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YURI LOTMAN - Doctor of philology, founder of structural semiotics in culturology

This modest, immensely cultured man, this meticulous technician who was also an improviser of unusual verbal seductiveness, and a tireless generator of new ideas, foregrounded, and in this sense, prefigured the dynamics of cultural facts, including the upheavals that Russian culture is now experiencing. /Julia Kristeva, philosopher/

Yuri Lotman was the founder of structural semiotics in culturology, and a leading figure in the Tartu–Moscow school of semiotics. He published numerous books and articles on the 18–19th century Russian literature, on the structure of poetic texts and cultural typology. He maintained that no culture, no study of culture, is possible without taking into account the transformative essence of meaning, and the idea that raises a problem for formalism - and for dogmatism.

Lotman was established as the first Soviet structuralist with his book On the Delimitation of Linguistic and Philological Concepts of Structure (1963). Lotman published his Lectures on Structural Poetics in the first issue of Sign Systems Studies (1964) and pursued his analyses in The Structure of Artistic Text (1970) and An Analysis of the Poetic Text (1972), before taking up the study of film (1973). As late as 1992, he addressed culture as a specific fact in Culture and Explosion. All in all, he produced more than 550 texts.

Yuri Lotman was born in Petrograd on 28 February 1922. He graduated from Leningrad University in 1950, and worked, first as a lecture, and later as a professor, at the University of Tartu. In 1964, he became the editor of Sign Systems Studies, a journal published by the University of Tartu. He was a professor at the University of Tartu.

Yuri Lotman died in 1993.