Culture and Communication. Yuri Lotman

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      When Ivan the Terrible executed disgraced boyars not only together with their families, but with their servants—and not only their domestic servants, but their peasants and villages (or else the peasants were resettled, the villages renamed, the structures razed to the ground)—this was dictated, despite the tsar’s pathological cruelty, not by the danger they posed (as if a serf on a provincial family estate could be a danger to the tsar!) but by the notion that they were all one person, parts of the individual boyar being executed, and they, accordingly, shared responsibility with him. Such a view was evidently not unfamiliar to Stalin, who had the mentality of an Eastern tyrant.

      From a European juridical perspective, one reared on the post-Renaissance sense of an individual’s right to justice, it seemed incomprehensible that one person would suffer for someone else. As late as 1732, Lady Rondeau, the wife of the English envoy in Petersburg (and quite fond of the Russian court, and even inclined to idealize it: in her missives she extols the “sensibility” and “goodness” of Empress Anna Ioannovna, who was as crude as the lady of a provincial estate, and the “nobility” of her cruel favorite, Biron), informing her European correspondent of the Dolgorukov family’s exile, wrote: “You will perhaps wonder at the banishing of women and children, but here, when the master of a family is attacked, the whole family is involved in his ruin. …”¹³

      The very same idea of the collective (and, in the given instance, patrimonial) person, rather than the individual, underlies the blood feud, for example, where the killer’s entire extended family is seen as a responsible party. The historian S. M. Solovyov drew a convincing connection between the institution of mestnichestvo¹⁴—which in the eyes of eighteenth-century enlighteners, with their pious faith in progress, appeared only as a manifestation of “ignorance”—and the peculiar collective experience of the clan as a single individual:

      One understands that with this strong familial bond, with all family members being responsible one for the other, the import of the separate person necessarily faded before the import of the family. A person was unthinkable without the family. The famous Ivan Petrov was not thought of as one Ivan Petrov, but was thought of only as Ivan Petrov with his brothers and nephews. With such conflation of the person with his family, when the one person was elevated in the service, the entire family was elevated; with the demotion of one member of the family, the entire family was demoted.¹⁵

      Thus, for example, Matvey Pushkin, a boyar and stol′nik under Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich (seventeenth century) who belonged to the list of thirty-one families of highest nobility, refused to go on a diplomatic mission as deputy to Nadrin-Nashchokin,^vi an eminent agent of state and favorite of the tsar, though of lower nobility, preferring to go to prison and steadfastly shouldering the threat that all his property would be confiscated and he would incur the tsar’s wrath, responding with dignity, “though you may put me to death, my lord, to me Nashchokin is a young man, and not one of high birth.”¹⁶

      The space that appears as a single individual in one coding system can, in another, turn out to be a site of conflict between several semiotic subjects.

      For every message circulating within it, the capacity of semiotic space to be intersected by numerous boundaries creates a situation of multifold translations and transformations accompanied by the generation of new information, which assumes an avalanche-like character.

      The function of any boundary or film (from the membrane of a living cell to the biosphere as—following Vernadsky—a film enveloping our planet, to the boundary of the semiosphere itself) amounts to limiting penetration, to the filtration and adaptive reworking of what is external into the internal. This invariant function is realized in diverse ways on different levels. On the level of the semiosphere, it signifies the separation of the self from the other, the filtration of the external, which is assigned the status of text in a foreign language, and the translation of that text into one’s own language. In this way, external space acquires some structure.

      In cases where the semiosphere includes real-territorial features, the boundary assumes a spatial meaning in the direct sense. The isomorphism between different kinds of settlement—from ancient settlements to the ideal cities of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment—and notions about the structure of the cosmos has been frequently noted. Connected to this is how the center of construction gravitates around the most important religious and administrative buildings. It is on the periphery that the least valued social groups are settled. Those who are situated beneath the line of social value are distributed along the boundary of the outskirts; the very etymology of the Russian word predmest′e, “outskirts,” signifies pered mestom, that is, “before the city,” at its boundary line. Along a vertical orientation, this will be attics and basements and, in the modern city, the subway. If, however, the center of “normal” habitation is the apartment, then it is the stairwell or entryway that becomes the boundary space between “home” and “outside of home.” It is no accident that it is precisely these spaces that become “one’s own” for “boundary” groups—the marginalized—within society: the homeless, the addicted, the youth. Urban public space, stadiums, and cemeteries are among the boundary places. No less revealing, too, is the change in norms of acceptable behavior as one moves from the boundary of such a space toward its center.

      There are specific elements, however, that are generally situated outside. If the inner world recalls the cosmos, beyond its boundary we find chaos, the antiworld, an iconic space beyond structure that is inhabited by monsters, infernal forces, or the people connected to them. In the village, beyond the line of settlement is where the sorcerer, the miller, and (sometimes) the smith have to live, and, in the medieval city, the hangman. “Normal” space has not only spatial boundaries, but temporal ones as well. Beyond its line we find nighttime. When he is needed, people go to see the sorcerer at night. It is in anti-space that the bandit lives: his home is the forest (an anti-home), his sun is the moon (“the thief’s sunshine,” as the Russian saying goes), he speaks an anti-language, he demonstrates anti-behavior (he whistles loudly, curses indecently), he sleeps when people are working, and he robs while they’re asleep, and so forth.^vii

      The “night world” of the city is likewise situated on the border of cultural space or beyond its line. This travestied world is oriented toward anti-behavior.

      We have already paid attention to the process by which a culture’s periphery is shifted to its center and its center removed to the periphery. Even more pronounced is the movement of these contradirectional flows between the center and the “periphery of the periphery”—the boundary zone of culture. Thus, following the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, this process received a manifold, non-metaphorical realization: the poor from the suburbs moved en masse into “bourgeois apartments,” from which they evicted their former occupants or “consolidated” their space. Of course, taking the highly artistic, wrought-iron barrier that had surrounded the royal garden around the Winter Palace in Petrograd up until the Revolution and removing it to a working-class district, where it enclosed a suburban square, with the royal garden remaining entirely without a fence—“open”—this had a symbolic meaning. In the utopian plans for the socialist city of the future, which were created in abundance in the early 1920s, one often finds the notion that in the center of such a city—“where the palace and church had been”—there will be an enormous factory.

      It is in this sense that Peter I’s transferring the capital to Petersburg—to the border—was telling. Transferring the political-administrative center to a geographic boundary was simultaneously shifting the boundary into the state’s administrative-political center. And the Pan-Slavists’ subsequent plans to transfer the capital to Constantinople even shifted the center beyond all actual borders.

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