Juri Lotman as a scholar and mentor: academic domesticity in action

Abstract This article examines Juri Lotman’s scholarly and pedagogical practice as an integrated system in which teaching, mentorship, research, and publishing strategies constituted a single cultural mechanism structured by what may be termed academic domesticity (an equivalent of Boris Eikhenbaum’s concept of “literary domesticity”): the deliberate relocation of scholarly production into semi-private—non-institutional or trans-institutional—spaces. Mobilizing Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and Robert K. Merton’s notion of the scientific microenvironment , the article analyzes how Lotman cultivated specific dispositions, norms, and modes of intellectual interaction that enabled sustained creativity amid institutional constraints and political pressure. These practices fostered a distinctive model of knowledge generation and transmission, in which oral pedagogy, collective discussion, and an iterative reworking of lecture material played a central role. By reconstructing the interrelationship between Lotman’s intellectual biography, the formation and transformation of the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics, and the institutional history of teaching Russian literature at the University of Tartu in the late Soviet period, the article situates his work within broader debates on academic authority, the transmission of knowledge in scholarship and higher education, and the social conditions of theory production in the humanities. Alongside historical sources, the analysis incorporates the author’s own experience as a student in Tartu in the 1980s and early 1990s.