Juri Lotman (Russian: Ю́рий Миха́йлович Ло́тман; 28 February 1922 – 28 October 1993) was a prominent Russian-Estonian literary scholar, semiotician, and historian of Russian culture, who worked at the University of Tartu. He was elected a member of the British Academy (1977), the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (1987), the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (1989) and the Estonian Academy of Sciences (1990). He was a founder of the Tartu–Moscow Semiotic School. The number of his printed works exceeds 800 titles. His extensive archive (now kept at the University of Tallinn and at the Tartu University Library) includes his correspondence with a number of Russian and Western intellectuals.
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Juri Lotman in the context of Russian formalism
Russian formalism was a school of literary theory in Russia from the 1910s to the 1930s. It includes the work of a number of highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars, such as Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Vladimir Propp, Boris Eikhenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Boris Tomashevsky, and Grigory Gukovsky, who revolutionised literary criticism between 1914 and the 1930s by establishing the specificity and autonomy of poetic language and literature. Russian formalism exerted a major influence on thinkers like Mikhail Bakhtin and Juri Lotman as well as on structuralism as a whole. The movement's members had a large impact on modern literary criticism as it developed in the structuralist and post-structuralist periods. Under Stalin it became a pejorative term for elitist art.
Russian formalism was a diverse movement, producing no unified doctrine, and no consensus amongst its proponents on a central aim to their endeavours. In fact, "Russian Formalism" describes two distinct movements: the OPOJAZ (Obshchestvo Izucheniia Poeticheskogo Yazyka, Society for the Study of Poetic Language) in St. Petersburg and the Moscow Linguistic Circle. Therefore, it is more precise to refer to the "Russian Formalists," rather than to use the broader and more abstract term of "Formalism."