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Review Author(s): Stephen Hutchings Review by: Stephen Hutchings Source: The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Summer, 1992), pp. 245-247Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European LanguagesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/308981Accessed: 09-09-2015 05:54 UTC

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Reviews 245

familiar to the specialist. The anthology, intended, according to Ledkovsky, as "an inner slice of Russia's newest history," offers a wide selection of available riches, ranging in genre and theme from Anna Axmatova's memories of Blok before the Revolution to Irina Ratu'in- skaja's fiction of the 1980s.

The uninitiated reader, unfortunately, may have some difficulty approaching the many interesting texts included here. The translations are generally serviceable, and short biographi- cal notes are included on each writer at the end of the volume. But the works themselves often require an intimacy with Russian history, custom, and tradition that few non-specialists will possess. This seems particularly true of the excerpted memoirs of Marina Cvetaeva, Evgenija Ginzburg, Nadeida Mandel'tam, and Lidija tukovskaja, all of which would benefit greatly from expanded introductions and explanatory footnotes. The same is true of excerpts from the fiction of Bella Axmadulina and the pseudonymous Tatjana Nikolaeva and of a journalistic piece by Marina Rachko. Short stories by I. Grekova, Natalija Baranskaja, Ruth Zernova, and Liudmila Stern round out the collection.

The volume will probably be most useful as a companion to the earlier anthology Rossija glazami zenscin (reviewed in SEEJ, Summer 1991, 35, 2, pp. 304-5), of which it is an exact translation. The editor and publishers have taken care to see that the English text matches the Russian original page for page, which certainly facilitates its use in the classroom or in independent study. Numbered lines would be an additional courtesy. With a longer introduc- tion and notes, the two volumes together might make a useful supplement to a fourth- or fifth- year class.

Mary A. Nicholas, Lehigh University

Jurij M. Lotman. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. 288pp., $45.00 (cloth).

Semiotic theory in the Soviet Union has followed a different path of development from that of its Western counterpart. This book provides an answer to anyone harboring illusions that Soviet achievements in this field thereby fail to match those of the West. Soviet semiotics offers a distinctive, richly productive approach to literary and cultural studies and Universe of the Mind represents a summation of the intellectual career of the man who has done most to guarantee this.

The book has been translated competently by Ann Shukman and the ideas it propounds are illustrated throughout with pertinent references to Russian literature, medieval culture, con- temporary film, the history of fashion and other fields. Part 1 treats problems of the text. Central to Lotman's theories here is the notion of meaning-generation as the accumulation of new information through the translation of texts back and forth between two or more different codes. The higher the mutual untranslatability (or entropy) between the codes, the greater the potential for the generation of information when translation is attempted. Several conse- quences flow from this premise: 1) Semiotics acquires a much needed diachronic dimension since the creation of meaning becomes a dynamic process in which both text-codes and audience-codes progressively restructure themselves as a result of their interaction (e.g. theat- rical readings of the texts of real life result in the restructuring of both 'theater' and 'life'); 2) If meaning is bound up with translation between codes, there can be no 'outside position' allowing the semiotician to unmask a text's ideological encoding, as in some Western models; 3) Since artistic texts are the most resistant to recoding, and thus the most 'information- efficient', they occupy a key position in any literate culture. (Lotman is influenced by Russian Formalism in which 'poetic language' is privileged over 'less efficient' everyday language.)

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246 Slavic and East European Journal

Also important is the positing of an organic link between textual communication and culture, allowing binary oppositions between text-types to serve as the basis for a typology of entire cultures.

Because artistic tropes (metaphors, metonymies etc.) involve the mutual translation of normally incompatible semantic fields, rhetoric becomes the tool with which to analyse all information-productive or 'creative' thinking, whether artistic or scientific. Lotman thus res- cues semiotics from an overreliance on linguistics, introducing art as a supplementary model with which to enrich semiotic study. The propensity to apply the tools of the humanities to science and vice versa characterizes Lotman's method. However, since poetic figures now represent art in its purest form, the unique abilities of the narrative prose genres to engage linear time and social discourse are somewhat overshadowed (a weakness that also applies to Formalism).

Part 2 deals with 'The Semiosphere'-a term Lotman coins by analogy with the word 'biosphere' to describe the multitude of interlocking codes within a culture's semiotic space. Crucial to Lotman's argument is the notion that "semiotic experiences within the semiosphere precede any given semiotic act" (123), in other words, that models of communication only become working models when they are provided with human participants already immersed in the need for, and practice of semiosis. Lotman thus succeeds in overcoming the abstract schemas typical of early semiotic theory.

'Cultural space' is understood in a literal as well as a figurative sense. Lotman goes on to analyse specific spatial oppositions active within any semiosphere. By emphasizing space's ability to acquire semantic features, he removes semiotics still further from linguistics, replac- ing verbal conventionality by spatial iconicity (semiosis based on relations of similarity rather than on arbitrary conventions). One of the most important spatial concepts is that of the boundary between 'own' and 'alien,' which Lotman demonstrates to be a crucial mechanism of cultural development; cultures continually receive from each other texts that they consider 'alien,' then retransmit them in assimilated form as 'own,' forever redrawing the boundaries between 'own' and 'alien.'

In his theory of plot Lotman establishes a link between spatial perception and cyclic/mythic interpretations of time. When applied to narrative, the latter are geared towards designating repetitions and the setting of norms. Against this he counterposes linear-discrete approaches to time which are suited for the recording of change and norm-disruption. The history of plot is seen as the fruit of the interaction between these two basic impulses.

Part 2 concludes with analyses of individual spatial figures in Dante and Bulgakov, and of the image of Petersburg in Russian culture. In this last example Lotman's powers of synthesis enable him to connect architecture, everyday behaviour, literature, politics and salon gossip in a single persuasive theory.

In Part 3, history and cultural memory become the central focus. The analysis here is preceded by a carefully argued critique of deterministic theories of history in which Lotman stresses that chance elements and individual choice play a role equal to that of immutable, impersonal processes. Drawing on probability theory, Lotman maintains that a historical event is "always the result of one of many possible alternatives" and that "the same conditions do not always produce the same results; history is an irreversible process" (230). Among the highlights of the exercises in cultural history that Lotman then conducts is his comparison of Western history to Russian history as that of a culture rooted in contracts involving the conventional sign, to a culture based on surrender to the 'truth' of the symbol, and his examination of the sophisticated pre-literate consciousness of the early South American peo- ples. Lotman's sensibility to cultural difference leads him to a deep respect for, and under- standing of other eras; at the same time he remains aware that our very image of these eras is based on a translation into the codes of the present of texts produced according to codes of the past. The book concludes with a reflection on this epistemological paradox. The human brain

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Reviews 247

both contains the vast intellectual mechanism of human culture as its simulacrum and is therefore able to articulate it, yet at the same time forms part of that mechanism and is articulated by it. This is the paradox of the Universe of the Mind.

The only complaints of substance to be made derive from the paucity of information regarding original publication dates of the material included. Much has been published else- where in similar form. Though this is mentioned in passing in Umberto Eco's otherwise excellent introduction, full details are not forthcoming. This is more than a technical quibble, for such an omission deprives the reader of the ability to place long-since superseded ideas (for example, structuralist notions of 'deep-level norms' in Part 1) in the context of the time in which they were formulated. It also makes it difficult to derive an overall context for, and sense from, the seemingly inexhaustible array of binary oppositions on which Lotman's analy- ses are founded. Nonetheless, this book is a landmark in cultural theory and will be of compelling interest to literary scholars, historians, semioticians, and to those concerned in any way with the workings of the human mind and the nature and limits of human knowledge.

Stephen Hutchings, University of Rochester

George Y. Shevelov. The Ukrainian Language in the First Half of the Twentieth Century (1900- 1941). Its State and Status. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1989, 242 pp. (cloth).

Shevelov's study traces the development of modern Standard Ukrainian during the first four decades of our century while taking into consideration the historical, political, cultural, and sociological factors which helped shape its present form. The work is divided into seven chapters: 1) The Standard Ukrainian Language in 1900: A Tentative Crosscut; 2) The Years before World War I and Revolution (1900-1916); 3) The Years of Struggle for Independence (1917-1920); 4) The Soviet Ukraine before Ukrainianization; 5) The Years of Ukrai- nianization (1925-1932); 6) Between 1933 and 1941: The Ukraine under Postylev and Xru'ov (Khrushchev); and 7) The Interwar Period (1920-1939) in the Western Ukraine. It concludes with the author's "Retrospective Remarks" (214-233), an extensive bibliography (224-234), and an index of personal names, names of organizations and titles of works (233- 242).

In his Introduction, Shevelov takes pains to point out the limitations of his study, both extraneous and self-imposed. He notes that it is "very incomplete," that, for various reasons, he was unable to use all the pertinent materials published, that it is limited to "the problems of Ukrainian in its internal development," and that "the status and character of the Ukrainian language" outside of the territory of the Ukrainian SSR, both in Eastern Europe and in the West, i.e., in the diaspora, remain outside the scope of his research (3). And yet, even a cursory reading of the work reveals that, notwithstanding the author's claims, the work is comprehensive and yet succinct, erudite without being too technical, and, as a result, emi- nently readable. It is, without doubt, of great value not only to linguists, but also to historians and political scientists as well as to the lay person interested in the culture of the Slavic East.

The work offers a wealth of peripheral yet pertinent information. It features an analysis of the official measures proscribing Ukrainian in Tsarist Russia (5-9); it provides revealing statistical data on Ukrainian book and journal production in the 1920's (118), and it contains a concise encapsulation of the history of the Ukrainian press (76-85). It also deals extensively with censorship, with the process of Ukrainianization and Russification of the language, with the Sovietization of Ukrainian life and letters, with the differences among the language variants spoken in the various regions of Ukraine, with the language of the Church (both

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Article Contentsp. 245p. 246p. 247

Issue Table of ContentsSlavic and East European Journal, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Summer, 1992) pp. 159-273Front MatterZamjatin's Modernist Palette: Colors and Their Function in We [pp. 159-171]Marina Lebedeva's "MEZHDU NAMI, ZHENSHCHINAMI" Feuilletons [pp. 172-188]The Temptation of Miracle in Brat'ja Karamazovy [pp. 189-201]The Tale of Savva Grudcyn and the Poetics of Transition [pp. 202-216]The Narrator in Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being [pp. 217-226]ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 227]Review: untitled [pp. 228-229]Review: untitled [pp. 229-230]Review: untitled [pp. 230-231]Review: untitled [pp. 231-232]Review: untitled [pp. 232-234]Review: untitled [pp. 234-235]Review: untitled [pp. 235-237]Review: untitled [pp. 237-238]Review: untitled [pp. 239-241]Review: untitled [pp. 241-242]Review: untitled [pp. 242-244]Review: untitled [pp. 244-245]Review: untitled [pp. 245-247]Review: untitled [pp. 247-248]Review: untitled [pp. 248-250]Review: untitled [pp. 251-252]Review: untitled [pp. 253-255]Review: untitled [pp. 255-256]Review: untitled [pp. 256-258]Review: untitled [pp. 258-260]Review: untitled [pp. 260-261]Review: untitled [pp. 261-263]Review: untitled [pp. 263-264]Review: untitled [pp. 264-266]Review: untitled [pp. 266-267]Review: untitled [pp. 267-268]

Back Matter [pp. 269-273]