CULTURE AS DYNAMITEDinda L. Gorle

CULTURE AND EXPLOSION

Juri LotmanEdited by Marina Grishakova

Translated by Wilma Clark

Mouton de Gmyterhttp://www.degmyter.de195 pages; cloth, $155.00

Culture and Explosion is the English translationof Kul'tura i vzryv (1992). Juri Lotman (1922-1993)was one of the leaders in the field of interdisciplinaryliterary and cultural studies. Despite the exile ofEstonia by the Communist Soviet Union, and despitethe cultural collision of the Iron Curtain dividingWestem and Eastem Europe, Lotman's "new look"made him a world-renowned semiotician and cultu-rologist (with the help of some Westem confreres).Culture and Explosion is his last book, and is a nobleeffort to gain cross-linguistic and cross-culturalinsights in Russian and general culturology. The bookprophesies the idea of cultural (political, ideological,informative, etc.) explosion. Though the centralpart of the book is Lotman's twenty shorter essays(174 pages), fully seventy pages of this volume aredevoted to the introduction, foreword, afterword, andindex, written by Lotman's associates. The chaptersare abundantly illustrated with examples, mainlyfrom the rich legacy of Russian culture. Readingthe book, one feels inspired to imagine non-Russianexamples from mythological and biblical figures,including figures from real life.

As a young Russian of Jewish origin, Lotmanwas a creative intellectual in St. Petersburg. Ambi-tious to publish the secret societies of the DecembristRevolt in Tsarist Russia (1825), his "culture as text"strategy was new historical criticism. Yet in theStalinist era, he was regarded as a liberal element andseemed to become a political threat, getting involvedin what the Russian authorities called conspiracyand revolution. The policy of oppression forcedLotman in 1950 to leave Russia; he was exiled to aprovincial town in the Baltics: Tartu, Estonia. (TheRussians had pressured Estonia to sign a "mutualassistance" pact that allowed the Red Army to oc-cupy the country.) Discontent with the strongholdof autocracy, Lotman stood firm in (not against)the Russian policy. He became the founder of theTartu-Moscow School, editor-in-chief of the joumalSign Systems Studies (flourishing today in Tartu). Hewas the so-called almus pater of the University ofTartu, and late in his life, he became an advocate ofEstonian independence.

Lotman's own standing as an eminent scholarof Russian culture was established in broaderdimensions: the global and diachronic dimensions ofa whole culture or a cultural period, genre, or author.His earlier book. Universe of the Mind: A SemioticTheory of Culture (1990, introduced by UmbertoEco), had tumed Lotman into the official channel ofcommunication between aesthetics, poetics, semi-otic theory, the history of culture, mythology, andcinema. Linguistic culturology was for Lotman botha personal and a social concept-in-change, or bettera concept-in-exile. His cultural criticism was not toresituate the cultural identity and the social biases ofhis unfortunate political situation, but rather to situ-ate the "semiosphere" of cultural events in time andspace. Cultural beliefs and knowledge energize ourhuman activities all over the world. Lotman wrote

that culture could be destmctive and chaotic, but alsoopened up creative explosions bursting into beautyand perfection. Lotman's own metaphor stood outin the negative polarity of technology and nature:"A minefield with unexpected explosive pointsand a river in spring with its powerful but directedstream."

Culture transforms into all kinds of explosivesubstances, dynamizing the world and making usrespond in life and art. Culture and Explosion polar-ized between gradual pattems and explosive ones.Not seen as separate or loose moments, but ratheras events in their cultural context. Cultural eventscan in the past and future become bumt, withered,vitalized, destroyed, overlooked, rejected, stressed,disappeared, replaced, distorted, translated, changed,and exchanged. For example, the statues of victori-ous political figures highlight national symbols.Some statues of leaders remain in place, such asEmperor Augustus, Peter I the Great of Russia, andKim Il-sung. The statues of Adolf Hitler, FranciscoFranco, and Benito Mussolini have disappeared, nolonger of good standing. Those of Valdimir Leninand Joseph Stalin are on the way out. The statue ofSaddam Hussein came tumbling down in the springof 2003. High images of the mling elite can easilyexplode into a low state of being.

Juri Lotman was one of the leaders inthe field of interdisciplinary literary

and cultural studies.

Lotman analyzed the ritual behavior of animals,surrounded by nature. An animal's harmony canclash with man's (woman's) cultural and psycho-logical impact, far away from nature. The eccentricdisharmonies of man (such as hunting, alpinism, andother "mortal" explosions) disturb the force of nature.Technological man and natural animal fear eachother and stay out of each other's reach. Ironically,the feelings stirred by hatred can also explode intolove. This metamorphosis is how man has an affinitywith domestic animals: they have "proper names"and are "trained" to behave both as man and animal.This "play" leads to real life, but is commonplace infiction. In the Brothers Grimm's fairytale The FrogKing, the frog's human speech and erotic entreatiesto share the bed of the beautiful princess intriguethe readers. Lotman brought up the clever tricks ofthe cat in Charles Perrault's tale Puss in Boots. Puss"deceived the foolish cannibal-magician by first sug-gesting he becomes a lion, and then a mouse, whichhe quickly and victoriously eats." Little wonder thatPuss organizes catastrophes in a "normal" but wisefashion.

The behavior of "wiseman" Puss is a symbolof intelligence and skill. In chapter "The fool andthe madman," Lotman discusses the "predictable"orientation of a wiseman to conflicts in contrast tothe "predictable" and "unpredictable" acts of thefool, and the madman's "unpredictable" moods toconflicts around him. The concepts of "folly" and"normal" are illustrated with examples from theinterplay between "reality-fiction" (Leo Tolstoy's"theatricality"). The mad Hamlet, Ulysses fleeingfrom the gigantic Cyclops, the sad and camivalesqueadventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Nero'scrazy singing performances to the Roman audience,all have seemed to find a possible or impossible so-lution to the catastrophes. A work of art "transportsman into a world of freedom" and "in the freedomof fantasy" elaborates its own "rituals of magic." Ex-

Juri Lolman

Culture andExplosion

DE GRUYTERMOUTON

amples could be multiplied indefinitely. In everydaylife, the Monica Lewinsky scandal of "wiseman" BillClinton was an episode dynamizing an otherwiserigid and immobile system of US presidency. In art,Lotman told the episode of a duel between friendsin Alexander Pushkin's Eugen Onegin. Secretly, wemiss a description of life and death in Tolstoy's AnnaKarenina (1877). Is Anna's controversial suicide a"special form of victory over death...contradictoryto the natural (i.e. neutral) order of things," or is themetaphor of sex a sign of cultural decline (see chapter"The end? How sonorous is this word!")?

Lotman's dualism in Russian literature is ran-dom and regular, real and unreal, stable and eccentric.In a symmetrical structure, Lotman discussed intheory and practice the impact of adventure andfreedom, the masculine and feminine, the sick andthe healthy, the simple and the pretentious, intimacyand courtesy, and other oppositions in Europeanhistory. Or, putting it in poetic words, "the corpseas the double of the living, the authentic and thefalse, the ugly and the beautiful, the criminal and thesaint, the negligible and the great." The catastrophecan provoke a mortality crisis, tuming from a dualstructure into a three way one. In the end of Cultureand Explosion, Lotman presents the "apocalyptic"vision of an explosive reality, pressed into a Stateideal, moving towards the "utopia" of a human senseof "forgiveness, sacrifice, love."

The reviewer was not able to read this bookabout art and morals quickly, but had to frequentlystop to think about humankind's growing skills ofexploring, meeting, playing, working, and lovingculture through life and art. Reading this book, werealize that humanity is actually becoming human,trying to find a slippery way through good or evil ex-plosions. All the way through Culture and Explosionwere pertinent asides on matters of semiotic concemand cultural debate, so that this book provokes somuch tangible information and intangible imagi-nation that it deserves to be widely read and longpondered.

Dinda L. Gorle (http://wwwjcs4all.nl/~gorlee/) is asemiotician and translation theoretician living in TheHague (the Netherlands) with research interests ininterarts studies. She is associate editor o/AmericanBook Review.

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