The present paper is an introduction to and analysis of the article “Literary criticism must be scientific”, presented here for the first time in English translation. The original was published by Lotman in 1967 in the journal Voprosy Literatury. The article by Lotman is a part of a wider debate, started in 1963, that saw structuralists and their opponents dispute the validity and heuristic value of structuralist methodology in literary criticism. The aim of the introduction is to explore Lotman’s engagements with his intellectual context as they emerge in his 1967 article. The first part of the paper discusses the wider context of the debate, and explores the positions of the opponents of structuralism and the ways in which Lotman relates to them. The second part of the paper analyses how Lotman and his structuralist colleagues related to the official Soviet ideology, the diamat. In both cases, it will be seen how Lotman engaged certain aspects of his opponents’ ideas, as well as the official ideology, in order to further his goal of reconciling structuralism and historicism.
Throughout his life, Jurij Lotman lived at the crossroad between different worlds, ages, and cultures. The many authors, cultures, and ideas that shaped his thought and influenced his theories are scattered at either side of countless geographical, political, and cultural borders, beginning with the one that separates “Russian culture” from “European culture,” porous and ambiguous as any boundary.The task of reconstructing how Lotman’s ideas came to being, how they shifted their meaning as their context shifted, is more and more a crucial task not only for the historian. Many Lotmanian concepts, first and foremost that of semiosphere, are acquiring major relevance not only for semiotics itself and its branches, such as the rising political semiotics, but also for many neighboring disciplines, such as cultural studies and political sciences. Therefore, gaining a better understanding of the meaning of Lotman’s ideas could be of value also for the applied semiotician or the political analyst.The present paper is the result of research started in the Lotman Archives in Tallin, Estonia. Through an analysis of archival material, it aims at reconstructing the origins and meaning of the most political tropes of Lotman’s theories, especially what I will call his theory of the political subject. In the first part, I will argue that, in order to understand this political aspect of Lotman, it is necessary to take into consideration the intellectual debates inside which the author started his intellectual journey in 1930s–1940s Soviet Russia, and how he sought answers to those debates in the works of G. W. Leibniz.In the final part of the paper, I will try to show how this reconstruction of Lotman’s history could contribute to the contemporary debate in semiotics and other connected disciplines.
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