbally formulated. It is to a great extent isomorphic with an utterance (cf. Wittgenstein 1922). Second, a single fact must be connected with other facts by causal and temporal relations, that is, fact is a part of some narrative. A state of things becomes a fact only as a unit of some narrative or narratives. Recognition of a fact is related to the logic of the narrative. Fact is a part of a historical

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narrative. A missing fact is just like a missing puzzle piece. In order to reconstruct it, one has to know the whole, which in the case of history is often a subject of reconstruction itself. From the standpoint of semiotics, a fact is different from the state of things in a very important aspect—fact has meaning. Yet herein lies the danger of attributing an arbitrary or ideologically motivated meaning to a fact. Reconstruction can take place, however, in both directions: if we know the whole narrative, we can reconstruct missing facts, and if we know the individual facts, we can reconstruct the whole narrative. In this realm, the parallels between text and culture are especially clear. Relying on drafts, plans, and other hints, Lotman has repeatedly attempted to reconstruct the unwritten texts and the situations associated with those texts (Lotman 1979b, 1982b, 1986). At the same time, he stressed repeatedly that from the viewpoint of the semiotics of culture, history is not a process that can be determined unequivocally. Just as with literature, we can speak of unrealized possibilities, which are drafts of history. These were the developments that were possible but were not realized. In his last period, Lotman makes several comments on possible developments of culture. Here we could mention his interest in those pre-Columbian civilizations in America that did not know writing. He proposes different types of culture, for example, those that were oriented not toward events and excesses but toward sustainability and stability. In the actual history of European culture, we see the coexistence of different cultural models. Lotman does not confine himself to general models, as he is just as much interested in the possibility of alternative events. Thus, for example, he responded in a positive way to Aleksandr Isachenko’s deliberation over what would have happened if Moscow had failed to defeat Novgorod in the fifteenth century and Republican Novgorod had instead defeated despotic Moscow (Isachenko 1973). Yet, just as in literature, a plan that was discarded earlier can be realized later in some other context. In this sense, the study and reconstruction of historical drafts is not a purely academic enterprise; it can also serve as a source for future development or, on the contrary, a warning of it. The semiotics of history must be distinguished from the semiotics of time, even though they are inseparably related. The past and history (i.e., a story of past events) have a special ontological and semiotic status. But what we are willing to admit as past depends to a great extent on our understanding of time. Lotman repeatedly warned that, although the works created by historians are texts among other texts in a given culture and so are subjected to the narrative techniques characteristic of that

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culture, historians must recognize this and attempt to liberate themselves from that dependency. For example, a historian should avoid moralizing, teleologism, and so on. The construction of the past has to be intrinsically related to the deconstruction of contemporary narratives. Different models of time are used in the semiotics of time: cyclical, linear, corpuscular, and so on. Time is represented as a vector or a flow that moves from the past into the future. At the same time, one can imagine time to be a sequence of possible worlds, in which it is not time that moves, but our present space that moves from one possible world into the next. History is a story of events that took place in time. History usually treats time as asymmetrical: a future that has multiple possible variations and is vague versus a certain, determined past. Once again, Lotman uses the model of text in his treatment of history. From the standpoint of the author, a text may lack a final, canonical version, but for Lotman, a text is a collection of plans and ideas rich in variation that were only partially recorded in drafts. In a sense, a certain symmetry develops here: plans in the future relate to drafts in the past, and the present is only the intermediate status between them. When, in 1983, Lotman published his paper on an ode by Lomonosov that was based on the Book of Job (Lotman 1983), he claimed that it was the beginning of a completely new direction in his research. This direction led to the study of irrational, unpredictable, and often unrealized models of culture. He did not achieve completeness comparable to his theory of the artistic text or his typology of cultures. Nevertheless, the problems outlined in these works represent a significant contribution not only to the semiotics of culture but also to the theory of history.4

Notes 1. What has been said should not be understood in a simplified way, as if Uexküll’s and Lotman’s approaches deny the existence of natural or sociocultural environment. It is a kind of solipsism, which Uexküll and Lotman attributed correspondingly to an organism and text, but not the view of the researchers themselves (at least as concerns Lotman, which I can confirm). 2. This might be true for Gogol, but in Abrahamic religious traditions, time began with the act of creation. 3. Such communication is at the center of attention of dialogical philosophy; compare Martin Buber, Mikhail Bakhtin, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, and others.

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4. The writing of this chapter was supported in part by a Personal Research Funding (PUT1231) from Estonian Research Council.

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Lotman, Ju. M. 1975. “On the metalanguage of a typological description of culture.” Semiotica 14(2): 97–123. Lotman, Iurii M. 1976. “K voprosu ob istochnikovedcheskom znachenii vyskazyvanii inostrancev o Rossii.” In Sravnitel’noe izuchenie literatur: Sbornik stat’ei k 80-letiiu akademika M. P. Alekseeva, 125–132. Leningrad: Nauka. Lotman, Juri 1977a. The Structure of the Artistic Text. Ronald Vroon (transl.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Lotman, Yuri M. 1977b. “Two Models of Communication.” In Soviet Semiotics: An Anthology, Daniel P.  Lucid (ed. and transl.), 99–101. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Lotman, Iurii M. 1979a. “K probleme raboty s nedostovernymi istochnikami.” Vremennik Pushkinskoi komissii, 13, 93–98. Lotman, Iurii 1979b. “‘Povest’ o kapitane Kopeikine’: Rekonstrukciia zamysla i ideino-kompozicionnaia funkciia.” Trudy po znakovym sistemam, 11: 26–43. Lotman, Yuri M. 1982a. “The Text and the Structure of Its Audience,” Ann Shukman (transl.). New Literary History, 14(l): 81–87. Lotman, Iurii M. 1982b. “Opyt rekonstrukcii pushkinskogo siuzheta ob Iisuse.” In Vremennik Pushkinskoi komissii 1979, 15–27. Leningrad: Nauka. Lotman, Iurii M. 1983. “Ob ‘Ode, vybrannoi iz Iova’ Lomonosova.” Izvestia AN SSR. Seria literatury i iazyka, 42(3): 253–262. Lotman, Iurii M. 1986. “Zamysel stihotvoreniia o poslednem dne Pompei.” In Pushkin i russkaia literatura: Sbornik nauchnyh trudov, 24–33. Riga: LGU im. P. Stuchki. Lotman, Yuri M. 1990. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, Ann Shukman (transl.). London and New York: I. B. Tauris. Lotman, Iurii M. 1992a. “Mozg – tekst – kul’tura – iskusstvennyi intellekt.” In Iurii Lotman, Izbrannye stat’i, vol. 1, 25–33. Tallinn: Aleksandra. Lotman, Iurii M. 1992b. “Semiotika kul’tury i ponijatie teksta.” In Iurii Lotman, Izbrannye stat’i, vol. 1, 129–132. Tallinn: Aleksandra. Lotman, Iurii M. 1992c. “Mekhanizm Smuty (K tipologii russkoi istorii kul’tury).” Studia Russica Helsingiensia et Tartuensia, 3: 7–23. Lotman, Iurii M. 1993. “Kul’tura kak sub’iekt i sama-sebe ob’iekt.” In Iurii Lotman, Izbrannye stat’i, vol. 3, 368–375. Tallinn: Aleksandra. Lotman, Iurii M. 1994. “Chem dlinnee proiden put’, tem men’she veroiatnostei dlia vybora.” In Iu. M. Lotman i tartusko-moskovskaya semioticheskaya shkola, A. D. Koshelev (ed.), 456–458. Moskow: Gnosis. Lotman, Iurii M. 1997. Pis’ma 1940–1993. Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury. Lotman, Juri 2004. Culture and Explosion. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Lotman, Yuri 2014. Non-Memoirs, Caroline Lemak Brickman (transl.). Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press. Lotman, Iurii M. and Aleksandr Piatigorsky, 1968. “Tekst i funkciia.” In III Letniaia shkola po vtorichnym modeliruiushhim sistemam. Kääriku, 10–20 maja 1968 goda: Tezisy, 74–88. Tartu: Tartuskij gosudarstvennyj universitet.

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Lotman, Mihhail 2000. “A Few Notes on the Philosophical Background of the Tartu School of Semiotics.” European Journal for Semiotics Studies, 12(1): 23–46. Lotman, Mihhail 2002. “Umwelt and semiosphere.” Sign Systems Studies, 30(1): 33–40. Lotman, Mihhail 2011. “Linguistics and Poetics Revisited.” In Frontiers in Comparative Prosody, Mihhail Lotman and Maria-Kristiina Lotman (eds), 15–53. Bern etc.: Peter Lang Verlag. Lotman, Mihhail 2017. “History as geography: In search for Russian identity.” Sign Systems Studies, 45(3/4): 263–283. Mandelstam, Osip 1987. Slovo i kul’tura. Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’. Maturana, Humberto R. and Francisco J. Varela, 1980. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Dordrecht, Boston and London: D.  Reider Publishing Company. Nöth, Winfried 2014. “The Topography of Yuri Lotman’s Semiosphere.” International Journal of Cultural Studies, 14(4): 1–17. Piatigorsky, Aleksandr 1962. “Nekotorye obshhie zamechanija otnositel’no rassmotrenija teksta kak raznovidnosti signala.” In Strukturno tipologicheskie issledovaniia. Sbornik statei, 144–154. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR. Prigogine, Ilya 1978. “Time, Structure and Fluctuations.” Science, 201(4358): 777–785. Randviir, Anti 2007. “On Spatiality in Tartu–Moscow Cultural Semiotics: The Semiotic Subject.” Sign Systems Studies, 35(1/2): 137–159. Semenenko, Aleksei 2012. The Texture of Culture: An Introduction to Yuri Lotman’s Semiotic Theory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1922. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, C. K. Ogden (transl.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Zolyan, Suren 2016. “Iurii Lotman o tekste: idei, problem, perspektivy.” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 3(139): 63–96. Zolyan, Suren and Lotman, Mihhail 2012. Issledovanija v oblasti semanticheskoi poetiki akmeizma. Tallinn: Tallinn University Press.

Index1

A Akhmatova, Anna, 108, 119, 252 Alekseev, Petr, 173n3 Alexander I, 60, 238, 239 Alexander II, 239 Alexander III, 239 Alexander VI, Pope, 210 Algorithm, 34, 70, 71, 89, 179, 197, 251 Analogy, 8, 9, 70, 78, 105, 251 Anderson, Lindsay, 232 Annales School, 118, 191–193, 233 Apparatus, 8, 27, 44, 45, 71, 86, 101, 185 Ariosto, Ludovico, 207 Artificial intelligence, 33, 46, 251 Assmann, Aleida, 10, 11 Assmann, Jan, 10 Asymmetry, 28, 39, 42, 87, 90, 193, 250, 251, 256, 258, 262 Augustine, Saint, 51

Autocommunication, 6, 258 Automatization, 75, 90 B Babeuf, Gracchus, 146 Bacon, Francis, 205, 209, 211 Baer, Brian James, 21 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 21n5, 102, 134, 248, 253, 254, 262n3 Bakoš, Mikuláš, 81n1 Balzac, Honoré de, 75, 165, 226 Baratynsky, Yevgeny, 143, 154, 158, 165, 168, 221n2 Baroque, 181, 209 Batiushkov, Konstantin, 126 Baudelaire, Charles, 246 Bayezid II, sultan, 210 Belinsky, Vissarion, 77, 78, 141, 170, 171 Bell, Roger T., 28

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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267

268 

INDEX

Berdyaev, Nikolai, 186 Berrong, Richard, 29 Bifurcation, 19, 89, 90, 100, 111n1, 184, 185, 187n3, 195–197 Binary structure, see Binary system Binary system, 86, 226–228, 230, 234, 238–241 Biological, 8, 71, 86, 99, 105, 118, 127, 185, 252 Biosemiotics, 251, 252 Bloch, Marc, 193 Blok, Alexander, 78, 120, 122, 164, 233, 239, 242n3 Bodin, Jean, 210–212, 214 Boileau, Nicolas, 80 Borgia, Cesare, 208 Boundary, 21n2, 76, 78, 92, 122, 126, 134, 186, 228 Boyko, Taras, 17 Breughel, Pieter, 171, 172 Briusov, Valery, 117 Brodsky, Joseph, 16 Bruno, Giordano, 211 Brutus, Marcus Junius Brutus, 147 Buber, Martin, 262n3 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 106, 254 Bulgarin, Faddey, 78, 107 Bunčić, Daniel, 29 Byron, George Gordon, 79, 192, 197, 198 C Caesar, Gaius Julius, 146, 147 Caesarius of Heisterbach, 210 Calvin, John, 214 Carpzov, Benedict, 212 Catherine II, 59, 64n8, 134, 238, 239 Cato, Porcius Marcus, 146 Caus, Salomon de, 207 Cellini, Benvenuto, 204, 217 Cervantes, Miguel de, 140, 211 Chaadaev, Pyotr, 186, 232

Chance, 27, 90, 111, 116, 118, 123, 182, 184, 185, 192–197, 198n1, 205–208 Charles XII, 56 Chateaubriand, François-René, 191 Chekhov, Anton, 239 Chernigovskaya, Tatyana, 250 Chukovsky, Kornei, 27, 129n2, 243n8 Cinematography, 40, 41, 73, 111, 126, 219 Coding, 12, 34, 44, 75, 78, 84, 140 Cognition, 36–38, 46 Collective intelligence, 10, 46, 47, 133, 184 Collective memory, 1, 8–10, 12, 14, 101, 133, 141, 150, 151, 156, 203, 220n2 Collingwood, Robin G., 255 Condorcet, Nicolas de, 179, 194 Consciousness, 9, 14, 35–38, 40, 45, 47, 51, 52, 56, 61, 70–72, 76, 78, 85, 88, 89, 92, 98, 116, 118, 119, 125, 127, 142, 145, 148, 150, 158, 164–166, 179, 182, 191, 192, 196, 197, 206, 211, 217, 219, 220, 226, 232, 236, 251, 254 Constance School, 84, 93n1 Content, 35, 39, 41, 48n3, 50, 51, 60, 62, 102–104, 109, 110, 143, 146, 161, 162, 164, 165, 167, 172, 191, 209, 247 Continuity, 7, 8, 20, 22n5, 35, 38, 39, 73, 133, 135, 141, 148, 232, 233, 254 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 210, 211 Creative memory, 10, 11, 22n5, 134 Creolization, 40, 41 Cultural code, 13, 135, 136, 148 Cultural history, 1, 10, 12, 16, 20, 43, 79, 84, 111, 112n9, 135, 162, 247, 259 Cultural language, 7, 8, 21n3, 42

 INDEX 

Cultural memory, 1, 4, 6, 7, 9–14, 20, 28, 29, 127, 133, 135–137, 143, 148, 155, 163, 165, 169, 220n2 Cultural semiotics, see Semiotics of culture Culturology, 10, 133–137, 184, 201–220, 259 Cybernetics, 5, 21n4, 70 Cyclicity, 14, 36, 37, 96–98, 111, 119, 126, 157, 221n2, 252, 255, 256, 262 D Da Vinci, Leonardo, 204, 206, 208, 210 Dance, 21n3, 108, 155, 157 Daniel the Exile, 53 Dante Alighieri, 183, 204, 252 Danton, Georges Jacques, 125 Darwin, Charles, 83, 252 Decembrists, 109, 148, 229, 238, 239 Decoding, 11, 12, 17, 18, 34, 44, 45, 72, 73, 78, 84, 136, 190, 191 Deely, John, 252 Delumeau, Jean, 212, 213 Delvig, Anton, 107 Derzhavin, Gavrila, 118, 134 Diachrony, 8, 13, 16, 84, 139, 141, 142, 163 Dickens, Charles, 197 Discreteness, 7, 8, 35, 36, 38, 39, 42, 48n1, 48n3, 64n4, 73 Dmitriev-Mamonov, Alexander, 238 Donatello, 204 Dornheim, Johann Georg Fuchs von, 212 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 3, 53, 63n2, 79, 110, 122, 129, 129n3, 129n7, 143, 165–170, 173n2, 173n4, 183, 227, 239, 240, 248 Dürer, Albrecht, 205, 208 Ď urišin, Dionýz, 69, 81n1

269

Dynamism, 4, 8, 12, 13, 16, 21n2, 38, 47, 78, 90, 97, 115, 116, 118, 121, 158, 194, 195, 227 E Eco, Umberto, 246 Egorov, Boris, 21n1 Eikhenbaum, Boris, 2 Einstein, Albert, 193, 253, 254 Eisenstein, Sergei, 185 Elizabeth I, 238 Encoding, 11, 17, 18, 71, 76, 88, 190, 191, 249 Engels, Friedrich, 180 Enlightenment, 28, 62, 77, 152, 179, 194, 207, 210, 214, 215 Erasmus of Rotterdam, 208, 212 Explosion, 4, 8, 12, 16, 19, 20, 96–100, 116–119, 122, 124–127, 136, 184, 216, 225–228, 230, 232, 234, 257, 258 Expression, 50, 56, 60, 102–104, 106, 109, 110, 125, 146, 161, 162, 164, 165, 167, 170, 172, 180 Extra-textual reality, 191, 193 F Fact, 12, 15, 17, 18, 20, 59, 77, 79, 81, 117, 168, 178, 179, 186, 189, 190, 198, 260, 261 Feyerabend, Sigmund, 214 Fialkova, Larisa, 254 Film, 21n3, 28, 40, 41, 193, 194 Fioravanti, Aristotele, 206 Fomenko, Anatoly, 17 Forgetting, 12, 13, 135, 237 Form, see Expression Foucault, Michel, 260 Francis of Assisi, 52 Freidenberg, Olga, 248

270 

INDEX

French Revolution, 97, 143, 178, 215, 226, 256 Future, 11, 14, 15, 20, 141, 148, 152–154, 157, 163, 178, 179, 186, 193, 195, 198, 202, 206, 230, 255, 256, 258, 260, 262 G Gachev, Georgy, 137 Galilei, Galileo, 210 Galitsky, Danil, 56 Garrick, David, 145, 153, 154 Gasparov, Boris, 3 Gasparov, Mikhail, 248 Genre memory, 21n5, 134, 248 Gesture, 7, 41, 50, 53, 62, 99–102, 104, 106–109, 112n7, 144, 146, 153, 235, 236 Gippius, Zinaida, 233 Godunov, Boris, 235 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 142, 249 Gogol, Nikolai, 3, 29, 98, 110, 141, 254, 262n2 Gorky, Maxim, 243n8 Goya, Francisco de, 215 Griaznoy, Vasily, 54, 57 Grotius, Hugo, 59 Guicciardini, Francesco, 207 Guizot, François, 191 Gukovsky, Grigory, 2 H Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 15, 83, 85, 179, 180, 192, 198n1 Heraclitus, 249 Historical process, 15, 19, 68, 79, 80, 96, 97, 124, 136, 178, 180, 185, 192, 193, 195–198, 230 Historical semiotics, see Semiotics of history

Historical theory, 1, 4, 262 Historical writing, see Historiography Historiography, 111, 118, 178, 179, 191, 201 Homeomorphism, 15, 36, 38 Homer, 29, 141 Human brain, 28, 36, 87, 93n2, 251 Human intellect, 38, 46, 192, 250–252 I Iconicity, 7, 14, 37, 48n3, 64n4, 73, 76, 161, 172, 191, 250, 251 Identity, 10, 88, 126, 127, 133 Ideology, 18, 62, 191, 206, 261 Individual, 7–10, 38–40, 43, 44, 46, 47, 51, 56, 58, 71, 72, 74, 89, 90, 96, 112n8, 117, 119, 123, 127, 151, 152, 154, 165, 172, 179, 181, 182, 184, 185, 192, 194–197, 205–207, 217, 236, 250, 261 Information, 5, 6, 8–11, 14, 17, 21n4, 33, 38, 43, 45, 46, 71, 76, 80, 85, 89–91, 101, 116, 134, 136, 142, 143, 151, 152, 155, 183, 202, 247–249, 251, 252, 257 Information science, 5, 71 Information theory, see Information science Informative memory, 10, 134 Innocent VII, Pope, 211 Intelligence, 33, 45, 90, 184, 185, 251 Internal memory, 141 Intersemiotic translation, 28, 249–251 Invariant, 10, 13, 41, 43, 85, 109, 133, 142, 143, 145, 154, 162 Irreversible, 19, 85, 86, 89, 90, 184, 185, 193, 194, 258 Isachenko, Aleksandr, 230, 232, 261 Isomorphism, 6–8, 38, 54, 85, 89, 119, 121, 127, 172, 192, 260

 INDEX 

Ivanov, Vyacheslav, 3, 195–196 Ivan the Terrible, 54, 57, 64n6, 166, 230, 234–236 J Jakobson, Roman, 84, 191, 246, 247, 249, 251, 257 Janscó, Miklós, 135 K Kant, Immanuel, 84, 85, 152 Karamzin, Nikolay, 4, 60, 61, 147, 178, 186 Kipling, Rudyard, 88, 98, 99, 109 Kluyev, Nikolai, 165 Konrad, Nikolai, 67, 68, 92 Kotzebue, Alexander von, 221n13 Krämer, Heinrich, 211 Khrapovitsky, Alexander, 60 Krylov, Ivan, 62 Kuhn, Thomas, 201 Kull, Kalevi, 252 Kurbatov, Alexis, 54 L Lakhtikova, Nastia, 29 Language of culture, see Cultural language Laplace, Pierre-Simon, 193 Law-governed, 28, 73, 96, 100, 117, 123, 133, 178, 180–184, 190, 195–197, 234 Le Goff, Jacques, 191 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 85 Lekomtseva, Margarita, 196 Lenin, Vladimir, 125, 225, 240, 243n8 Leontiev, Konstantin, 77 Lermontov, Mikhail, 108, 109, 129n2, 140, 165

271

Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 246 Linearity, 11, 14, 18, 35, 37, 38, 42, 73, 98, 99, 111, 119, 141, 195, 252, 253, 255, 256, 259, 262 Lomonosov, Mikhail, 3, 58, 262 Louis XVI, 147 Louvelle, Louis Pierre, 221n13 Lunin, Mikhail, 221n13 Luther, Martin, 211, 214 M Macfarlane, Alan, 213 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 207, 208, 210 Magic, 49, 50, 98, 109, 207 Makovsky, Konstantin, 242n5 Mandelstam, Osip, 58, 112n7, 143, 248, 252, 255 Mann, Thomas, 142 Marlowe, Christopher, 142, 206 Marr, Nikolai, 67 Marx, Karl, 68, 171, 172, 180 Maturana, Humberto, 252 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 119, 171 Meaning making, 85, 86, 89, 173n2 Mechanism, 5, 7–11, 27–29, 38, 40, 42, 45–47, 70–74, 80, 84, 86, 87, 96, 101, 111, 116, 124, 125, 133, 135, 137, 142, 143, 155, 163, 165, 172, 195, 252, 257 Memory, 1, 4–6, 9–12, 14, 18, 20, 33, 74, 96, 98, 100, 101, 116, 127, 134–137, 141, 142, 144, 146, 148, 150, 151, 156, 158, 165, 170, 172, 220n2, 247, 249, 256 Messemer, Hannes, 128 Metalanguage, 21n3, 40, 41, 48n1, 79, 87, 253 Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, 208 Michelet, Jules, 191

272 

INDEX

Middle Ages, 12, 54, 56, 62, 99, 105, 110, 135, 136, 139, 204, 207, 208, 210, 213–215, 218 Miko, František, 81n1 Minin, Kuzma, 236, 242n5 Mints, Zara, 4 Minucius Felix, Marcus, 213, 216 Mohomet II, 207 Monad, 85, 86, 88–93, 257 Monolingualism, 29, 115 Monomakh, Vladimir, 56 Monosemantic, 70, 72, 73 Montesquieu, Charles de, 146 Mukařovský, Jan, 81n1 Muravyev-Apostol, Sergey, 109 Music, 7, 21n3, 40, 137, 140, 233 Myth, 37, 95, 101, 103, 156, 159, 171, 207, 215, 217, 220, 235, 251, 253 Mythological texts, 14, 37 N Napoleon I, 109, 146 Narrative, 18, 20, 38, 73, 167, 181, 191, 198, 249, 260, 261 Nekrasov, Nikolay, 129n2, 170 Newton, Isaac, 123, 184 Nicholas I, 62, 238, 239 Nicholas II, 239 Non-discreteness, 35, 38, 39, 48n3, 64n4 Non-written culture, see Oral culture O Odoevsky, Alexander, 148, 229 On-written culture, see Oral culture Oral culture, 14, 15, 28, 149, 152, 155 Organism, 8, 44, 45, 89, 246, 250, 262n1 Orlov, Mikhail, 106

P Paducheva, Elena, 196 Panchronic, 10, 14, 37, 135 Past, 11, 15, 20, 141, 152, 157, 163, 178, 179, 189, 193, 253, 256, 260–262 Pasternak, Boris, 125 Pasteur, Louis, 185 Paul I, 62, 237, 239 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 63n4, 245 Peskov, Mikhail, 242n5 Pestel, Pavel, 109 Peter the Great, 12, 54, 56, 58, 59, 178, 230, 232, 236, 242 Photography, 40, 41 Piatigorsky, Alexander, 3, 85, 196 Pinsky, Leonid, 211 Plato, 97, 156, 157, 220n2, 254, 257 Platonov, Sergei, 232, 235, 236 Plautus, Titus Maccius, 177 Plutarch, 147 Poetry, 12, 21n3, 28, 37, 41, 42, 56, 58, 67, 75, 93n2, 104, 108–110, 120, 122, 129n2, 136, 137, 147, 154, 229 Pokrovsky, Mikhail, 15, 22n6 Polevoy, Nikolai, 182 Polotsky, Simeon, 58 Polyglossia, 36, 88, 115, 163 Postnikov, Mikhail, 17 Pre-written culture, see Oral culture Prigogine, Ilya, 19, 85, 89, 90, 111n1, 184, 185, 187n3, 194, 195, 197, 258 Probability, 70, 72, 89, 116, 185, 197, 258 Progress, 10, 99, 124, 135, 157, 179, 181, 205, 207, 210, 217, 231 Propp, Vladimir, 2 Prose, 42, 75 Pufendorf, Samuel von, 59

 INDEX 

Pushkin, Alexander, 3, 39, 58, 62, 77, 106, 107, 119, 121–124, 135, 147, 158, 169, 182, 183, 185, 187n1, 204, 238, 249, 254 R Radishchev, Alexander, 146, 147 Ramelli, Agostino, 206 Randomness, 19, 37, 90, 100, 116, 117, 123, 167, 181, 196, 230, 258 Ranke, Leopold von, 189 Religion, 46, 49, 51, 63n3, 144, 228 Rembrandt, 169, 205, 206, 211 Renaissance, 99, 110, 135, 136, 139, 179, 180, 204–210, 213, 218, 219, 220n1, 231 Revzin, Isaak, 3 Rhythm, 39, 126 Ritual, 7, 14, 53, 54, 56, 60, 96, 99, 101–106, 108–110, 112n6, 143, 144, 147, 151–155, 157, 159, 220n2, 235 Rivarol, Antoine de, 204 Robespierre, Maximilien, 125 Rodin, Auguste, 144, 145, 153, 154 Rollin, Charles, 146 Romanov, Alexei, 230 Romanticism, 109, 139, 140, 148, 163, 164, 168, 171, 180, 181, 197 Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen, 262n3 Roskoff, Gustav, 211 Rossellini, Roberto, 127, 129 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 62, 79 S Sand, Karl Ludwig, 221n13 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 8, 56, 63n4, 161, 245, 246, 257

273

Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 88 Schiller, Friedrich, 79, 126 Schlegel, Friedrich, 20, 198 Schönenberg, Johann von, 212 Science, 27, 28, 38, 97, 118, 124, 186, 193, 194, 201, 202, 205, 207, 209, 210, 216, 217, 228 Scott, Walter, 29, 141 Searle, John R., 219 Secondary modelling systems, 7, 21n3 Second World War, 2, 127, 240 Self-description, 6, 86, 88, 91, 120 Semiosis, 8, 13, 57, 60, 89, 91, 103, 172, 217 Semiosphere, 8, 86, 89–92, 93n3, 245, 253, 254, 257 Semiotics of culture, 3, 5, 21n1, 78, 85, 184, 196, 245, 261, 262 Semiotics of history, 4, 16, 17, 19, 261 Semiotic space, 8, 85, 86, 88, 91, 253, 254, 257 Shafirov, Pyotr, 56 Shakespeare, William, 11, 12, 140, 147, 205, 206, 211, 249 Shannon, Claude, 28, 246 Shared memory, 10, 21n4, 133, 136, 142 Shcheglov, Yuri, 80 Sheremetev, Boris, 53 Shklovsky, Viktor, 69 Shuisky, Vasily, 235, 236 Shukman, Ann, 5 Sica, Vittorio de, 128 Snow, C. P., 28 Socrates, 156, 157 Spatiality, 7, 14, 21n2, 35, 37, 73, 135, 143, 178, 202, 217, 253, 254 Speech, 41, 42, 89, 93n2, 96, 104, 105, 109–111, 159, 167, 168, 218, 219, 256–258

274 

INDEX

Spivak, Gayatri, 27 Sprenger, Jacob, 211 Staël, Anne Louise Germaine de, 88, 237, 242n7 Stengers, Isabelle, 19, 184, 185, 187n3, 195, 197 Stenich, Valentin, 112n7, 165 Structuralism, 3, 16, 245 Sumarokov, Alexander, 60 Swift, Jonathan, 104 Symbol, 13, 36, 56, 58, 59, 63n4, 103, 125, 142–144, 146, 152, 154, 155, 161–166, 169–172, 250 Symmetry, 34, 39, 87, 89, 116, 119, 193, 234, 256, 260, 262 Synchrony, 8, 13, 16, 84, 136, 142, 163, 165, 172, 191 Syntagmatic, 20, 35, 135, 155, 163, 198 Szilard, Leo, 195 T Tacitus, Publius Cornelius, 76 Tager, Elena, 112n7 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 135 Tarquinius, Lucius Superbus, 147 Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School, 3, 5, 16, 17, 21n1, 245, 246, 248, 256, 257 Tatlin, Vladimir, 171, 172 Technology, 71, 123, 125, 134, 140, 150, 183, 201, 202, 204–207, 216–218, 237 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 179, 186 Temporality, 10, 13, 14, 37, 97, 134, 140, 141, 163, 202, 253, 254, 256, 260 Ternary structure, see Ternary system Ternary system, 226, 228, 234, 239, 241

Text memory, 11, 21n5 Theater, 41, 42, 61, 137, 180 Titus Livius, Patavinus, 216 Tolstoy, Aleksey, 112n7, 121 Tolstoy, Fyodor, 106 Tolstoy, Leo, 48n3, 79, 110, 143, 166–168, 191, 239, 240 Tomashevsky, Boris, 2 Toporov, Vladimir, 3, 195 Translation, 28, 29, 35, 38–40, 73, 86, 91, 108, 126 Trediakovsky, Vasily, 61 Trotsky, Leon, 125 Trubetzkoy, Nikolai, 246 Turgenev, Ivan, 3, 107, 125, 146, 165, 170, 241 Turgenev, Nikolai, 238 Turing, Alan, 33 Turner, Victor, 143, 144, 153 Tylor, Edward Burnett, 68 Tynianov, Iurii, 69, 108 Typology, 11, 14, 18, 49, 68, 136, 149, 158, 190, 232, 234, 252, 262 Tyutchev, Fyodor, 3, 77, 118, 184, 217 U Uexküll, Jakob von, 246, 262n1 Unpredictability, 4, 8, 16, 18–20, 27, 28, 85, 90, 96–98, 100, 116–119, 123, 158, 181, 184, 196, 197, 230, 232, 262 Uspenskij, Boris, 3, 5, 9, 11, 12, 16, 195 V Varena, Francisco, 252 Vega, Lope de, 204

 INDEX 

Vernadsky, Vladimir, 8, 185 Verne, Jules, 123 Veselovsky, Alexander, 68 Voltaire, 62, 79, 107, 147, 179, 191 von Nettesheim, Agrippa, 213 Vovelle, Michel, 215 Vyazemsky, Pyotr, 3, 106 W Waldstein, Maxim, 3 Weaver, Warren, 28 Wilde, Oscar, 129n3

275

Writing, 14, 15, 149–151, 154–159, 190, 202, 203, 210, 218, 220–221n2, 255, 257, 258, 261 Written culture, 14, 15, 28, 101, 152, 157–159 Z Zalizniak, Andrei, 196 Zhirmunsky, Viktor, 67, 68 Zholkovsky, Alexander, 80 Zhukovsky, Vasily, 168 Zola, Emile, 75 Zoosemiotics, 95, 96