1372total visits.
The twenties of the twenty-first century is a time of planetary challenges. At the same time, these are years of round anniversaries of major representatives of the cultural and scientific community, such as Dante or Lotman. This is a reason to turn to their reflections in order to better comprehend what is happening in connection with the nature of man himself.
Dante’s Divine Comedy was in the center of attention of Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman, who devoted to this topic one of the chapters of the book Universe of the Mind. Lotman analyzes the structure of the Divine Comedy primarily as a symbolic space, where Nature and the Universe are semiotic texts, the meaning of which is to be deciphered. The text is organized around the semantic axis “Top-Bottom”, and the author’s movement in the text is always a descent or ascent.
The article proposes to consider the space of the Divine Comedy from the standpoint of Lotman’s semiotics of culture, in connection with the philosophical hypotheses of Pavel Florensky, as well as with the later reflections of European semioticians of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Keywords: construction of the universe, semiotic space, “Top – Bottom” axis, spiritual ascension
International Center for Semiotics and Intercultural Dialogue, State Academic University for the Humanities – GAUGN. Maronovsky per., 26, 119049 Moscow, Russia; e-mail: igmerkulova@gaugn.ru.
https://doi.org/10.33234/SSR.16.1
I