Conversations about Russian Culture

Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman — a world-renowned scholar, philologist, and cultural scientist, whose works have been translated into all major European languages. His legacy is extraordinarily vast and counts about eight hundred scientific and popular-scientific articles and books. He was destined to lead a whole scientific school that developed new methods for analyzing artistic texts, alien to the official Soviet literary studies. Like many outstanding scholars, Yu. M. Lotman found it difficult to remain within the bounds of a single scientific discipline: his research focused not only on literature of the 18th and 19th centuries but also on the history of Russian public thought, theories of art, and cultural studies. In the late 1980s, he gave lectures on television about the life and traditions of the Russian nobility, and based on this television cycle, the book «Conversations about Russian Culture» was created. The scholar's interest in this topic was organically connected with the study of the works of Russian literature of the first third of the 19th century. Thanks to Lotman, the Pushkin era unfolds before us not only through classical texts but also through the realities of everyday life: ranks table, home education, high-society ball, duel, card game, and so on. The diversity of documentary sources used, the breadth of generalizations, and the accessibility of presentation — these qualities invariably characterize the research of Yu. M. Lotman, which remains popular not only among specialists but also among a wider reading audience.