Lotman as a Culturologist and His Experience in the Reconstruction of Russian Culture

俄罗斯文艺 (Russian Literature & Arts) (Китай). 2024. No. 3. P. 129–139.

Zhukova O.

Translator: Y. Zheng

Lotman successfully worked in the field of cultural history and theory. Based on the textual and semiotic approach he proposed a productive model for the description and interpretation of Russian culture — its semantic thesaurus (semiosphere). His way of considering the national culture through the prism of creative precedents that make up its history offers new opportunities for philosophical and cultural studies. Lotman’s works on the history of Russian culture and literature of the late 18th - first half of the 19th centuries are a kind of experience of ideal reconstruction that allows the scholar to reconstruct the mental map of national culture as an event of creative consciousness of its creators. Analyzing literary texts and the historical context of their emergence, Lotman reconstructs the events of the work of Russian writers of the classical era, putting forward interesting and productive considerations and hypotheses that clarify or even change our ideas about the nature of the creative process and the content of works. Such an experience of ideal reconstruction, for example, is his novelreconstruction of the creative experience of N. M. Karamzin. The method of “decoding” the text allows Lotman to reconstruct Karamzin’s biography as the journey of the Russian writer, historian and thinker’s soul, to see his work as a history of moral and intellectual self-creation. In doing so, Lotman, a cultural studies scholar, returns Karamzin’s legacy to current Russian history. Reinterpreting the works of Karamzin, Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Lotman rediscovers their texts for the modern reader, emphasizing their role in the formation of aesthetic, ethical, political ideals of Russian culture, its spiritual and intellectual tradition.

Keywords: reconstruction, реконструкция, semiotic approach, семиотический подход, русская культура, Russian culture, reinterpretation, реинтерпретация

Publication based on the results of: Russia and Europe in the 19th Century: Intellectual Interactions in the Socio-Political Context (2024)