The Soviet Empire of Signs: A History of the Tartu School of Semiotics by Maxim WaldsteinReview by: Peeter ToropSlavic Review, Vol. 69, No. 2 (SUMMER 2010), pp. 517-518Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25677163 .

Accessed: 12/04/2014 14:13

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserveand extend access to Slavic Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 157.92.4.12 on Sat, 12 Apr 2014 14:13:00 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Book Reviews 517

The Soviet Empire of Signs: A History of the Tartu School of Semiotics. By Maxim Waldstein. Saarbrucken: VDM Verlag Dr. Miiller, 2008. xii, 219 pp. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliog

raphy. Glossary. Index. 79.00, paper.

This book by Maxim Waldstein may be thought of as a kind of sequel to Peter Seyffert's Soviet Literary Structuralism: Background, Debates, Issues (1985) and Stephen Rudy's thorough overview, "Semiotics in the USSR," published in the compilation The Semiotic Sphere (1986). It is, however, more sociological than either of those texts. As a sociologist, the author has

conducted fieldwork in both Estonia and Russia and recorded copious amounts of oral

material about the Tartu school. By including plenty of memoirs, Waldstein's book is also

remininscent of Edna Andrews's Conversations with Lotman (2003), which incorporated information gleaned especially from Iurii Lotman's sisters. Yet whereas Andrews makes

use of these interviews in her theoretical discussions, for Waldstein this oral information

mainly provides the sociohistorical background for the school. Indeed it is one of the

book's features that both Soviet and western backgrounds are presented as a basis for

understanding the Tartu school.

Waldstein provides a distinctive and well-rounded narrative. At first glance, this nar

rative appears to combine both historical and theoretical approaches. Yet with closer read

ing, it appears rather that the book is closely connected to the Sovietological research

tradition and that the sociological approach is used to understand ideology, rather than

the sociology of science. As a result, the Tartu school takes on the veneer, not of a com

munity, but of an institution. Waldstein himself explains his approach with reference to

intellectual capital: "I am talking specifically about the idea that the Soviet intellectual elite was not merely a victim of the Communist regime but also a privileged status group within

Soviet society" (186). The Sovietological approach to the Tartu school is clearly fruitful for understanding

the general logic and conditions of the development of science in the Soviet Union. And

the Tartu school was unavoidably a part of this science. This connection is further empha sized by the periodization of the history of the Tartu school in Waldstein's book: the Tartu

Moscow School (1964-1974), the Tartu School as Lotman's school (1975-1986), politics and the academic intelligentsia during perestroika (1986-1991). And indeed, Waldstein's

book is an essential handbook and an abundant source of data for any researcher inter

ested in the Tartu school or the history of the humanities in the Soviet Union. On the

other hand, however, such an approach does not allow one to sufficiently appreciate the

nature of scientific creativity in the Tartu school, its innovative content, and its topical

ity for the humanities today. Unfortunately noticeable gaps appear in the reading of this otherwise highly erudite author, especially for understanding the nature of this science.

Especially unfortunate is the absence of papers written by Karl Eimermacher, the founder of the Lotman Institute in Bochum, as he was not just the first to publish Lotman's work in

the west, but also one of the first to interpret him. This reviewer, too, feels it unfortunate that his paper "Tartu School as School" has gone unnoticed by Waldstein and that the

sociology of science concept "invisible college" employed there has not been compared with Waldstein's own concept of "parallel science" (40-41). The Empire of Signs, referred to in the title of the book, is closely connected to the concept of parallel science as well. The book makes separate note of Lotman's Empire of Signs, the Tartu Empire of Signs, and

the Soviet Empire of Signs, all of which makes the school come across as a deductive one.

This generalization tends to overshadow the fact that the Tartu school is based on ad hoc

theories and does not attempt to introduce a unitary semiotic doctrine.

For Waldstein, it is important to cast the Tartu school against the background of west ern humanities and to study its reception in the west. Such an approach is relevant from

the perspective of both history and theory. Namely, a comparison of the east and the west

brings into prominence the connection between theory and its object of research, and the impact of the specificity of Russian (and to a lesser extent, Soviet Russian) culture on

theory, something that is constantly emphasized in the programmatic texts of the Tartu school. This is one side of ad hoc science?theory rises out of the specificity of the object of research. The other side of ad hoc science is substantial subjectivity. Many different

theoretical and individual approaches can be generated from the same object of research,

This content downloaded from 157.92.4.12 on Sat, 12 Apr 2014 14:13:00 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

518 Slavic Review

and the richness of the Tartu school does in fact lie in the diversity of such approaches. Herein, too, lies a program for further study of the Tartu school?to establish an overview

of different individual theories and to arrive, by comparing and generalizing them, at the

school's theoretical history. Social history is an important step toward this theoretical history, and without the

social background provided by Waldstein it would be difficult to understand the nature of the school. And it is this fact that makes his book highly relevant for the scientific endeavor.

Peeter Torop

University of Tartu, Estonia

Sovetskoe nizhnee bel'e: Mezhdu ideologiei ipovsednevnost'iu. By Ol'ga Gurova. Moscow: Novoe

literaturnoe obozrenie, 2008. 287 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustra

tions. Photographs. Hard bound.

Until very recently, the study of clothing was the purview of two academic disciplines in the Soviet Union and Russia: European clothing was part of the decorative arts, while anthro

pologists undertook the study of ethnic dress. These scholars produced an impressive lit

erature devoted to a deep analysis of individual items of clothing or outfits, focusing their

analysis on how the clothing was made and the contexts in which it was worn. Most of this

scholarship focused on ethnic dress with little written about the clothing of the nobility or

the middle classes. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the freeing of academic

disciplines from the heavy hand of Soviet Marxism have brought about important changes for the study of dress, however. First, there was a renewed interest in high fashion and

glamour?both past and present trends. And, at the same time, Russians academics were

now free to use new methodologies to explore areas that had been excluded from the

mainstream of Soviet scholarship.

Ol'ga Gurova's new work represents this new generation of Russian scholarship on

clothing. A sociologist, Gurova is a practitioner of cultural studies. Indeed, she was in

spired to undertake her study by a museum exhibition that originated in St. Petersburg in 2000-2001 entitled, "The Memory of the Body: Underwear in the Soviet Epoch." This

exhibit coupled with her own reading of western scholarship on the Soviet Union and the

major cultural theorists of our time (Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, and others) encouraged her to write on a subject that few others have attempted.

As her subtitle suggests, Gurova's purpose is to explore how government ideology in

fluenced private life and how ordinary people adapted to the social and cultural context in

which they found themselves. The lens through which she explores these complicated so

cial processes is underwear. Gurova begins with a discussion of the official Soviet discourse

of the body and its visual representation of underwear in mass culture. She argues for

three distinct periods: the healthy body (1917-1920s), the cultured body (1930-1940s), and the body of personal taste (1950-1980s). In the next section Gurova analyzes the de

sign, production, and distribution of underwear. In her final section, she writes a "cultural

biography" of underwear?how underwear reflected social reality, depending upon age,

gender, location, and relationship to the government; how underwear operated in public and in private; and how underwear was linked to the emotional life of Soviet citizens. To

support her arguments, Gurova uses prescriptive texts dealing with hygiene and the art

of dressing as well as autobiographies and literary texts, visual materials including photo

graphs and magazine illustrations, and finally, twenty interviews with individuals from dif

fering backgrounds conducted in 2001.

This is an ambitious book. Using primarily western cultural theory, Gurova attempts to retell Soviet cultural history by showing how Soviet ideological constructs shaped and interacted with the history of a material object. Her choice of underwear is quite inspired as it allows us to understand in a new way how Soviet ideology affected ordinary people on

the most intimate level. Gurova argues that Soviet underwear in the 1920s was intended to

emphasize proper hygiene and athleticism, not sexuality and sensuality, thereby expung

This content downloaded from 157.92.4.12 on Sat, 12 Apr 2014 14:13:00 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions