Lotman’s school: European intellectuals on the Soviet soil

Abstract

The article represents the attempt of interpretation of the Tartu–Moscow School as the European phenomenon and at the same time as the Soviet one. Using ideal and typical intellectuals’ characteristic, stated systematically in the researches of German sociologist Bernhard Giesen, the author concludes that the organization and communica-tive procedures of intellectual societies described by Giesen may be applicable for the description of Lotman’s school. Especially, it means the support of self-isolation and distance from the authority, official science and official academic audience to preserve the autonomy. Along with that, the Tartu–Moscow School had special features, formed due to specific Soviet existence conditions. Among them, there was distance from the authorities worsened by hostile and suspicious attitude of the authorities to the group of the adherents of semiotics. Such attitude, the threat of persecutions and real persecutions increased their desire for self-isolation to keep freedom. Adverse external con-ditions increased thirst for specific, incomprehensible to censorship, “secret” language and unwillingness to partici-pate in politics. They also provoked construction of academic traditions in circumvention of the Soviet traditions and the alliances with the authors of doubtful ideas. Desire for self-isolation together with the restrictions of academic communication, inevitable in conditions of the “Iron Curtain”, can be observed as one of the possible reasons for the fact that the participants of Lotman’s school did not mention or ignored several efficient academic ideas that prepared an anthropological turn in the Humanities.doi: 10.17072/2219-3111-2017-3-56-63