Yuri Lotman and symbols of Dante Alighieri

Abstract

This article analyzes the narrative construction of Dante’s Divine Comedy from the point of view of Yuri Lotman’s semiotics of culture. Dante’s text was put under deep scrutiny by the founder of the Moscow-Tartu Semiotic School, Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman, who dedicated one of the chapters from his book “Inside the Thinking Worlds” to the poet. Lotman analyzes the structure of the “Divine Comedy” above all as a symbolic space in which Nature and Universe are semiotic texts whose meanings can be deciphered. All of Dante’s work is organized through the semantic axis “Top-Bottom”, and the author’s movement on the text is always one of ascending or descending. Lotman’s analysis has as its background the late twentieth century to early twenty-first century European semiotics achievements, i.e. Greimas’ and Fontanille’s “The Semiotics of Passion” and Castellana’s “corporal semiotics”.