“Semiotic essayistics”: works of Vladimir Macura on the history of culture

The article highlights little-known studies of Czech culture in Russia, written by Vladimír Macura (1945-1999), a Czech philologist, cultural historian, translator and writer, author of the books “The Sign of Birth (National Revival as a Type of Culture)”, “The Czech Dream” (about the most important Czech cultural constants), “Happy Time” (about the culture of the era of socialism), etc. Macura, who began as a linguist, even in his early publications demonstrated his passion for the ideas of the Moscow-Tartu semiotic school: his reviews of “Works on Sign Systems” were regularly published in Czech scientific periodicals of the 1970s and 1980s, and references to the works of Yu.M. Lotman also appear in his later monographs, constructed, according to the author's definition, as collections of “semiotic essays”. The influence of Tartu semiotics on Macura's work is also considered.