Non-Memoirs (Scholarly)

Description: One afternoon in December 1992, in Tartu, Estonia, Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman reluctantly sat down to dictate his memoirs to Elena Pogosian, his assistant, over a pot of tea. It was to be the first of twelve dictation sessions during which the initial draft of Non-Memoirs was created. The sessions were spread out over that winter and into the spring of 1993--the last spring of Lotman's life. The result of the process is this book - a book of memories and recollections of a good part of 20th century, divided into seven sections. The five shorter sections concern themselves with a single anecdote or theme (lice on the front, an encounter with a hare, a "totally Bulgakovian" episode, a visit from the KGB, Tartu School politics); the two longer sections provide the narrative backbone of the memoirs, tending to treat the passage of time, rather than a single event (school and frontline life, the end of the war and postwar university life).

Review: ... Lotman, in my view, is a critic who started from a structuralist approach... but who does not remain bound by it. -- Umberto Eco

Author Biography: Yuri M. Lotman was born in 1922 in what was then Petrograd, Russia, and died in 1993 in Tartu, Estonia. He was founder of the Moscow-Tartu School and the initiator of the discipline of cultural semiotics. His works translated into English include Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture and The Structure of the Artistic Text.