How did the ideas of Juri Lotman reach the West?
How did the ideas of Juri Lotman reach the West?

Summary/Abstract: During my first face-to-face meeting with the younger generation of the Tartu semiotics school during the Meeting of the International Association for Semiotic Studies in Dresden in 1999, Peeter Torop — now Lotman’s successor in the chair of semiotics at Tartu University — asked me to write down my recollections about how I discovered Juri Mikhajlovich first two monographs on semiotic aspects of artistic texts (1964, 1970), and how I was able to bring these monographs to the United States and thereby to open them up for the world of Western learning. To this request I recklessly assented, not giving much thought to the difficulties inherent in this the task. The proposed memoir seemed so simple, and so wholly straightforward. Was it not a simple task of retelling something, which is an intimate part of my own personal experiences, my own recollections, my own intellectual biography? But, as I was to learn painfully when I sat down to prepare this paper, this was not at all the case. For what follows involves not just a piece of my lived life, but something which literally turned my scientific maturation on its ear, and was to become a vigorous compass for the direction of my further intellectual paths. So, as the Germans say: “Wer A sagt muss auch B sagen,” here I am, trying to say B.

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