Yuri Lotman

Yuri Lotman

Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman (Russian: Ю́рий Миха́йлович Ло́тман, Estonian: Juri Lotman) (28 February 1922, Petrograd–28 October 1993, Tartu) was a prominent Soviet literary scholar, semiotician, and cultural historian. Member of the Estonian Academy of Sciences. He was the founder of the Moscow-Tartu school of cultural semiotics and is considered to be the first Soviet structuralist because of his early essay On the Delimitation of Linguistic and Philological Concepts of Structure (1963) and works on structural poetics. The number of his printed works exceeds 800 titles; and his archive which is now kept at the University of Tallinn and which includes his correspondence with a number of Russian intellectuals, is immense.