ABSTRACT
Perhaps no two thinkers in the latter decades of the twentieth century have changed more our ability to conceptualize Russian literature, the Russian literary context, and ultimately verbal reality regardless of national origins, than Mikhail Bakhtin and Iurii Lotman. This chapter shows how Lotman learned from Bakhtin in the 1980s, adapting the latter’s “dialogism” to open up the more mechanical structural-semiotic “modelling systems” made famous in the works of the Moscow-Tartu School of the 1960s and 1970s. It focuses on the major works of Lotman’s last decade — his books on Pushkin and Karamzin — all of which apply in non-specialist language the lessons of “code wrestling” to concrete examples of what might be called “poetic thinking”. Lotman was hoping, at least explicitly, that by writing such a biography he would be demonstrating that semiotic science had come of age. This was the actual test case to prove all the semiotic calculations and “formulas”.
