On Yury Lotman

Extract

When did the Berlin Wall come down? However much this event took us by surprise in the autumn of 1989—indeed, no one foresaw either its rapidity or its consequences—I believe that the fissures in the wall began to be clearly felt in the early 1960s. A few unknown scholars—thinkers expressing disturbing ideas in hermetic idioms—were regrouping, like a colony of ants, to carry out subversive labors. Too complex for the already nascent media culture, their work was, of course, invisible from Paris or New York; but the masters of the Kremlin were not unaware of its undermining effects.