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 includeUniverse of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture(1990),Culture and Explosion(2009),The Unpredictable Workings of Culture(2013), andNon-Memoirs(2014).

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

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