Yury Lotman is a Russian literary critic, philologist, historian, culturologist, semiotician, creator of a structural and semiotics method of studying literature and culture in the Soviet science, founder of the Tartu and Moscow semiotics school.

Lotman has developed a culture semiosphere concept. He considered culture in general and literature in particular as a set of the texts having the sign and symbolical properties and various semiotics mechanisms allowing to build on semantic designs over natural language bases of primary sign systems. According to Yu. Lotman, it is necessary to understand science about the communicative signs used in the course of communication, not as a set of elementary symbols as semiotics, but as a system. Semiosphere is a result and condition of cultural development, a museum, according to Yury Mikhaylovich, where a number of ordered semiotics spaces functions: exhibits, card files, employees, exposition, etc.

"From the perspective of studying culture  only those messages exist which represent texts. It seems, all others  don't exist and  aren't taken into account during research. In this sense it is possible to say that the culture is а set of texts or а hard organised text" (Yu. Lotman).

Students Slavists also remembered works of Lotman-pushkinist. Yury Mikhaylovich often had unexpected view to many questions of Pushkin studies. For example, he considered the biography of the writer as continuation of creativity and correlated the author's life to the literary models created in his works.

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