Lotman Yuri Mikhailovich is a huge world of thought that we, the descendants, have to study. And although television has done a lot to make its versatility and complexity accessible to people, so that many can get in touch with the depth of the material and the simplicity of its transmission, Yuri Mikhailovich still remains a mystery.

Information about childhood and youth

In the family of Mikhail Lvovich Lotman, a mathematician and lawyer, who already had three daughters, a son did not appear in any way. And in the hungry year of 1922 in Petrograd, the long-awaited heir was finally born - Yuri Lotman. The house where he was born is very difficult. It was from him that Pushkin went to a duel, from which he was brought mortally wounded.

For thousands of years, Jewish families have taught children to respect learning and books. Therefore, seven-year-old Yuri Lotman was sent to study at the very best school Leningrad, which has now received its original name "Petrishule". In that educational institution studied people who made a huge contribution to Russian culture, for example: K. Rossi, N. Benois, M. Mussorgsky, Decembrist M. Fonvizin, Admiral P. Chichagov and many others.

Only in this school Lotman Yuri could get a deep versatile education and excellent command foreign languages, especially German, which Yuri Mikhailovich was fluent in. In the meantime, Yuri Lotman has been studying science for nine years and is preparing to enter Leningrad University. He chose the Faculty of Philology and wrote his term paper under the scientific guidance of the outstanding philologist-folklorist V. Ya. Propp, who had world recognition and stood at the origins of the development of text theory. The student's interests included the study of Russian literature of the early 19th century, so he needed knowledge of French.

War

In 1939-1940 there was a military conflict with Finland. And from the second year Lotman Yuri was sent to the Red Army. As an absolutely necessary item, he took a dictionary with him. French and carefully studied it all the years of the war. Since the beginning of the Patriotic War, he has served as a signalman in the artillery troops, that is, on the front line, without hiding behind anyone's backs. First he is a sergeant, then the commander of the communications department.

In 1944, he was awarded two medals - "For Courage" and "For Military Merit". After a shell shock in 1945, Yuri Mikhailovich was awarded the Order of the Red Star and II degree. So his military distinctions were noted. Yuri Lotman ended the war in Berlin.

Demobilization and start of work

From 1946 to 1950 he continued his studies, and then got a place in Tartu, in pedagogical institute. As a Jew, other paths were closed to him. He will stay in little Tartu for the rest of his life. A year later, Yuri marries a girl close to him in spirit, who studies Russian symbolism and the work of A. Blok.

Two years later, in 1952, Lotman Yuri Mikhailovich defended his PhD thesis. The theme was chosen about Radishchev's struggle with Karamzin's aesthetics of the nobility. Two years later, work begins at the University of Tartu, which in the 20th century, thanks to Lotman's work there, will not only become famous throughout the world, but will also take a central place in world philology. And all this only because a great scientist lectured there and created a school of semiotics. In 1961, Yuri Mikhailovich defended his doctoral dissertation on Russian literature before the Decembrist uprising, since 1963 he has been a professor, head of the department of Russian literature.

People of the era of the late 18th - early 19th century were living interlocutors for him. He talked with Pushkin, checked his assessments of life and culture and his own conclusions. In 1981, his biography of Pushkin was published. Insanely interesting is the book "Conversations about Russian Culture", published in 1993, just at the time when TV began a cycle of his lectures on this topic. This book can be opened from any page and read avidly. Lotman's memory and knowledge are extraordinary. Students at lectures listened to his lectures, not knowing what to do - listen or write down. Undoubtedly, he was an idol.

Attitude towards culture

Memory, as Lotman believed, is the highest achievement of both man and humanity as a whole. It is she who is the guardian of culture as the most positive result of the activity of the human spirit. Culture as memory is a way to understand the activity of a scientist. The last book published during his lifetime is Culture and Explosion. It examines the cultural processes in the historical aspect, which led the country to what we have today. So thought Yuri Lotman, whose biography, despite the vicissitudes of wars, is a biography of a thinker.

Family life

Yuri Mikhailovich lived with his wife for thirty-nine years, outliving her by three years. So they looked, being already spouses with experience. The couple are buried nearby. They have three sons. The eldest followed in their footsteps, being engaged in literary criticism and semiotics, the second - an artist, the third - a biologist.

Lotman Yuri Mikhailovich passed away in 1993. His biography continues in lectures, books that descendants are now reading and pondering with him those thoughts that bothered and disturbed him.

Lotman Yuri Mikhailovich

Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman is one of the founders of the Moscow and Tartu semiotic schools. Thanks to the structural-semiotic method he developed for studying culture and literature, his research and scientific works, we began to better understand Karamzin, Pushkin and the cultural traditions of the 18th-19th centuries.

Culturologist and literary critic Yu.M. Lotman was born in Leningrad on February 28, 1922. From 1930 to 1939 he studied in the town of Petrishula. After graduating from school, he passed the exams and entered the Faculty of Philology at the Leningrad University. In October 1940 he was drafted into the army, where he served in the signal troops and went through the entire war. Awarded with orders(Patriotic War and the Red Star) and medals ("For Courage" and "For Military Merit"). In April 1943 he joined the CPSU (b), demobilized in 1946.

Having retired from the armed forces, Yu. Lotman continued his studies in his chosen specialty and graduated from the university in 1950. After defending his diploma at the university, from 1954 until the end of his life, he worked at the University of Tartu. In 1954-1959. teacher, and from 1960 to 1977 - head of the department. In 1961, he successfully defended his doctoral thesis on the literature of the pre-Decembrist (18-19 centuries) period, and in 1963 Lotman was awarded the title of professor. Estonia was chosen as a place to live and work due to the greater tolerance for dissent in the academic circles of this republic.

In 1951 Yu.M. Lotman married a student Zara Mints (later a professor, literary critic, specializing in the study of Russian symbolism and the work of A.A. Blok). Lotman always liked to recall the episode that occurred at their first meeting. Zara Mints, knowing that her teacher paints small portraits beautifully and quickly, turned to him with a request to make a sketch with a photo of Mayakovsky for scientific conference. In response, Lotman grunted angrily that he was busy and did not draw for free at all. Zara burst into tears and shouted out in a fit of temper: "You mustachioed bastard!"

In marriage, the Lotmans had three sons: Mikhail Yuryevich (born in 1952), professor of literary criticism and semiotics at Tallinn University, in 2003-2007 a member of the Estonian Parliament, and since 2011 the chairman of the Tartu City Council; Grigory Yurievich (born 1953), artist; Aleksey Yurievich (born 1960), biologist, member of the Estonian Parliament from 2007-2011.

The parents (Mikhail and Alexandra) Yu.M. Lotman had three more children - the scientist's sister. The eldest - Inna Mikhailovna Obraztsova (1915-1999) was a composer, the middle one - Lidia Mikhailovna Lotman (1917-2011) - a literary critic, and the youngest - Victoria Mikhailovna Lotman (1919-2003) a doctor.

The main focus of Y. Lotman's work was the study of Russian culture and literature. He was one of the pioneers in the creation of a new method of studying these subjects - structural-semiotic. Lotman has always been distinguished by a breadth of views, which could not please the ruling elite. So, in 1970, for a completely far-fetched reason (the case of N. Gorbanevskaya), a search was carried out in his apartment. At the same time, he was banned from traveling abroad of the USSR.

At that time, semiotics was no longer called the “corrupt girl of capitalism,” but it was criticized not without a fair amount of malice. Such an attitude was often provoked by amateurs from science. Yu.M. Lotman was not one of them, but the very life of a world-famous scientist outside the megacities, in a small town, was considered at that time a dangerous rarity. Therefore, the scientist was "looked after", and the search in his apartment, which was initially unpromising, was considered more as a preventive measure. The echo of these "concerns" of the state was the refusal to elect Lotman to the Academy of Sciences of the Russian Federation after the collapse of the USSR as a "foreigner". And despite the fact that by this time Yu.M. Lotman was a member of four foreign academies of sciences: British (since 1977), Norwegian (since 1987), Royal Swedish (since 1989) and Estonian (since 1989).

Professor Lotman worked hard labor, to the detriment of his own health. He always said that unlike natural sciences in the humanities, based on private judgments, this is the only way to achieve something. Even having survived a stroke and practically not owning his right hand, he continued his scientific activity, dictating his thoughts to the secretaries.

Yu.M. Lotman was not limited to literary research alone. In the 80s he created a television series about Russian culture. He also wrote such works as: "On Art", "Education of the Soul", "Inside the Thinking Worlds", known not only to specialists. During perestroika, he took part in the work of the Estonian Popular Front.

Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman died on October 28, 1993 and was buried in a cemetery in Tartu. In October 2007, a monument was erected to him in front of the Tartu University Library.

Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman(1922 - 1993) - one of the creators of the structural-semiotic method of studying literature, the founder of the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school. Without him, domestic literary criticism would definitely be different.

The strength and talent of the researcher were enough for various topics and directions: from ancient texts to Lotman's contemporary works, from the history of literature to the semiotics of cinema, from everyday life to poetry. Umberto Eco himself considered him his teacher.

During his lifetime, Yuri Mikhailovich was a member of several academies of sciences in different countries, created a series of programs "Conversations about Russian Culture" and published many books, the most remarkable quotes from which we have selected for you.

History is not a menu where you can choose dishes to taste.

Art is one of the means of communication. It undoubtedly creates a connection between the transmitter and the receiver (the fact that in certain cases both of them can be combined in one person does not change the matter, just as a person talking to himself combines the speaker and the listener). “On Art: The Structure of a Literary Text; Semiotics of cinema and problems of cinema aesthetics; Articles, notes, speeches 1962-1993.

The fact is that the creativity of even a bad singer is personal in nature, the creativity of even a good engineer, as it were, dissolves in the general anonymous progress of technology. "Culture and Explosion"

Mental and physical grace are connected and exclude the possibility of inaccurate or ugly movements and gestures. The aristocratic simplicity of the movements of people of “good society” both in life and in literature is opposed by stiffness or excessive swagger (the result of a struggle with one’s own shyness) of the gestures of a commoner. “Conversations about Russian culture. Life and traditions of the Russian nobility (XVIII - early XIX century)"

Only in art can we be horrified at the villainy of an event and enjoy the skill of an actor at the same time. Semiotics of Cinema and Problems of Cinema Aesthetics

The task of science is correct setting question. But it is impossible to determine which formulation of the question is correct and which is not without studying the methods of moving from ignorance to knowledge, without determining whether this question basically lead to an answer.

Poetry belongs to those areas of art, the essence of which is not completely clear to science. About poets and poetry. Analysis of the poetic text. Articles. Research. Notes"

In its search for a new language, art cannot be exhausted, just as the reality it cognizes cannot be exhausted. "Culture and Explosion"

Belief in the mysterious meaning of dreams is based on faith in the meaning of the message as such. It can be said that sleep is the father of semiotic processes. "Culture and Explosion"

In fact, the entire history of cinema as an art is a chain of discoveries aimed at banishing automatism from all links subject to artistic study. Cinema defeated moving photography, making it an active means of cognizing reality. Semiotics of Cinema and Problems of Cinema Aesthetics

In a literary text, words act (along with their general language meaning) as pronouns - signs for designating content that has not yet been clarified. The content is constructed from their connections. “The structure of a literary text. Analysis of the poetic text»

The manor's house is visible from afar, from the windows and from the balcony it also opened distant views. The houses of the provincial landowners were built by serf architects and unnamed artels of carpenters. They deeply learned one of the main features of ancient Russian architecture - the ability to place the building so that it blends harmoniously into the landscape. This made such buildings, along with church buildings and bell towers, organizing points of that Russian landscape, to which Pushkin and Gogol were accustomed in their travels. “Roman A.S. Pushkin "Eugene Onegin". A comment"

Freedom is not only the absence of external prohibitions. The absence of external prohibitions must be compensated by internal cultural prohibitions. "I can lie, but I will not lie", "I can offend another ... but I will not do it." “Conversations about Russian culture. Life and traditions of the Russian nobility (XVIII - early XIX century)"

The purpose of art is not just to display this or that object, but to make it a carrier of meaning. Semiotics of Cinema and Problems of Cinema Aesthetics

The closer we know a person, the more dissimilarities we find in photographs. Semiotics of Cinema and Problems of Cinema Aesthetics

The youth of the beginning of the 19th century got used to life in bivouacs, to campaigns and battles. Death became habitual and was associated not with old age and disease, but with youth and courage. Wounds caused not regret, but envy.

The cult of Friendship was inseparable from the literature of pre-romanticism: Schiller and Karamzin, Rousseau and Batiushkov created a real "mythology" of friendship. Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin. Biography of the writer»

An appearance of understanding is created where there is no true understanding. Semiotics of Cinema and Problems of Cinema Aesthetics

Each text has its own world, of which its dictionary is a rough but adequate replica. “The structure of a literary text. Analysis of the poetic text»

1. Introduction

Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman is one of the outstanding Russian scientists, Russian culturologist, semiotician, philologist, prof. University of Tartu, corresponding member. British Academy, full member of the Norwegian, Swedish, Estonian academies, vice-president of the World Association of Semiotics, laureate of the Pushkin Prize of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Yu.M. Lotman is considered the head of the "Tartu school", and one of the leaders of Soviet semiotics, the author of the doctrine of the semiosphere. Since the early 1960s Lotman develops a structural-semiotic approach to the study works of art, becomes the initiator of the publication of "Works on sign systems (Semiotics)", develops the concept of "secondary modeling systems", when the text is interpreted as a sign system in relation to the primary sign system of natural languages. We can say that Yu.M. Lotman gave the semiotics of culture the status of a scientific discipline, which since then could no longer be practiced amateurishly. This approach was new for the early 60s, the claims of semiotics to scientific explanation phenomena of language, history, art, etc., were perceived as something seditious, since, according to historical mathematics, all culture is only a superstructure on the basis - productive forces and production relations. Thus, the Tartu School returned to the field of humanities research an almost disappeared scientific approach. The definition of the semantic dimension of the text proposed by Lotman, despite big number formulations can be reduced to two main approaches. At the same time, it becomes obvious that it is impossible to determine the place of the model of textual meaning in its typology of culture (the main concept of which, in turn, is the concept of text), without considering his analysis of the semantic functioning of the text from the point of view of its evaluative nature; in other words, whether Lotman understands the text as a modeling activity (as a product of signifiers) or as a mechanical reproduction of equivalence relations between the plane of expression and the plane of content, functioning within the framework of pre-established codes. Naturally, the decision in favor of one or another model of meaning generation will also determine the approach that will serve as the basis for the concept of text or culture (or for the future complex science of culture), which embraces semiotic activity and models the integrity of culture as the semiotic and ideological integrity of the text.

Yu.M. Lotman was able to combine in his research the latest achievements of his time, such as cybernetics and information theory, the study of the functional asymmetry of the brain and systems approach. An invaluable contribution to domestic science is the application of such complex theoretical ideas in the analysis of the diverse material of world culture.

1. The teachings of Yu.M. Lotman on the semiosphere

The essence of the teachings of Yu.M. Lotman is that not a single sign (word) is taken as the starting point of any semiotic system, but the ratio of at least two signs, which made it possible to take a different look at the fundamental foundations of semiosis. The object of analysis is not a single model, but a semiotic space ("semiosphere"), within which communication processes are realized and new information is generated. Yu.M. Lotman defines the semiosphere as follows: “…clear and functionally unambiguous systems in real functioning do not exist on their own, in an isolated form. Their isolation is due only to heuristic necessity. None of them, taken separately, is actually not workable. They function only when they are immersed in a certain semiotic continuum filled with semiotic formations of various types and at different levels of organization. We call such a continuum the semiosphere.” The semiosphere is built as a concentric system, in the center of which are the most obvious and consistent structures that represent the world as ordered and endowed with a higher meaning. The nuclear structure ("myth-forming mechanism") represents a semiotic system with realized structures of all levels. The movement towards the periphery increases the degree of uncertainty and disintegration inherent in the world external to the semiosphere, and emphasizes the significance of one of the main concepts - the border. The boundary of the semiosphere is understood by Yu.M. Lotman as the sum of bilingual translator-filters, which also designate the type of social roles and ensure the semioticization of what comes from outside and its transformation into a message. The situation in which the space of reality is not covered by any language separately, but only by their totality, is not a disadvantage, but a condition for the existence of language and culture, because dictates the need for another - a person, language, culture. We are talking about the fact that two coding systems should fundamentally participate in the formation of meaning, between which there is a relation of untranslatability, which gives the transformations of the text an unpredictable character. Such phenomena occur, according to Lotman, for example, when "Western" civilization tries to retell texts of "Eastern" civilizations that are unusual for it and thus look like irrational ones. As a result, texts new to both civilizations are generated. These ideas are developed by Lotman in the article "Brain-Text-Culture-Artificial Intelligence" In the concept of semiotics of culture developed by Yu. M. Lotman, the main category was the text, and this was proclaimed rather insistently. Culture itself was considered as a mechanism for generating texts, as a space for their functioning. Culture was interpreted as a collective intellect. Yu. M. Lotman dedicated to this circle of ideas, in addition to articles, the book "Culture as Collective Intelligence and Problems of Artificial Intelligence" (1977). However, in contrast to the formulation of the task of translating texts with the help of artificial intelligence, which is traditional for mathematized semiotics, Yu. M. Lotman emphasizes here the culturally characteristic phenomenon of the fundamental untranslatability of texts of various types, which provides an "avalanche-like self-growth of meanings" and stimulates creativity (that is, according to Lotman, creating new texts) consciousness.

Today it is more and more obvious that in Lotman's semiotic approach to literature and culture, the main thing is by no means formal schemes, and certainly not the imposition of these schemes on cultural-historical material. The main thing is the identification of specific meanings expressed by symbolic means (texts) of a particular culture. At the same time, texts actively influence their context, creating new patterns of cultural behavior.

At the same time, Lotman remains a universalist in his interpretation of culture. Of course, culture is fundamentally local in space and time: each epoch, each locality gives rise to a huge number of original patterns of behavior, cultural traits, and style features. The very phenomenon of culture acquires the status of an autonomous subject of a scientific discipline - the semiotics of culture, without attempts to reduce it to other entities - material or spiritual.

Russian culture as a sign system

During his work at the University of Tartu Yu.M. Lotman studies culture and art in detail, paying special attention to Russian literature, cinematography. His main ideas are formulated in such works as: "Lectures on structural poetics" (1964) "The structure of a literary text" (1970); "Analysis of a poetic text" (1972); "Articles on the typology of culture" (Vol. 1-2, 1970-1973); "Semiotics of Cinema and Problems of Cinema Aesthetics" (1973); "The Creation of Karamzin" (1987); "Culture and Explosion" (1992) and others. Yu.M. Lotman is devoted to the analysis of the works of Radishchev, Karamzin, Merzlyakov, the Decembrists, Pushkin, Gogol and other writers.

One of the fundamental works on the study of Russian culture is the monograph by M.Yu. Lotman "Conversations about Russian Culture", prepared by the scientist on the basis of a series of his lectures, with which he appeared on television. The book is devoted to Russian life and culture of the 18th - early 19th centuries, M.Yu. Lotman explains the choice of this period as follows: “On the one hand, this time is close enough for us (what do 200-300 years mean for history?) today's life. This is the time when the features of the new Russian culture took shape, the culture of the new time, to which, whether we like it or not, we also belong. On the other hand, this time is quite distant, already largely forgotten .... XVIII - early XIX centuries is a family album of our current culture, its “home archive”, its “close-distant”. “Culture is considered by Yu.M. Lotman as a collective concept, the sum of non-hereditary information or a super-individual intellect that makes up for the shortcomings of individual consciousness. "Culture is something common to any collective - a group of people living at the same time and connected by a certain social organization," writes Yu.M. Lotman. The semiotics of culture is not limited to the presentation of culture as a sign system - the very attitude to the sign and sign is one of the main typological characteristics of culture. Any reality involved in the sphere of culture begins to function as a sign, and if it already had a sign (or quasi-sign) character, it becomes a sign of a sign (a secondary modeling system). The representation of culture as a sign system is interpreted by Yu.M. Lotman as follows: “Any structure that serves the sphere of social communication is a language. This means that it forms a certain system of signs used in accordance with the rules known to the members of this collective. We call signs any material expression (words, pictures, things, etc.) that has a meaning and, thus, can serve as a means of conveying meaning.

Consequently, culture has, firstly, communication and, secondly, symbolic nature". M.Yu. Lotman argues that the realm of culture is always the realm of symbolism. He illustrates the significance of culture with the help of such seemingly ordinary things as bread, a sword, a sword, which, according to Lotman, have no meaning, but use, however, these things are woven into the system of the symbolic language of the era and become a fact of its culture.

“The sword is nothing more than an object. As a thing, it can be forged or broken, it can be placed in a museum display case, and it can kill a person. This is all - the use of it as an object, but when, being attached to a belt or supported by a sling placed on the hip, the sword symbolizes a free man and is a "sign of freedom", it already appears as a symbol and belongs to culture. "A sword as a weapon, a sword as a piece of clothing, a sword as a symbol, a sign of nobility - all these are various functions of an object in the general context of culture."

M.Yu. Lotman identifies such properties of culture as synchronicity and diachronism. Synchronicity of culture is determined by the fact that culture is “an organizational structure that unites people living at the same time”, Diachronism is that culture always implies the preservation of previous experience, it is always connected with history, always implies the continuity of moral, intellectual, spiritual life. individual, society and humanity.

Therefore, culture is always, on the one hand, a certain number of inherited texts, and on the other, inherited symbols.

Symbols of a culture rarely appear in its synchronic slice. As a rule, they come from the depths of centuries and, changing their meaning (but without losing the memory of their previous meanings), are transferred to the future states of culture. Such simple symbols as a circle, a cross, a triangle, a wavy line, more complex ones: a hand, an eye, a house, and even more complex ones (for example, rituals) accompany humanity throughout its many thousands of years of culture.

For Yu.M. Lotman everyday life, everyday life is a historical-psychological category, a sign system, that is, a kind of text. . “life, in its symbolic key, is part of culture,” says Yu.M. Lotman. “All the things around us are included in social practice, become, as it were, clots of relations between people, and in this function they are capable of acquiring a symbolic character.”

In "Conversations about Russian Culture" Yu.M. Lotman limited himself to the study of the culture of the nobility, not including the customs of the Russian peasantry in the circle of research, Don Cossacks, an Orthodox peasant and an Old Believer peasant; the special life of the Russian clergy, merchants and city dwellers, who had their own way of life, their own circle of reading, their own life rituals, forms of leisure, clothes. Lotman explains this by the fact that this kind of research is rather the subject of ethnography, and quite a lot of work has been done in this direction, in contrast to the study of the culture of the Russian nobility, which, according to Yu.M. Lotman is in science "no man's land".

In the first part of the book, Lotman discusses the Petrine reform and its impact on Russian culture. “The Peter’s reform, with all the costs that the nature of the era and the personality of the tsar imposed on it, solved national problems, creating statehood that ensured Russia’s two hundred years of existence among the main European powers and created one of the most vibrant cultures in history human civilization", - the author considers. The forms of Petersburg (and, in a sense, the entire Russian city) life were created by Peter I. His ideal was, as he himself put it, a regular - correct - state, where all life is regulated, subject to rules, built in compliance with geometric proportions, reduced to exact, one-line relationships. The psychology of the service class was the foundation of the self-consciousness of the nobleman of the 18th century. It was through service that he recognized himself as part of the class. Peter I, according to Yu.M. Lotman, stimulated this feeling in every possible way - both by personal example and by a number of legislative acts. Their pinnacle was the Table of Ranks, developed over a number of years with the constant and active participation of Peter I and published in January 1722. But the Table of Ranks itself was the realization of more general principle new Petrine statehood - the principle of "regularity". This principle gave rise to one of the main evils and at the same time the main characteristic features Russian life - its deep bureaucratization. Yu.M. Lotman analyzes in detail the concept of rank in this era and the influence of ranks on people's self-awareness. “In the culture of the St. Petersburg (“imperial”) period of Russian history, the concept of rank acquired a special, almost mystical character,” notes Yu.M. Lotman. “The word “rank”, in fact, diverged in meaning from the old Russian “order”, because it meant orderliness not real, but paper, conventionally bureaucratic.” However, this word, which does not have an exact match in any of European languages(although Peter I was sure that his reforms make Russia look like Europe), became a designation of the most important feature of Russian reality.

According to Yu.M. Lotman is a woman, attitude towards her, her behavior are important indicators of the culture of the era. On the one hand, a woman with her intense emotionality, vividly and directly absorbs the features of her time, to a large extent overtaking it. In this sense, the character of a woman can be called one of the most sensitive barometers of social life. On the other hand, the female character paradoxically realizes directly opposite properties. A woman - a wife and mother - is most connected with the suprahistorical properties of a person, with what is deeper and wider than the imprints of an era. Therefore, the influence of women on the appearance of the era is, in principle, contradictory, flexible and dynamic. Flexibility is manifested in the variety of connections of the female character with the era.

Yu.M. Lotman in "Conversations about Russian Culture" becomes a card game, which, according to the scientist, has become a kind of model of life. “In the function of the card game, its dual nature is manifested,” says Yu.M. Lotman - on the one hand, a card game is a game, that is, it is an image conflict situation. Within the framework of a card game, each individual card receives its meaning according to the place that it occupies in the system of cards. So, for example, the queen is below the king and above the jack, the jack, in turn, is also located between the queen and the ten, and so on. Outside of relation to other cards, a separate card torn from the system has no value, since it is not associated with any value that lies outside the game.

On the other hand, cards are also used in divination. Here, Yu.M. Lotman singles out other functions of the maps: predictive and programming. At the same time, when divining, the meanings of individual cards come to the fore. Lotman cites a typical case of the mutual influence of these two plans: “when in Pushkin we meet the epigraph to The Queen of Spades: “The Queen of Spades means secret malevolence”, and then in the text of the work the Queen of Spades acts as a playing card. The card game turns into a condensed image of the whole reality, from everyday life to his philosophy.

Such a phenomenon of the era of the nobility as a duel deserves attention. Yu.M. Lotman gives the following definition of a duel: “A duel (duel) is a pair fight taking place according to certain rules, with the aim of restoring honor, removing the shameful stain caused by an insult from an offended person.” Thus, the role of the duel is socially symbolic.

The duel is a certain procedure for the restoration of honor and cannot be understood outside the very specifics of the concept of "honor" in the general system of ethics of the Russian Europeanized post-Petrine noble society. Naturally, from a position that rejected this concept in principle, the duel lost its meaning, turning into a ritualized murder.

Balls and dances were also important elements of noble life. The ball turned out, on the one hand, to be an area opposite to service - an area of ​​​​easy communication, secular recreation, a place where the boundaries of the service hierarchy were weakened, on the other hand, the ball was an area of ​​\u200b\u200bsocial representation, a form of social organization, one of the few forms allowed in Russia at that time collective life. In this sense, secular life received the value of a public cause.

Further Yu.M. Lotman describes the forms of marriage, family life, divorce, which existed in the life of the nobility. “Romantic situations invaded that Russian life, which was recognized as “enlightened” and “Western”. It is curious to note that "Western" forms of marriage actually existed in Russian society from the most archaic times, but were perceived first as pagan, and then as "immoral", forbidden.

Another example of the perception of culture as a sign system can be seen by referring to the phenomenon of Russian dandyism. As Yu.M. Lotman, "the art of dandyism creates complex system own culture, which outwardly manifests itself in a kind of "poetry of sophisticated costume". The costume is an outward sign of dandyism, but not at all its essence. Tailcoat cut and similar fashion attributes are only the outward expression of dandyism. So, in Pushkin, for example, it is impudence, covered with mocking politeness, that forms the basis of the behavior of a dandy. Karamzin described the phenomenon of dandyism as a fusion of rebellion and cynicism, the transformation of selfishness into a kind of religion and a mocking attitude towards all the principles of "vulgar" morality.

Art and reality are two opposite poles, the boundaries of the space of human activity.

Within this space, the whole variety of human actions unfolds. Although objectively art always reflects the phenomena of life in one way or another, translating them into its own language, the conscious attitude of the author and the audience in this matter can be threefold.

Thus, where the visual arts or theater (for example, ballet) operate with deliberately conventional signs and the relationship between image and content is determined not by similarity, but by historical convention, the possibility of "confusing" these two planes is excluded, and between the canvas and the viewer, the stage and an insurmountable line emerges. Artistic and non-artistic spaces are separated by such a sharp line that they can only correlate, but not interpenetrate.

The second approach to the relationship between art and non-artistic reality is to look at art as an area of ​​models and programs. Active influence is directed from the sphere of art to the area of ​​non-artistic reality. Life chooses art as its model and hastens to "imitate" it.

Thirdly, life acts as an area of ​​modeling activity - it creates patterns that art imitates.

Death takes a person out of the space allotted for life: from the realm of historical and social personality passes into the realm of the eternal and unchangeable.

Nevertheless, we associate the experience of death with the uniqueness of a particular culture, because the image of death, thoughts about it accompany a person throughout his life, and at all stages of history. The idea of ​​death is far ahead of death itself. It becomes, as it were, a mirror of life, with the only correction that the reflection here is not passive: each culture is reflected in its own way in the concept of death it created, and death casts its sinister or heroic reflection on each culture.

Among the works of Yu.M. Lotman, you can find studies on film art. Thus, in "Semiotics of Cinema and Problems of Film Aesthetics" and "The Nature of Film Narrative" Lotman considers cinema as a "double transformation" while emphasizing that we are talking not about the technical and not about the optical side of the matter, but about the relationship between the nature and possibilities of various types of art. Yu.M. Lotman closely links cinema with photography. “Photography is not only the technical basis of cinema; cinema inherited from it the most important feature - a place in the system of culture,” he says. “Photography takes the first step: on the one hand, it turns a three-dimensional, three-dimensional reality into a two-dimensional illusion of three-dimensionality. At the same time, the reality perceived by all senses turns into a visual photoreality, the object into an image of the object. On the other hand, the continuous mobility and boundlessness of reality turn into a stopped and limited piece of it.

The fact that the image in the cinema is mobile, transfers it to the category of "telling" (narrative) arts, makes it capable of narration. The very nature of storytelling lies in the fact that the text is built syntagmatically, that is, by connecting individual segments in a temporal (linear) sequence. These elements may have different nature: represent strings of words, musical or graphic phrases. The successive deployment of episodes connected by some structural principle is the fabric of storytelling.

“It is easy to understand that these representations are the result of the transfer to the film of the skills developed in the verbal sphere - the skills of listening and reading, that is, perceiving the film as a text, we involuntarily transfer to it the properties of the text most familiar to us - the verbal one,” says Yu. M. Lotman

Yu.M. Lotman asks the question: “Does cinema, any cinema, both “silent” and sound, have its own language?”
In order to answer this question, we must first define the concept of language.

“Language is an ordered communicative (serving to transmit information)
sign system. From the definition of language as a communicative system follows the characteristics of its social function: the language provides the exchange, storage and accumulation of information in the team that uses it. An indication of the sign character of the language defines it as a semiotic system. In order to fulfill its communicative function, language
must have a system of signs. A sign is a materially expressed replacement of objects, phenomena, concepts in the process of information exchange in a team. Consequently, the main feature of a sign is the ability to implement the substitution function. The word replaces the thing, object, concept;
money replaces value, socially necessary labor; the map replaces the terrain; military insignia replace their respective ranks. All these are signs. A person lives in an environment of two kinds of objects: some of them are used directly and, without replacing anything, can not be replaced by anything. The air that a person breathes, the bread that he eats, life, love, health cannot be replaced. However, along with them, a person is surrounded by things whose value has a social meaning and does not correspond to their directly material properties. Since signs are always substitutes for something, each of them implies a constant relation to the object it replaces. This relationship is called the semantics of the sign. The semantic relation determines the content of the sign. But since each sign has an obligatory material expression, the dual relation of expression to content becomes one of the main
indicators for judging both individual signs and sign systems as a whole.
However, the language is not a mechanical set of individual signs: both the content and the expression of each language are an organized system of structural relations.

Arguing in this way, Yu.M. Lotman rephrases his question as follows: "Is cinema a communicative system?".
The director, film actors, script writers, all filmmakers want to say something with their work. Their tape is like a letter, a message to the audience. But in order to understand the message, you need to know its language. Only by understanding the language
cinema, we will be convinced that it is not a slavish thoughtless copy of life, but an active recreation in which similarities and differences add up to a single, intense - sometimes dramatic - process of learning about life. Signs are divided into two groups: conditional and figurative. To conditional
include those in which the relationship between expression and content is not intrinsically motivated. The pictorial or iconic sign implies that the meaning has a single, naturally inherent expression. The most common case is drawing

On the question of the significance of culture Yu.M. Lotman also returns in a study on dolls ("Dolls in the Cultural System").

The essence of the significance of culture, according to Yu.M. Lotman is that every essential cultural object, as a rule, appears in two guises: in its direct function, serving a certain range of specific social needs, and in a “metaphorical” one, when its signs are transferred to a wide range of social facts, of which it becomes a model. Based on this division, one can approach the synthetic concept of "doll as a work of art."

The doll as a toy, first of all, must be separated from the figurine, a three-dimensional sculptural image of a person, seemingly of the same type with it. The difference comes down to the following. Yu.M. Lotman distinguishes two types of audience: "adult", on the one hand, and "children", "folklore", "archaic", on the other. “The first relates to a literary text as a recipient of information: looks, listens, reads, sits in a theater chair, stands in front of a statue in a museum, firmly remembers: “do not touch with your hands”, “do not break the silence” and of course “do not climb onto the stage” and "don't interfere with the play." The second relates to the text as a participant in the game: he screams, touches, intervenes, does not look at the picture, but twirls it, pokes his fingers at it, speaks for painted people, intervenes in the play, pointing out to the actors, hits the book or kisses it.

Thus, in the first case, we are dealing with obtaining information, in the second, with its development in the course of the game. Accordingly, the role and proportion of the three main
elements: author - text - audience. In the first case, all activity is concentrated in the author, the text contains everything essential that the audience needs to perceive, and this latter is assigned the role of the perceiving addressee. In the second, all activity is concentrated in the addressee, the role of the transmitter tends to be reduced to a service one, and the text is just an excuse that provokes a meaning-generating game. The statue belongs to the first case, and the doll to the second. This feature of the doll is due to the fact that, moving into the world of adults, it carries with it memories of the children's, folklore, mythological and game world. This makes the doll not an accident, but a necessary component of any mature "adult" civilization.

Conclusion.

So, turning to scientific activity outstanding Russian scientist Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman, the founder of the structural-semiotic approach, we examined the concept of the semiosphere and turned to the question of the significance of any culture, including Russian.

* Selected articles in three volumes (Published with the assistance of the Open Foundation of Estonia). VOLUME I: Articles on semiotics and topology of culture. Tallinn: "Alexandra", 1992.

Lectures on Structural Poetics (1964)

The Structure of a Fiction Text (1970)

Analysis of the poetic text. The Structure of Verse (1972) (monograph)

Articles on the typology of culture: Materials for the course of the theory of literature. Issue. 2 (1973)

Semiotics of Cinema and Problems of Cinema Aesthetics (1973)

A. S. Pushkin's novel "Eugene Onegin": Commentary (1980)

Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin: biography of a writer (1981)

Culture and Explosion (1992)

Lotman Yu. Conversations about Russian culture. Life and traditions of the Russian nobility (XVIII - early XIX century). (1993)

 Dolls in the culture system

 "Queen of Spades" and the theme of cards and card games in Russian literature of the early 19th century

 Lotman Yu. M. Semiotics of cinema and problems of cinema aesthetics

 Conversations about Russian culture

Egorov BF Life and work of Yu. M. Lotman. M., 1999. - 384 p.

Yu, Schrader "Culture as a factor of freedom"

Yu.M. Lotman "On the semiosphre"

Game as a semiotic problem and its relation to the nature of art // Program and abstracts of the Summer School on Secondary Modeling Systems, August 19-29. 1964 Tartu, 196

People and Signs // Soviet Estonia. 1969. No. 27.

Analysis of the poetic text: The structure of the verse. L., 1972.

Notes on the structure of the narrative text // Uchen. app. Tart. state university 1973. Issue. 308.

Semiotics of cinema and problems of cinema aesthetics. Tallinn, 1973

dynamic model of a semiotic system. M., 1974.

What is the semiotic approach? // Questions of Literature. 1976. No. 11.

Culture as a collective mind and the problem of artificial mind. M., 1977

Dolls in the system of culture // Selected Articles. In 3 t.t. T. I. Tallinn, 1992, p. 377-380

Analysis of the poetic text // Poetics: Proceedings of Russian and Soviet poetry schools. Budapest, 1982.

Culture and text as generators of meaning // Cybernetic Linguistics. M. 1983.

On the semiosphere // Uchen. app. Tart. state university 1984. Issue. 641. S. 5-23. (Proceedings on sign systems. [T.] 17: The structure of dialogue as a principle of operation of the semiotic mechanism.)

Symbol in the system of culture // Uchen. app. Tart. state university 1987. Issue. 754. S. 10-21. (Works on sign systems. [T.] 21: Symbol in the system of culture.)

language of cinema and problems of film semiotics: [Abridged transcript of the report at the theoretical seminar on the topic "Language of cinema", Tartu, 1987; with adj. the text of the debate] // Film Studies Notes / All-Russian Research Institute of Cinematography. 1989. Issue. 2.

Russian literature of the post-Petrine era and the Christian tradition // Rainbow. 1991. No. 10.

City and time [Conversation with Yu. M. Lotman 12/28/1992] // Metaphysics of St. Petersburg. SPb., 1993.

Conversations about Russian culture: Life and traditions of the Russian nobility (XVIII - early XIX century). SPb., 1994.

Lectures on structural poetics // Yu. M. Lotman and the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school. M., 1994.

On the nature of art // Yu. M. Lotman and the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school. M., 1994

Russian literature of the post-Petrine era and the Christian tradition // From the history of Russian culture. T. V: (XIX century). M., 1996.

www.vivovoco.rsl.ru

Yu. M. Lotman

THE NATURE OF FILM STORY

Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman was born on February 28, 1922 in Petrograd. In 1939, he entered the philological faculty of Leningrad University - the choice of profession was largely influenced by the circle of friends of his elder sister. His teachers at the university were famous professors and academicians - G.A. Gukovsky, M.K. Azadovsky, A.S. Orlov, I.I. Tolstoy, and student Lotman wrote his first term paper with V.Ya. Propp. In October 1940, Yuri Lotman was drafted into the army, and after the beginning of the Great Patriotic War the artillery regiment in which he served was transferred to the front. With battles, he went through all four war years, ending the war in Berlin.
Demobilized at the end of 1946, Yuri Lotman returned to study at the university and already in student years conducted active and fruitful research work. In 1950, he graduated with honors from the university, but because of his nationality he could not enter graduate school - the country was in full swing against the "cosmopolitans". Therefore, Yuri Lotman got a job as a teacher at the Department of Russian Language and Literature of the Tartu Teachers' Institute, later he headed this department. In 1952, he defended his Ph.D. thesis on the creative relationship between Radishchev and Karamzin, after which he published a number of works about these writers. In 1954, Lotman was invited to the post of associate professor at the University of Tartu, where he lectured. His entire subsequent life was connected with the University of Tartu - after defending his doctoral dissertation "The Ways of Development of Russian Literature in the Pre-Decembrist Period", he became a professor, headed the department of Russian literature for many years, and wrote almost all of his scientific works.
A significant part of Lotman's scientific heritage is devoted to the study of the work of A.S. Pushkin, and the books "A.S. Pushkin's novel "Eugene Onegin. Commentary" and "Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin. Biography of the writer" became the peaks of his research. The scientist's field of interest also included semiotics and structuralism, Lotman's works in this area received worldwide recognition, and his name is among the founders of literary structuralism. His earliest publications touching on these issues date back to the first half of the 1960s, and among the most famous and significant studies are "Semiotics of cinema and problems of cinema aesthetics", "Analysis of a poetic text", "The structure of a literary text".
Despite a serious illness and loss of sight, Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman continued to engage in science until last days of his life, and in 1992 the last book of the scientist "Culture and Explosion" was published, in which he developed I. Prigogine's ideas about the special patterns of random processes in his own way. Yuri Lotman died in Tartu on October 28, 1993.
Information from the site http://www.alleng.ru
Yu.M.Lotman
Main works
Monographs:
1. Andrei Sergeevich Kaisarov and the literary and social struggle of his time // Uchen.zap. Tart State University Tartu, 1958. Issue. 63. (also see "Karamzin", St. Petersburg, 1997, p. 637-804.)
2. Lectures on structural poetics // Uchen.zap. Tart State University Tartu, 1964. Issue 160. / Proceedings on sign systems. V.1
3. The structure of the artistic text M., 1970 (also see "On Art", St. Petersburg, 1998. P. 14-281.)
4. Articles on the typology of culture 1: Materials for the course of literary theory Tartu, 1970.
5. Analysis of the poetic text L., 1972.
6. Semiotics of Cinema and Problems of Film Aesthetics Tallinn, 1973 (also see "On Art", 1998, pp. 288-373.). [Text on the Internet is in Moshkov's library]
7. Yuri Lotman, Yuri Tsivyan Dialogue with screen Tallinn, 1994.
8. Selected articles in three volumes Tallinn, "Alexandra" publishing house, 1993.
9. Culture and explosion M., 1992. (also see "Semiosphere", St. Petersburg, 2000.)
10. Inside the thinking worlds. Man-text-semiosphere-history M., 1996. (also see "Semiosphere")
11. Pushkin's novel in verse "Eugene Onegin" Tartu, 1975.
12. Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin: biography of the writer L., 1982.
13. A.S. Pushkin's novel "Eugene Onegin": Commentary L., 1983.
14. In the school of the poetic word: Pushkin. Lermontov. Gogol M., 1988.
15. Creation of Karamzin M., 1987 (also see "Karamzin", 1997. P. 10-311.)
16. Conversations about Russian culture: life and traditions of the Russian nobility (XVIII-early XIX century) St. Petersburg, 1996.
17. Universe of the Mind: a semiotic theory of culture L. 1990. (see "Inside the thinking worlds")
Articles:
1. On the problem of values ​​in secondary modeling systems // Uchen.zap.Tart.gos.un-ta, 1965. Issue. 181. / Proceedings on sign systems, vol. 2, pp. 22-37.
2. To the problem of typology of culture // Uchen.zap.Tart.gos.un-ta, 1967. Issue. 198. / Proceedings on sign systems, v.3., S.30-38.
3. To the problem of typology of texts // Tez. report at the Second Summer School on Secondary Modeling Systems Tartu, 1966. P.83-91.
4. Abstracts to the problem "Art in a number of modeling systems" // Uchen.zap.Tart.gos.un-ta, 1967. Issue. 198. / Proceedings on sign systems, v.3., S.130-145.
5. Literary criticism should be a science // Vopr. lit., 1967. No. 1. pp. 90-100. (also see "On Russian Literature", St. Petersburg, 1997, pp. 756-765.)
6. On the semiotic mechanism of culture (Jointly with B.A. Uspensky) // Uchen.zap. Tart. gos. un-ta, 1971. Issue. 284. / Proceedings on sign systems, vol. 5, pp. 144-166. (also see Selected Articles, vol. 3, 1993, pp. 326-344.
7. Myth-name-culture (Jointly with B.A. Uspensky) // Uchen.zap.Tart.gos.un-ta, 1973. Issue 308. / Proceedings on sign systems, v.6., S.282-303. (also see "Selected Articles", v.1., 1993. P.58-75.
8. Semiotics of culture and the concept of text // Works on sign systems, vol. 12., pp. 3-7 (also see Selected Articles, Tallinn, 1993. vol. 1. pp. 129-132.
9. On the semiosphere // Proceedings on sign systems, Tartu, 1984. No. 17. pp.5-23. (See also "Selected Articles", Tallinn, 1993, vol. 1, pp. 11-24.)
10. On the dynamics of culture // Works on sign systems, Tartu, 1992. No. 25. P.5-22. (also see "Semiosphere", St. Petersburg, 2000.)
11. Lotman Yu.M. The problem of the sign in art (abstracts). // Lotman Yu.M. About art. SPB., 1998.
12. Lotman Yu.M. The Phenomenon of Culture, TZS No. 10, 1978.
13. Lotman Yu.M. Culture as a collective intelligence and problems of artificial intelligence. // Lotman Yu.M. Semiosphere St. Petersburg. 2000.
14. Lotman Yu.M. The place of cinematography in the mechanism of culture. TZS No. 8 1977.
15. Lotman Yu.M. Winter notes about summer schools. // Yu.M.Lotman and Tartu-Moscow semiotic school M., 1994.
16. Lotman Yu.M. A.M. Pyatigorsky, Abstracts. Kääriku, May 10-12, 1968. Tartu, 1968.
17. Lotman Yu.M. On the Meta-Language of Typological Descriptions of the TCS Culture No. 4 Tartu, 1969.
18. Lotman Yu.M. On the construction of a typology of culture. // Abstracts of reports at the second summer school on secondary modeling systems, August 16-26, 1966. Tartu, 1966. P.82-83.
19. Lotman Yu.M., Uspensky B.A. On the semiotic mechanism of culture. Proceedings on Sign Systems No. 5, 1971.
20. Lotman Yu.M. The problem of “teaching culture” as its typological characteristic. // ТЗС №5, Tartu, 1971.
21. Lotman Yu.M. The problem of the similarity of art and life in the light of the structural approach. // Lotman Yu.M. About art. SPb., 1998, pp. 378-386.
22. Lotman Yu.M. Poetry of the 1790-1810s. // Lotman Yu.M. About poets and poetry SPb., 1996.
23. Lotman Yu.M. Dynamic model of semiotic system. // Lotman Yu.M. Semiosphere, St. Petersburg, 2000.