Lotman Yuri - extraordinary and bright

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Lotman Yuri Mikhailovich is a huge world of thought that we, the descendants, have to study. And although television has done a lot to make its versatility and complexity accessible to people, so that many can get in touch with the depth of the material and the simplicity of its transmission, Yuri Mikhailovich still remains a mystery.

Information about childhood and youth

In the family of Mikhail Lvovich Lotman, a mathematician and lawyer, who already had three daughters, a son never appeared. And in the hungry year of 1922 in Petrograd, the long-awaited heir was finally born - Yuri Lotman. The house where he was born is very difficult. It was from him that Pushkin went to a duel, from which he was brought mortally wounded.

For thousands of years, Jewish families have taught children to respect learning and books. Therefore, seven-year-old Yury Lotman was sent to study at the best school in Leningrad, which has now received its original name "Petrishule". People who made a huge contribution to Russian culture studied at this educational institution, for example: P. P. Vyazemsky, K. Rossi, N. Benois, M. Mussorgsky, Decembrist M. Fonvizin, Admiral P. Chichagov and many others.

Only in this school Yuri Lotman could get a deep versatile education and excellent knowledge of foreign languages, especially German, which Yuri Mikhailovich was fluent in. In the meantime, Yuri Lotman has been studying science for nine years and is preparing to enter Leningrad University. He chose the Faculty of Philology and wrote his term paper under the scientific supervision of the outstanding philologist-folklorist V. Ya. Propp, who had world recognition and was at the origins of the development of text theory. The student's interests included the study of Russian literature of the early 19th century, so he needed knowledge of French.

War

In 1939-1940 there was a military conflict with Finland. And from the second year Lotman Yuri was sent to the Red Army. As an absolutely necessary subject, he took with him a dictionary of the French language and carefully studied it all the years of the war. Since the beginning of the Patriotic War, he has served as a signalman in the artillery troops, that is, on the front line, without hiding behind anyone's backs. First he is a sergeant, then the commander of the communications department.

In 1944 he was awarded two medals - "For Courage" and "For Military Merit". After a shell shock in 1945, Yuri Mikhailovich was awarded the Order of the Red Star and the Order of the Patriotic War, II degree. So his military distinctions were noted. Yuri Lotman ended the war in Berlin.

Demobilization and start of work

From 1946 to 1950 he continued his studies, and then received a position as a senior teacher in Tartu, at the Pedagogical Institute. As a Jew, other paths were closed to him. In little Tartu he will stay for the wholelife. A year later, Yuri marries a girl close to him in spirit, who studies Russian symbolism and the work of A. Blok.

Two years later, in 1952, Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman defended his PhD thesis. The theme was chosen about Radishchev's struggle with Karamzin's aesthetics of the nobility. Two years later, work begins at the University of Tartu, which in the 20th century, thanks to Lotman's work there, will not only become famous throughout the world, but will also take a central place in world philology. And all this only because a great scientist lectured there and created a school of semiotics. In 1961, Yuri Mikhailovich defended his doctoral thesis on Russian literature before the Decembrist uprising, since 1963 he has been a professor, head of the department of Russian literature.

People of the era of the late 18th - early 19th centuries were living interlocutors for him. He talked with Pushkin, checked his assessments of life and culture and his own conclusions. In 1981, his biography of Pushkin was published. Insanely interesting is the book "Conversations about Russian Culture", published in 1993, just at the time when TV began a cycle of his lectures on this topic. This book can be opened from any page and read avidly. Lotman's memory and knowledge are extraordinary. Students at lectures listened to his lectures, not knowing what to do - listen or write down. Undoubtedly, he was an idol.

Attitude towards culture

Memory, according to Lotman, is the highest achievement of both man and humanity as a whole. It is she who is the guardian of culture as the mostpositive result of the activity of the human spirit. Culture as memory is a way to understand the activity of a scientist. The last book published during his lifetime is Culture and Explosion. It examines the cultural processes in the historical aspect, which led the country to what we have today. So thought Yuri Lotman, whose biography, despite the vicissitudes of wars, is the biography of a thinker.

Family life

Yuri Mikhailovich lived with his wife for thirty-nine years, outliving her by three years. So they looked, being already spouses with experience. The couple are buried nearby. They have three sons. The eldest followed in their footsteps, studying literary criticism and semiotics, the second is an artist, and the third is a biologist.

Died in 1993 Lotman Yuri Mikhailovich. His biography continues in lectures, books that descendants are now reading and pondering with him the thoughts that bothered and disturbed him.