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Introduction to Semiotics of Cultures, 2010
Juri Lotman – Universe of the Mind
Chapter 7
Duality of Symbols
Vesa Matteo Piludu
University of Helsinki
Symbols: otherness and archaistic features
 Symbols are always connected to signs of other orders or languages
 The content of symbols are generally highly valued in culture
 A symbol is for example a religious sign used in a non-religious
situation as art: novels or painting
 There is always something archaic in symbols
 Sometimes symbols go back to pre-literate or oral cultures (fairy
tales)
Symbols
 Symbols preserves long and relevant texts in a condensed form
(image, icon)
The vertical cut
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A symbol never belongs to one synchronic section of a culture
It always cuts across that section vertically
coming from the past
And passing on into the future
 A symbol’s memory is always more ancient than the memory of its
non symbolic text content
Texts: heterogeneous
 Every texts of a culture is heterogeneous, it form a complex plurality
of voices, coming from different ages and times
 Symbols, as powerful symbols, as condensed elements of cultural
memory, can transfer texts, plots outlines, from one level of
memory to another
 The symbols activated cultural memory
 The symbols prevent the disintegration of culture in isolated layers
(no communication between classicism and romanticism)
Duality of Symbols
 Symbols reveals their duality
 By one hand the symbol is conservative, it has elements of
repeatability and invariance
 The symbol is a seed, it exists before the text, it comes from the
depths of cultural memory
 The symbol is like an emissary from other cultural epochs
 A reminder of the ancient foundation of a specific culture
 To the other side
 A symbol actively correlates with the cultural context of the text,
transform it and is transformed by it
 So there are many variant of the same symbol, that could have
different meaning in different texts of different ages or places
Tree possibilities
 The cultural context is strong, able to change the meaning of ancient
symbols
 The symbol is so strong that it’s able to change the cultural context
 The symbols and the contexts are equally strong and they are
changing each others in a complex and dynamic way
The most active symbols
 The most historically active symbols have a great number of variants
in texts of different epochs and cultures
The texts: multidimensionality
 Are often multidimensional, containing symbols from different times
 Their expression could be open, profane
 But the content of their symbols could be referred to a more secret,
unclear or even sacred domain dedicated to only a certain group of
receivers, able to read “between the lines”
 Romantic dream: art express the inexpressible (sacred, passion)
Link between symbol and texts
 The link that the writer, artist or message sender established
between a symbol and a certain text, never exhaust all the semantic
valence (=possible meanings) of the symbol
 The link establishes only one possible variation
 Original artists or communicator could also reverse the meaning of
symbols and establish unexpected relationships
Writers as “reader” and interpreters of symbols
 Dostoevsky was an assiduous reader of newspapers and collector
of incidents
 He considered the role of the writer similar to the doctor’s one: a
decoder of (social) symptoms, symbols presents in the news
 Original medical “semiotics”: symptomology
 Also for Turgenev the writer was a recorder of social processes
 And every character is a symbol, representative of something
Dostoevsky's plans for a “poem” called Emperor
 There are some notes about the plot
 Mirovich tries to persuade a young man who had grown up in total
isolation and who know nothing of temptation of life to follow him
 “He shows him the world, from the loft (the Neva and so on) …
He shows him God’s world. “it’s all yours if you want it. Let’s
go!”
 What symbol?
Emperor and Gospel
 The temptation of Jesus, when he is lifted to a high place (a
mountain, the roof of the temple), the Devil shows the world lying at
his feet
 In Dostoevsky the high place is the loft of the prison tower, and the
character have a demonic role in a urban space (St. Petersburg)
 Clear gospel symbolism
Dostoevsky’s Idots
 More complicate symbolism
 Criminal trials as symptoms and symbols
 But the symbolism is more subtitle: there is a mystery and is
expressed the impossibility to express thing precisely, as in a
documentary
 The reality is interpreted not with realism but as a metaphorical plot,
full of symbols that should be interpreted
 The word doesn’t describe things, but allude to more deep concepts
Dostoevsky’s Idots
Hyppolite’s inexpressible symbolism
 Hyppolite
 In every idea of genius or in every new human idea, or, more simply
still, in every serious human idea born in anyone’s brain, there is
something that cannot possibly conveyed to others, thought you
wrote volumes about it and spent thirty-five years in explaining your
idea;
 Something will always be left that will obstinately refuse to
emerge from your head
Idiots
and romantic symbolism
 In Hyppolite’s there is a clear reference to the romantic concept
of the inexpressible truth
 The language and the meaning are always inadeguate
 The truth could be understood only by approximation, allusions
by the interpretation of symbols
Baratynsky
from Complete Poetry
 The word for Baratynsky
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Alien to plain meaning
For me is a symbol
Of Feelings for which
I have not found expression in languages
Idiots
 Also the characters are symbols (name, identifying marks)
 According to Lotman
 Nastasya Filipovna
 is a character based on the La Dame aux Camélias
 And also to Susanna and the elders
 Rembrandt in the Dresden Gallery, visited by Dostoevsky
La Dame aux Camélias
 novel by Alexandre Dumas
 Adapted for stages, films, ballets
 "woman with a past"
 Influenced Verdi’s Traviata
Lady with the Camelias
Mucha’s version
Italian film (Mauro Bolognini)
Ballet
Nastasya Filipovna
Tragic heroine in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel The Idiot.
 daughter of an aristocrat with no money
 still a young child, falls under the "protection" of a rich rogue named
Totski.
 she had suitable private education
 As she grows older, Totski visits her only occasionally on the estate
where he has left her
 it seems likely that during this time Nastasya was coerced into the
position of a kept woman by Totski
 Totski married another woman and hopes to satisfy her by giving her
an apartment in St. Petersburg
Following adventures
 Tragic finale, after various adventures with Prince Myshkin and
Rogozhin
 Nastasya, refuses Myshkin, claiming that she cannot 'ruin him,' and
tells the company that she will marry Rogozhin.
 Myshkin tries again to save her from the fate that she feels she
deserves, telling her:
 "You're so awfully unhappy that you really think you are
yourself to blame... I- I shall respect you all my life, Nastasya
Filippovna."
Nastasya Filippovna:
A Woman Scorned by Nicola Smith
 From the beginning of Part One, Nastasya Filippovna appears to be
a fascinating, wild creature who is rebelling against the "natural”
role of woman for her time.
 The shock and scandal that seems to surround her exploits suggests
that her actions are not within the confines of her "role".
 However, the more we come to know her the more we see that she
has been exploited by society of the time and the men that
surround her and desire to possess her.
 Unable to stand up under the destructive forces that surrounded her,
the strongest, most promising character was reduced to insanity by
Dostoyevsky. It seems that he may sympathize with her situation,
given the use of word choice we have seen, and even some of the
ironic, yet sad depiction of a young girl violated.
 Filippovna must die to escape the tragic and unjust plight of a
woman scorned.
Nastasya Filippovna. Illustration for F.
Dostoyevsky’s novel “The Idiot.” 1956
1647 Rembrandt - Susanna und die beiden Alten
Susanna and the elders
Susanna and the Elders by Alessandro Allori
Susanna and the Elders by Jan van Noordt
Susanna and the Elders
by Artemisia Gentileschi
Symbol and artistic inspiration
 The symbol accumulate and organize new experience around
previous symbols and signs, it turns into a memory condenser
 Future authors could selectively combine elements of symbols (Lady
of Camelias, Susanna or Nastasya) to build up other plots (ballets,
films)
Symbol
 Can be expressed in synchronic verbal-visual forms which can be
projected onto various texts or transformed under the influence or
texts and authors
Vladimir Tatlin
Monument to the Third International
1919
Breughel the elder, 1563
Tower of Babel
Reversion of symbols
 Tower of Babel – rebellion against God (negative), peoples
divided in many languages
 Revolution as a rebellion against the Tsars, nobles, priests,
capitalists (social gods): positive
 Artist as a creative daemon: extreme individualist against the
artistic systems: positive
 Marx: The proletariat (positive, hearth) are storming heaven
(negative, capitalists)
 The value of earth and heaven is reversed
 The myth of separation of people is reverted in the union of the
people
 Incredible chain: Genesis, Breughel, Marx, Romanticims, Avant
Garde, International, Tatlin
Revertion
 The in the Tatlin case the cultural context (Soviet propaganda)
was quite strong and it changed the meaning of an ancient
symbol (tower of Babel)
Symbol as a mediator
 Mediator between the synchronicity of the text
 (the role of Tatlin’s work for Soviet propaganda)
 And the cultural memory (the strong references to Genesis and
art history)
Il quarto stato Pellizza da Valpredo 1901