One afternoon in December 1992, Yuri Lotman sat down to dictate to his assistant. These sessions were spread out over that winter and into the spring of 1993—the final spring of Lotman’s life. The result is this book of memories and recollections.
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One afternoon in December 1992, Yuri Lotman sat down to dictate to his assistant. These sessions were spread out over that winter and into the spring of 1993—the final spring of Lotman’s life. The result is this book of memories and recollections. Five sections concern a single anecdote or theme—lice on the front, an encounter with a hare, a “totally Bulgakovian” episode, a visit from the KGB, Tartu School politics. The remaining two sections supply the narrative backbone of the memoir, focusing on the passage of time: school and frontline life, the end of the war, and postwar university life.
“[Lotman’s work] will be of compelling interest to literary scholars, histories, semioticians, and to those concerned in any way with the workings of the human mind and the nature and limits of human knowledge.” — The Slavic and East European Journal
Yuri M. Lotman was born in 1922 in what was then Petrograd, Russia, and died in 1993 in Tartu, Estonia. He was founder of the Moscow–Tartu School and the initiator of the discipline of cultural semiotics. His works translated into English include Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture and The Structure of the Artistic Text.