Wasldstein M. The Soviet Empire of Signs: A History of the Tartu School of Semiotics

Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag, 2008. — 236 p. — ISBN10: 3639056051; ISBN13: 978-3639056051.This book examines the history of Yuri Lotman's Tartu (or Moscow-Tartu) School of Semiotics, which wasactive in the Soviet Union in the 1960s-1980s, and combines a comparative perspective on the Tartu paradigm with close attention to its social context. Comparing Tartu with other major idioms in culturaltheory from Russian Formalism to (post-)structuralism, this study reconstructs its evolutionfrom the early ideal of "exact science" to a variety of conceptual frameworks which combined an emphasison the autonomy of cultural texts with elaborate analysis of the social and intellectual environ mentof their production and reception. Working from life history interviews, archival research and textua lanalysis, the book demonstrates how this evolution reflected and refracted the intellectuals changing strategies of negotiating personal and professional autonomy and authority within Soviet academia. The Tartu School serves as a window into the distinctive character of intellectual production and thephenomenon of an unofficial public sphere in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union, and challenges stilldominant Cold War assumptions about the nature of Soviet science, culture and society.Preface and Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
The History of the Tartu School in Focus: Issues, Theories, Methods
Soviet Science and Academic Autonomy: The Structuralist "Sturm und Drang"
The Making of Parallel Science: The Tartu School and the Public Sphere
Toward a Global History of Structuralism: Roman Jakobson in the Center
From Rules to Texts: The Idioms of Soviet Structuralism
Thinking Culturologically: Tartu Perspectives on Culture
Playful Self-Fashioning: A Neo-Historicist Theory of (Russian) ModernityAppendixes:
Members and Associates of the Tartu School
Personal Interviews
The University of Tartu: A Historical Note