Peeter Torop

The Tartu‒Moscow School accepted as its professional attitude to reconstruct the tradition and connect itself to the forgotten or repressed cultural-scientific achievements of the period of the first decades of the 20th century. One mission of Lotman as one of the leaders of the Tartu-Moscow School was knowing and mediating forgotten heritage. In the situation of censorship many contacts between Lotman and Russian theory were not visible. Thus, the synthesis of Lotman, Tynianov, Bakhtin, Vygotsky, Eisenstein and others, in an implicit dialogue, can be the basis for the formation of the next stage of semiotics of culture. Finally, Tynjanov's understanding of literary and cultural dynamics, Lotman's semiotic theory of text and his thoughts about a model of space as one of the primary languages of culture, and Bakhtin's theory of chronotope form this theoretical complex that can give new possibilities for developing both, theoretical and practical principles of cultural and...

The concept of translation is redefined in a way that allows us to apply it to sign processes in non-humans. An approach to biology that makes organisms understandable via translation technology which is able to transmit the life of a sign system, the meaning of a biotext, without destroying it, is an aim for any biologist. Biotranslation, as distinct from eutranslation, occurs as a general process in message transfer between the Umwelten of organisms, including both intraspecific and in some cases also interspecific translation. Defining translation as transmission between Umwelten generalizes the notion of translation as transmission between languages. Since biological texts differ from human texts particularly at the level of syntactic elements, present to a lesser extent in the former, the concept of prosyntax is introduced for biological situations. Dank der Übernahme fremder Motive gestaltet sich der Körper eines jeden Subjektes zu einem Bedeutungsempfänger jener Bedeutungsträ...

The most common difficulty in translation studies has traditionally been the dilemma between the historical and synchronic approaches in the analysis and description of the culture of translation. On the one hand the culture of translation might be presented as the sum of various kinds of translated texts (repertoire of culture), on the other hand it might be described as the hierarchy of the various types of translations themselves. The first approach assumes plenty of languages for such description, in the latter one suggests only one language for the same representation. A cultural critic faces the same problems. In these perspectives the translation reveals important mechanisms of the performance of culture. First of all it is the semiotic interpretation of the theory of translation, introduced by the number of scientists beginning with R. Jakobson and including U. Eco who put together interlinguistic, intra-linguistic, and inter-semiotic translations, so crucial for the further...

Since 1984 when J. Lotman’s article “On semiosphere” was published, this concept has been moving from one terminological field to another. In the disciplinary terminological field of the Tartu–Moscow School semiotics of culture, ‘semiosphere’ is connected with terms ‘language — secondary modelling system — text — culture’. From interdisciplinary terminological fields, the associations either with biosphere and noosphere, or with logosphere, are more important. As a metadisciplinary concept, semiosphere belongs to the methodology of culture studies and is associated with the concepts of holism and the part and the whole. In this context, semiosphere marks the complementarity of disciplines studying culture, the movement towards the creation of general culture studies and “understanding methodology”. On the background of the contemporary trends of science it has to be remembered that semiosphere is simultaneously an objectand a metaconcept. The dynamism of culture as a research object...

... Mimikrist liikidevahelise kommunikatsiooni kontekstis Timo Maran Mimikri analüüsimine kommunikatsiooniaktina avab uusi perspektiive mimikri-nähtuste uurimisel, ent samuti võib säärane lähtekoht avardada meie arusaamist kommunikatsioonist. ...

Peeter Torop Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu "The Tartu School as a School" The paper addresses the question in what sense the Tartu school of semiotics constituted and still constitutes a coherent research community, and in what sense it can be called a school. The author discusses especially two aspects of this question: first, the Tartu school as a trend in semiotic research, and secondly, as a semiotic doctrine. The leading role of Yuri Lotman, the evolution of his thought, and his influence on the school during his lifetime and after his death are exposed as well as the contribution and impact of the school abroad.

The semiospherical approach to semiotics and especially to semiotics of culture entails the need of juxtaposing several terminological fields. Among the most important, the fields of textuality, chronotopicality, and multimodality or multimediality should be listed. Textuality in this paper denotes a general principle with the help of which it is possible to observe and to interpret different aspects of the workings of culture. Textuality combines in itself text as a well-defined artefact and textualization as an abstraction (presentation or definition as text). In culture, we can pose in principle the same questions both to a concrete and to an abstract text, although an abstract text is only an operational means for defining, with the help of textualization, a certain phenomenon in the interests of a holistic and systemic analysis. The practice of textualization in turn helps us to understand the necessity of distinguishing between articulation emerging from the textual material i...

The most common difficulty in translation studies has traditionally been the dilemma between the historical and synchronic approaches in the analysis and description of the culture of translation. On the one hand the culture of translation might be presented as the sum of various kinds of translated texts (repertoire of culture), on the other hand it might be described as the hierarchy of the various types of translations themselves. The first approach assumes plenty of languages for such description, in the latter one suggests only one language for the same representation. A cultural critic faces the same problems. In these perspectives the translation reveals important mechanisms of the performance of culture. First of all it is the semiotic interpretation of the theory of translation, introduced by the number of scientists beginning with R. Jakobson and including U. Eco who put together interlinguistic, intra-linguistic, and inter-semiotic translations, so crucial for the further...

Kultuuripärandi säilimine kultuurimälus, selle osalus kultuuriidentiteedi väärtustamises ja kultuuri kestlikkuse tagamises sõltub tema meelespidamise viisidest. Tänapäeval on nendeks viisideks transmeedialisus ja digitaalne lugemine. Pärandi vahendajatena ilmuvad raamatute kõrvale digitaalsed platvormid. Nende eesmärk on ühtlasi kultiveerida uusi kirjaoskusi, mis ei põhine üksnes verbaalsel emakeelel, sest kultuuris osalemine eeldab üha enam ka pildiliste ja helilis-pildiliste märgisüsteemide valdamist nii tõlgendamises kui eneseväljenduses. Artikkel põhineb TÜ transmeedia uurimisrühma kogemusel (humanitaar)hariduslike platvormide loomisel, tuues selle pinnalt välja mõned digitaalses keskkonnas eriti selgelt esile tulevad kultuurisemiootilised printsiibid.   Traditionally, books have been considered as one of the most valuable elements of culture (Kroó 2019, Torop 2019). Mediating unique literary/artistic texts, they also appear as models of culture. The book as a model of culture r...

Artikkel on pühendatud tõlketeooriat ja tõlkelugu ühendavale ideoloogia mõistele. Jälgitud on ideoloogia mõistevälja dünaamikat 21. sajandi tõlketeoorias ja tõlkeloos. Vaatluse all on tõlketeaduslikes käsiraamatutes loodud terminiväljade muutumist ideoloogia mõiste hägustumisest uute mõistete juurutamiseni. Artikkel osutab olukorrale tõlketeaduses, kus tõlketeoreetiline kirevus on nii suur, et tõlkeloolastel on raske nii metodoloogilist kui praktilist tuge leida. Samas osutab tõlketeooria areng üldisele mõttelaadi dünaamikale tõlkekultuuriga seoses ja selles toimuvaid protsesse on võimalik tõlkeloo analüüsimeetodite täiustamisel ära kasutada.   If there is a wish to understand translation, it is necessary to consider all its aspects also from the point of view of ideology. The process of translation should be seen as a complex of interlinguistic, intralinguistic, and intersemiotic translations, on the one hand, and as a complex of linguistic, cultural, economic, and ideological acti...

RESUMO A Escola de Tártu-Moscou aceitou, como atitude profissional, reconstruir a tradição e ligar-se com as realizações - esquecidas ou reprimidas cultural e cientificamente - das primeiras décadas do séc. XX. Uma missão de Lotman como um de seus líderes foi conhecer e mediar a herança esquecida. Na situação de censura muitos contatos entre Lotman e a teoria russa não estavam visíveis. Dessa forma, a síntese de Lotman, Tynianov, Bakhtin, Vygotsky, Eisenstein e outros, num intenso diálogo implícito, pode ser a base para a formação da próxima etapa da semiótica da cultura. Enfim, a compreensão de Tynianov acerca da dinâmica literária e cultural, a teoria semiótica lotmaniana de texto e seus pensamentos sobre um modelo de espaço como uma das linguagens primárias da cultura, e a teoria bakhtiniana do cronotopo formam um complexo teórico que pode oferecer novas possibilidades para o desenvolvimento tanto dos princípios culturais teóricos e práticos quanto da análise textual.

IF ONE WANTS to understand translation, it is necessary to look at all its aspects from the psychological to the ideological. And it is necessary to see the process of translation, on the one hand, as a complex of interlinguistic, intralinguistic, and intersemiotic translations, and on the other hand, as a complex of linguistic, cultural, economic, and ideological activity. Translators work at the boundaries of languages, cultures, and societies. They position themselves between the poles of specificity and adaptation in accordance with the strategies of their translational behaviour. They either preserve the otherness of the other or they transform the other into self. By the same token, they cease to be simple mediators, because in a semiotic sense they are capable of generating new languages for the description of a foreign language, text, or culture, and of renewing a culture or of having an influence on the dialogic capacity of a culture with other cultures as well as with itself. In this way, translators work not only with natural languages but also with metalanguages, languages of description. One of the missions of the translator is to increase the receptivity and dialogic capability of a culture, and through these also the internal variety of that culture. As mediators between languages, translators are important creators of new metalanguages. The status of translation and the translator have changed from one historical era to the next, and at the beginning of the 21st century we are confronting the need for a complex understanding of them both. At the core of this complex understanding is the universality of translation. The universality of translation comes from its connections with thought processes. As Yurii Lotman affirms, "the elementary act of thinking is translation" (Lotman 2000:143). And he stresses in the same place that "the elementary mechanism of translating is dialogue" (Lotman 2000:143). The irreducibility of dialogue to mere communication in a language common to the dialogue's participants is very important. For Lotman everything begins with the need for dialogue: "... the need for dialogue, the dialogic situation, precedes both real dialogue and even the existence of a language in which to conduct it" (Lotman 2000:143-144). The need for dialogue can be viewed either at the level of a comprehensive theoretical understanding or at the level of the deep-seated mechanism of individual behavior. The need for dialogue is tied in a complementary way both to the needs of an audience, which can be studied in the theory of mass communication (McQuail 2000), and to various personal needs (self-understanding, enjoyment, escapism) and social needs (knowledge about the world, self-confidence, stability, self-esteem, the strengthening of connections with family and friends) in the theory of communication (Fiske 2000:20). Any form of identity also depends on the need for dialogue. At the core of personal, national, or social identity is recognition of the boundary between self and other. The boundary not only divides but also unites and thus participates in dialogic processes. To a large extent dialogue within the boundaries depends on dialogue at the boundaries. Translators work at the boundaries of languages, cultures, and societies. They position themselves between the poles of specificity and adaptation in accordance with the strategies of their translational behaviour. They either preserve the otherness of the other or they transform the other into self. By the same token, they cease to be simple mediators, because in a semiotic sense they are capable of generating new languages for the description of a foreign language, text, or culture, and of renewing a culture or of having an influence on the dialogic capacity of a culture with other cultures as well as with itself. In this way, translators work not only with natural languages but also with metalanguages, languages of description. …

Any analysis of translation and culture can only begin by providing definitions for both concepts. Presumably, both concepts can be intuitively grasped by most readers of this article. Nevertheless, providing unambiguous definitions for them is well-nigh impossible. In the humanities and social sciences, this situation is frequent: rigorous scientific study is often conducted without first providing clear definitions for core concepts. This is in fact a general feature of the various methodologies of the disciplines. The language that disciplines use to mediate their results--metalanguage--develops alongside the disciplines and their research methods. Metalanguages can be treated as univocal only operationally, by tailoring them specifically for concrete research. Translation and culture in unison form a conceptual pair that brings together different disciplines, mainly those of culture studies and philology. Contacts between these disciplines have an impact on how both translation and culture are defined. Disciplines associated with anthropology are essential for culture studies, and those connected to translation studies are important for philology, and the two are methodologically combined, balanced and generalized by cultural semiotics and its sub-discipline, the semiotics of translation. The proliferation of definitions of culture and their frequent disparity clearly indicate that the principles of defining culture are numerous and sometimes very different. Numerous indeed, as we still cannot speak of the science of culture as a single discipline. The second reason why we still lack a uniform discipline of science of culture is the heterogeneity of culture itself. Culture, as the cause of all its definitions, is such a complex object of study that it is near impossible to list and rank all culture-related disciplines by their importance. Methodologist P. Feyerabend (1993) uses the notion of epistemological anarchism to describe the randomness and lack of hierarchy in the choice of research methods, i.e. all disciplines and all methods are equally valid for the study of culture and we have no reason to regard one as better than the other. It is not even really possible, since even the strictest scientific analysis is but one approach to culture, which cannot in any case rule out the others. Thus, the study of one and the same culture gives rise to numerous and different views and snapshots of that culture, and the analysis of culture as a fragmented object of study becomes the analysis of cultures. Essentially, we can speak of two fundamental pluralities--the plurality of the scientific research methods is complementary to the plurality of culture as a complex object of study. However, the notions of culture that are born out of different disciplines and viewpoints can hamper the comprehensive understanding of culture, since the synthesis or complementary linking of those notions is nearly utopic, as it would be to be aware of all the qualities of culture: Culture is the product of interacting human minds, and hence a science of culture will be a science of the most complex phenomenon on Earth. It will also be a science that must be built on interdisciplinary foundations including genetics, neuroscience, individual development, ecology and evolutionary biology, psychology and anthropology. In other words, a complete explanation of culture, if such a thing is ever possible, is going to comprise a synthesis of all human science. Such a synthesis poses significant conceptual and methodological problems, but also difficulties of another kind for those contributing to this science. Scholars from different disciplines are going to have to be tolerant of one another, open to ideas from other areas of knowledge. (Plotkin 2001: 91) Thus, there are two discernible tendencies in culture-studying disciplines. On one hand, the scholars try to ascertain what exactly is being studied and how it is being studied when a particular approach is applied; and what can possibly be the proper field of study for a general science of culture. …

In his studies of culture, Juri Lotman implicitly expressed several ideas that have been rendered explicit by the contemporary mediasphere. The aim of the current article is to explicate a link between Lotmanian cultural semiotics and transmediality as one of today’s more innovative communicative practices. Transmediality is hereby located in the context of cultural autocommunication as a mechanism serving both creative and mnemonic functions. Thus, the notion is related not only to the questions of textual construction but, even more importantly, to text’s processual existence in culture in diverse media languages and discourses over time. By explaining the roots and developments of Lotman’s concept of autocommunicativity, which is central to his understanding of culture as a whole, the article simultaneously indicates the areas of his cultural semiotic studies that we consider relevant and fruitful for contemporary research into transmediality.

During the ownership reforms in Estonia as in all the Baltic States a lot of historical properties as the basic objects of restitution were returned to the former owners. The appraisal of the value of historical properties is very important in the context of the clarification of their value for owners and for the all society as well. In addition to globalization and the started integration with EU, the understanding of the values of the historical properties should be harmonized with their common understanding in Europe. (Basically on the level of standards, Euro codes, etc.) Estonia as the other transitional countries is facing the similar problems like: i) the legal environment changes, ii) the ownership reforms are not jet finished, iii) the absence of enough experience on the field of appraisal of historical properties iv) the different views in common understanding to the value of property and their sustainability and iv) the lack of the high credit professionals who are well educated in the both considered areas: in the buildings heritage questions and in the real estate appraisal as well - the sustainable approach. This all pick up point of the paradigm that includes the research of the market accept of the expenses that were done for heritage and renovation works of the properties and an answer to the question: Should they as a different semiotic signs and marks load the aspect of the sustainability and if they should, how the society is understanding and valuing these approach.

Abstract. The semiospherical approach to semiotics and especially to semiotics of culture entails the need of juxtaposing several terminological fields. Among the most important, the fields of textuality, chronotopicality, and multimodality or multimediality should be listed. Textuality ...

Abstract. The most common difficulty in translation studies has traditionally been the dilemma between the historical and synchronic approaches in the analysis and description of the culture of translation. On the one hand the culture of translation might be presented as the sum of ...

The Tartu-Moscow School accepted as its professional attitude to reconstruct the tradition and connect itself to the forgotten or repressed cultural-scientific achievements of the period of the first decades of the 20th century. One mission of Lotman as one of the leaders of the Tartu-Moscow School was knowing and mediating forgotten heritage. In the situation of censorship many contacts between Lotman and Russian theory were not visible. Thus, the synthesis of Lotman, Tynianov, Bakhtin, Vygotsky, Eisenstein and others, in an implicit dialogue, can be the basis for the formation of the next stage of semiotics of culture. Finally, Tynjanov's understanding of literary and cultural dynamics, Lotman's semiotic theory of text and his thoughts about a model of space as one of the primary languages of culture, and Bakhtin's theory of chronotope form this theoretical complex that can give new possibilities for developing both, theoretical and practical principles of cultural and textual analysis. RESUMO A Escola de Tártu-Moscou aceitou, como atitude profissional, reconstruir a tradição e ligar-se com as realizações-esquecidas ou reprimidas cultural e cientificamente-das primeiras décadas do séc. XX. Uma missão de Lotman como um de seus líderes foi conhecer e mediar a herança esquecida. Na situação de censura muitos contatos entre Lotman e a teoria russa não estavam visíveis. Dessa forma, a síntese de Lotman, Tynianov, Bakhtin, Vygotsky, Eisenstein e outros, num intenso diálogo implícito, pode ser a base para a formação da próxima etapa da semiótica da cultura. Enfim, a compreensão de Tynianov acerca da dinâmica literária e cultural, a teoria semiótica lotmaniana de texto e seus pensamentos sobre um modelo de espaço como uma das linguagens primárias da cultura, e a teoria bakhtiniana do cronotopo formam um complexo teórico que pode oferecer novas possibilidades para o desenvolvimento tanto dos princípios culturais teóricos e práticos quanto da análise textual.

ПЕЭТЕР ТОРОП (Тарту, Тартуский университет) О новом статусе текста В истории переводоведения важным новшеством было внедрение понятия динамической эквивалентности для расширения рамок переводимости. Динамическая эквивалентность предполагает пе-ревод не столько формальных качеств текста, сколько реакцию чи-тателей подлинника на текст. Это привело и к новому отношению к подлиннику. Он перестал быть лишь текстом, читаемым перевод-чиком, и превратился в текст, прочитанный читателями подлин-ника. Задачей переводчика стало восстановление усредненного прочтения текста и поиск средств для передачи читательских реак-ций на текст. В период новых медиа такая метакоммуникативная стратегия перевода трансформируется все больше в интер-и транс-медийную стратегию перевода. Поэтому надо начать рассуждение о новом статусе перевода с динамики статуса текста. Окружающая литературу культурная среда быстро меняется, и существование литературы уже нельзя отделить от развития ин-тернета и новых медиа. Изначально вербальному тексту все чаще сопутствуют его «переводы» на «язык» разных медиа. То же со-держание может быть выражено двумя способами. Во-первых, оно * Статья написана в рамках проекта IUT 34-30 "Ideology of Translation and Translation of Ideology: Mechanisms of Cultural Dynamics under the Russian Empire and Soviet Power in Estonia in the 19th-20th Centuries".

The paper examines the problem of textual/cultural dynamics linked to the issue of semiotic literariness, to be further investigated by the authors in later papers on literary semiotics. This scientific project aims to get closer to reaching an adequate disciplinary identification for semiotics of literature and a relatively precise definition of the status of this field in relation to semiotics of culture. The first step for the project is to reveal the interrelationhip between text and culture using the notion of dynamics that can be reconstructed from a historical perspective through some essential components of Formalist and Structuralist theory (Tynyanov's 'function' , Jakobson's 'dominant') and also works by Lotman (the 'text–culture' relationship) and Bakhtin ('dialogue'). The notions of inclusiveness/integration, distancing and hierarchization, leading to transformation, are interpreted in some detail in the context of these theories. On these grounds, three basic categories of the analysability of textual/cultural dynamics are set up with the indication of further aspects of the dynamic function: (1) mediation; (2) transposition; (3) temporality–spatiality. The suggested classification and the implied conceptual segmentation are expected to contribute to a synthesis between " Structuralist " and Peircean theoretical and methodological orientations in semiotic literary studies. This also reveals the need for a coexistence of approaches (a) moving from particular cultural fields (literary culture tradition) towards general semiotics of culture, and (b) returning from universal transfield concepts to literary

The interpretation of cultural history in the context of cultural semiotics, especially interpretation of semiotics of cultural history as a semiotics of culture, and semiotics of culture as a semiotics of cultural history, gives us, first, a deeper understanding of the analysability of cultural history and, at the same time, of the importance of history and different aspects of temporality for the semiotics of culture. Second, the history of the semiotics of culture, especially the semiotics of culture of the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics, is an organic part of cultural history, while the self-presentation of the school via establishing explicit and implicit contacts with the heritage of Russian theory (the Formalist School, the Bakhtin circle, Vygotskij, Eisenstein etc) was already a semiotic activity and an object of the semiotics of cultural history. Third, the main research object of semiotics of culture is the hierarchy of the sign systems of culture and the existent as well as historical correlations between these sign systems. Such conceptualization of the research object of semiotics of culture turns the latter into a semiotics of cultural history. Emphasizing the semiotic aspect of cultural history can support the development of semiotics of culture in two ways. First, semiotics of culture has the potential of conducting more in-depth research of texts as mediators between the audience and the cultural tradition. Second, semiotics of culture as a semiotics of cultural history can be methodologically used for establishing a new (chronotopical) theory of culture.

A key concept for cultural semiotics is text. At the same time the text is simultaneously an ontological and an epistemic notion. Text is what we understand in culture and it is through the text that we understand something of culture. Yuri Lotman calls the association of the structural model of natural language and space the primordial semiotic dualism (Lotman 1978: 6). Against this background it is possible to follow the evolution of the notion of text in his works. At first, text is a space in which a language of the material of a text becomes manifest and the structure of material becomes the structure of a text. In the case of verbal texts it is natural that levels of a language from phonemes to sentences should also turn into levels of a text. However, the logic of the disjunction of language is not suitable for the treatment of film or painting as text. In spite of the fact that cultural semiotics knows the time when linguistic units from phonemes to words and sentences were searched from very diverse branches of art, this uni-versalisation of the linguistic treatment did not prove productive. A more novel step was connecting the notion of text with polylinguism or pol-ysystematism. is was accompanied by the term of the secondary modelling systems which, on the one hand, meant the intertwining of the linguistic and stylistic or poetic aspects. On the other hand it implied the addition of the compositional or narrative aspect. e Estonian language, the language of romanticism, genre, author on the one hand, and the compositional or narrative structure of a work on the other. In the case of nonverbal texts, the more abstract segmentation into the continual and the discrete systems of language became important. Hereby it is important that a text with the continual dominant creates its meaning through the whole, or in the deductive way, and a text with a discrete dominant through its elements, or in the inductive manner. At the same time, a general principle is that continuality and discreteness are two co-existing parameters.

If one wants to understand translation, it is necessary to look at all its aspects from the psychological to the ideological. And it is necessary to see the process of translation, on the one hand, as a complex of interlinguistic, intralinguistic, and intersemiotic translations, and on the other hand, as a complex of linguistic, cultural, economic, and ideological activities. Translators work at the boundaries of languages, cultures, and societies. They position themselves between the poles of specificity and adaptation in accordance with the strategies of their translational behaviour. They either preserve the otherness of the other or they transform the other into self. By the same token, they cease to be simple mediators, because in a semiotic sense they are capable of generating new languages for the description of a foreign language, text, or culture, and of renewing a culture or of having an influence on the dialogic capacity of a culture with other cultures as well as with itself. In this way, translators work not only with natural languages but also with metalanguages, languages of description. One of the missions of the translator is to increase the receptivity and dialogic capability of a culture, and through these also the internal variety of that culture. As mediators between languages, translators are important creators of new metalanguages. The status of translation and the translator have changed from one historical era to the next, and at the beginning of the 21st century we are confronting the need for a complex understanding of both of them. At the core of this complex understanding is the universality of translation. The universality of translation comes from its connections with thought processes. As Juri Lotman affirms, " the elementary act of thinking is translation " (Lotman 2000: 143). And he proceeds to emphasise that " the elementary mechanism of translating is dialogue "

For each culture-studying discipline, the problem of culture's analysability stems from disciplinary identity. One half of analysability consists of the culture's attitude and the ability of the discipline's methods of description and analysis to render the culture analysable. The other half of analysability is shaped by the discipline's own adaptation to the characteristics of culture as the object of study and the development of a suitable descriptive language. The ontologisation and epistemologisation of culture as the subject of analysis is present in each culture-studying discipline or discipline complex. Culture analysts are therefore scholars with double responsibilities. Their professionalism is measured on the basis of their analytical capability and the ability to construct (imagine, define) the object of study. The analytical capability and the ability to construct the object of study also determine the parameters of analysability. Be the analyst an anthropologist or a culture semiotician, the analysability of culture depends on how the analyst chooses to conduct the dialogue between him/herself and his/her object of study. The proliferation of definitions of culture and their frequent disparity clearly indicate that the principles of defining culture are numerous and sometimes very different. Numerous indeed, as we still cannot speak of the science of culture as a single discipline. The second reason why we still lack a uniform discipline of science of culture is the heterogeneity of culture itself. Culture, as the cause of all its definitions, is such a complex object of study that it is near impossible to list and rank all culture-related disciplines by their importance. Methodologist P. Feyerabend (1993) uses the notion of epistemolo-gical anarchism to describe the randomness and lack of hierarchy in

The interpretation of cultural history in the context of cultural semiotics, especially interpretation of semiotics of cultural history as a semiotics of culture, and semiotics of culture as a semiotics of cultural history, gives us, first, a deeper understanding of the analysability of cultural history and, at the same time, of the importance of history and different aspects of temporality for the semiotics of culture. Second, the history of the semiotics of culture, especially the semiotics of culture of the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics, is an organic part of cultural history, while the self-presentation of the school via establishing explicit and implicit contacts with the heritage of Russian theory (the Formalist School, the Bakhtin circle, Vygotskij, Eisenstein etc) was already a semiotic activity and an object of the semiotics of cultural history. Third, the main research object of semiotics of culture is the hierarchy of the sign systems of culture and the existent as well as historical correlations between these sign systems. Such conceptualization of the research object of semiotics of culture turns the latter into a semiotics of cultural history. Emphasizing the semiotic aspect of cultural history can support the development of semiotics of culture in two ways. First, semiotics of culture has the potential of conducting more in-depth research of texts as mediators between the audience and the cultural tradition. Second, semiotics of culture as a semiotics of cultural history can be methodologically used for establishing a new (chronotopical) theory of culture.