The Increasing Logos of Lotman’s Legacy (Book review: S.T. Zolyan. Yury Lotman: On Meaning, Text, History. Themes and Variations. Moscow: LRC Publishers, 2020)

Abstract

The reviewed work presents an attempt to generalize and develop the key ideas of Yu.M. Lotman, an outstanding researcher of the history of literature, culture, one of the founders of the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school. In the book, S.T. Zolyan, one of Lotman’s students, focuses on the concept of social semiotics and the fundamental role of the text in the formation of semantic complexes of culture as a system for generating, selecting, storing, and transmitting social experience, including the socialization of the individual. Thus, it demonstrates the meaning of linguistic communication, which is structured in texts and narratives. The book’s author convincingly shows that Lotman’s legacy not only retains theoretical interest but also becomes increasingly relevant in the context of expanding interdisciplinary research, convergence of disciplines, in which the concept of text acquires new non-trivial applications and operationalization - from the analysis of neural networks of personality socialization to the analysis of the dynamics of the semantic picture of historical memory.