This paper seeks to situate the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics of the 1960–1980s within the larger European intellectual-historical context from which it sprang, and in which it played a vital role. Analysing the school members’ engagement with their peers throughout Europe, we outline an “entangled history” (histoire croisee) of multi-directional scientific and philosophical influence. In this perspective, we discuss the most productive concepts and methods of Tartu-Moscow semiotics in the fields of general verse theory, intertextual theory and cultural theory.

This article examines Juri Lotman’s scholarly and pedagogical practice as an integrated system in which teaching, mentorship, research, and publishing strategies constituted a single cultural mechanism structured by what may be termed academic domesticity (an equivalent of Boris Eikhenbaum’s concept of “literary domesticity”): the deliberate relocation of scholarly production into semi-private—non-institutional or trans-institutional—spaces. Mobilizing Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and Robert K. Merton’s notion of the scientific microenvironment, the article analyzes how Lotman cultivated specific dispositions, norms, and modes of intellectual (...) interaction that enabled sustained creativity amid institutional constraints and political pressure. These practices fostered a distinctive model of knowledge generation and transmission, in which oral pedagogy, collective discussion, and an iterative reworking of lecture material played a central role. By reconstructing the interrelationship between Lotman’s intellectual biography, the formation and transformation of the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics, and the institutional history of teaching Russian literature at the University of Tartu in the late Soviet period, the article situates his work within broader debates on academic authority, the transmission of knowledge in scholarship and higher education, and the social conditions of theory production in the humanities. Alongside historical sources, the analysis incorporates the author’s own experience as a student in Tartu in the 1980s and early 1990s. (shrink)

Topics center around formalism—a school of literary criticism and literary theory—and include formalism’s role in late-Soviet/post-Soviet cultural imagination, quantitative poetics, and digital humanities; reimagining the late Viktor Shklovsky as the founding figure of Russian formalism; and the non-Russian roots of Russian formalism, including forgotten predecessors and marginalized followers. Contributors. Denniss Ioffe, Ilya Kalinin, Mark Lipovetsky, Michał Mrugalski, Serguei A. Oushakine, Igor Pilshchikov, Lidia Tripiccione, Andrei Ustinov.

This article links Konstantin Batiushkov's poem Elysium to the tradition of poetic imitations of Janus Secundus's Basium II. A French equivalent for this poem's pythiambic distichs was invented by Ronsard, who used cross-rhymed quatrains with regular alternation of dodecasyllabic and hexasyllablic lines. However, the French translators of Basia of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries could not use this metre, because its semantic aura was drastically changed by Malherbe's Consolation à Monsieur du Périer. Batiushkov's Elysium as well as its Latin (...) and French sources are poems about a delightful death and the union of lovers in the afterlife; yet the metre, which was used in Malherbe's poem, was for more than two centuries a metre of mournful elegiac stanzas about eternal separation. The question of a metrical prototype for Batiushkov's poem still remains undetermined. His "anacreontic" trochaic tetrameter does not have analogues in the Latin original or its French translations, but coincides with the metre of G. A. Bürger's Die Umarmung from 1776, and finds parallels in some eighteenth-century Russian imitations of Basium II which were most likely forgotten by the beginning of the nineteenth century. (shrink)

This article links Konstantin Batiushkov’s poem Elysium (1810) to the tradition of poetic imitations of Janus Secundus’s Basium II. A French equivalent for this poem’s pythiambic distichs was invented by Ronsard (Chanson, 1578), who used cross-rhymed quatrains with regular alternation of dodecasyllabic and hexasyllablic lines. However, the French translators of Basia of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries could not use this metre, because its semantic aura was drastically changed by Malherbe’s Consolation a Monsieur du Perier (1598). Batiushkov’s Elysium as (...) well as its Latin and French sources are poems about a delightful death and the union of lovers in the afterlife; yet the metre, which was used in Malherbe’s poem, was for more than two centuries a metre of mournful elegiac stanzas about eternal separation. The question of a metrical prototype for Batiushkov’s poem still remains undetermined. His “anacreontic” trochaic tetrameter does not have analogues in the Latin original or its French translations, but coincides with the metre of G. A. Burger’s Die Umarmung from 1776 (of which Batiushkov was hardly aware in 1810), and finds parallels in some eighteenth-century Russian imitations of Basium II which were most likely forgotten by the beginning of the nineteenth century. (shrink)