Yuri Tynianov, Jan Mukařovský and Nikolai Marr in Juri Lotman’s Concept of History of Humanities

Abstract

This article focuses on Juri Lotman’s views of the origins of Tartu-Moscow structuralism. He reconstructed the genesis of the Tartu-Moscow School using the Hegelian model (thesis – antithesis – synthesis). In Lotman’s concepts of the 1960s and 1970s, the role of the “thesis” was always played by the Petrograd Association of Russian Formalists (OPOIaZ). Lotman selected different movements as the “antithesis”. In the 1960s, the productive antithesis to OPOIaZ was, for Lotman, the “semantic paleontology” of Nikolai Marr and his followers (such as Olga Freidenberg). In the 1970s, Lotman assigned this role to the functionalist structuralism of the Prague School (with a special focus on the work of Jan Mukařovský), but he never abandoned his sympathy for the work of Freidenberg.