Juri Lotman (1922-1993), the Russian-Estonian literary scholar and semiotician, was one of the most original and important cultural theorists of the twentieth century, the founder of the well-known Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics, and the initiator of the discipline of cultural semiotics. His works translated into English include Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (1990), Culture and Explosion (2009), The Unpredictable Workings of Culture (2013), and Non-Memoirs (2014).

 Marek Tamm is Professor of Cultural History at the School of Humanities in Tallinn University, Estonia. He is the co-editor of Rethinking Historical Time: New Approaches to Presentism (2019) and Debating New Approaches to History (2018), and editor of Afterlife of Events: Perspectives on Mnemohistory (2015).

Brian James Baer is Professor of Russian and Translation Studies at Kent State University, USA. He is the author of Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature (2016) and the translator of Juri Lotman's final monograph, The Unpredictable Workings of Culture (2013).

1. Introduction: Juri Lotman's Semiotic Theory of History and Cultural Memory

2.Translator's Preface

Part I Culture

3.The Phenomenon of Culture

4.The "Contract" and "Self-surrender" as Archetypal Models of Culture

5.- Toward a Theory of Cultural Interaction: The Semiotic Aspect

6.Culture as a Subject and its own Object

7. On the Dynamics of Culture

8. The Role of Art in the Dynamics of Culture

Part II Memory

9. Memory in a Culturological Perspective

10. Cultural Memory

11. Some Thoughts on Typologies of Culture

12. The Symbol in the System of Culture

Part III History.

13. Clio at the Crossroads

14. A Divine Pronouncement or a Game of Chance? The Law-governed and the Accidental in the Historical Process

15. Technological Progress as a Culturological Problem

16. The Time of Troubles as a Cultural Mechanism: Toward a Typology of Russian Cultural History

17. Afterword: (Re)constructing the Drafts of Past.