Yury Mikhailovich Lotman (1922-1993) - Russian literary critic, semiotic, culturologist . Member of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, Corresponding Member of the British Academy of Sciences, Member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences . Creator of the well-known . Tartu Semiotic School and founder of a whole direction in literary studies at the University of Tartu in Estonia . Most of Lotman's life is connected with Tartu, where he later became the head of the Department of Russian Literature at the University of Tartu, where he joined forces with his wife, Z.. G. Mintz, and B. F. Egorov attracted talented people and created a brilliant school for the study of Russian classical literature. Throughout his life, Lotman studied Russian literature of the second gender. 18 — sir . 19 W . (Radischev, Karamzin, Decembrist writers, Pushkin, Gogol, etc.. ). In the sphere of purely literary, Lotman introduces an active study of the facts of life and behavior of the relevant eras, creates literary 'portraits' of famous Russian people. Commentary on Eugene Onegin and Lotman's research on the life and behavior of the Decembrists became classic literary works. Later Lotman gave a series of lectures on Russian literature and culture on television. This collection of articles is devoted to the problems of semiotic understanding of culture. From the author's foreword: We live in a world of culture. Moreover, we are in its thickness, inside it, and only in this way can we continue to exist. Hence the importance of the concept of “culture” and, at the same time, its difficulty in defining it. This difficulty is not only and not so much in the complexity and versatility of this concept, but in the fact that it has an initial, primary character. Culture is a device that produces information. Just as the biosphere with the help of solar energy processes the inanimate into the living (Vernadsky), culture, relying on the resources of the surrounding world, turns non-information into information. It is the anti-entropic mechanism of humanity. In order for a culture to accomplish this task, it needs, first of all, a complex internal organization. Consideration of the semiotic principles of this organization is devoted to this book. Specially for Infanta. Page numbering original.