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Unpredictable Mechanisms of Culture by Yuri Lotman (NF)
Rights sold: Brazil - Hucitec Editora, Estonia – TALLINN UNIVERSITY PRESS (in Russian and in English), Georgia – MTSIGNOBARI, Poland – WYDAWNICTWA AKADEMICKIEGO SEDNO
This book, dictated by the world-known cultural semiotician Yuri Lotman at the end of his life, is in fact the last volume of Lotman’s opus magnum (along with his other fundamental works ‘Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture’ and ‘Culture and Explosion’).
The author analyses the global rules of history, the meaning of explosion and unpredictability in culture as well as art as a workshop of unpredictability. The book features a vast variety of new culturological ideas explained with plain and simple language distinguishing for all other Lotman´s writings. First and foremost, Lotman´s interest lies in the ways of development of culture. Among processes of cultural evolution Lotman distinguishes the three general types: the cyclical processes, which regularly return to the same start point, the linear processes, and finally, the explosive processes, which only might be attributed as unpredictable and as such represent the most interest to the culturological science.
The legendary semiotician didn't see this work published. It was put together and edited by his disciples, and for a long time remained unknown to the reader.
The book also contains extensive commentaries authored by Yuri Lotman’s long-time friends and colleagues: a prominent Russian philologist and Indo-Europeanist Vyacheslav Ivanov, writer and semiotician Boris Egorov, and Boris Uspensky.
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CROSS-POLLINATION (TIME, PLACE, PEOPLE), collected essays by Vladimir Sharov
Rights sold: Russia - ARSIS BOOKS
This volume, published posthumously, was compiled when Sharov already acutely sensed his own end. Of its thirteen entries, one is on literature (Platonov, “without whom and outside of whom our twentieth cen-tury will never be understood”) and four on Russian history; these final five entries supplement earlier themes. But the first half of the book is urgently new. The author is embedded in every word. It is autobiographical, however, only in Sharov’s modest and decentered sense of a memoir: not a Bildungsroman focused on his own coming-of-age, but horizontal, anecdotal, literally a cross-pollination at the level of small living things.
At the radiant center of these remembrances is his father, Aleksandr Izrailevich Sharov (né Nyurenberg), who began as a geneticist, switched to journalism in the late1930s, and finally took refuge in literature. The essays then spread outward in space and time to Sharov’s early neighborhood, school teachers, the provincial town of Voronezh, crucial friends and interlocutors (including an open letter to his friend Alexander Etkind), and a memoir on how he came to write The Rehearsals. Sharov admits that the entries in both volumes overlap. “After some hesitation,” he writes, “I finally decided to leave everything as it was, and simply beg the readers’ pardon for the repeats. With some goodwill, they can be considered in the nature of a refrain”.
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