Non-Memoirs

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).

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.＂