Contents -- Acknowledgments -- A Note on Transliteration and Referencing -- Introduction -- Power -- 1. Dante, Florenskii, Lotman: Journeying Then and Now through Medieval Space -- 2. Lotman's Other: Estrangement and Ethics in Culture and Explosion -- 3. Pushkin's "Andzhelo," Lotman's Insight into It, and the Proper Measure of Politics and Grace -- 4. Post-Soviet Political Discourse and the Creation of Political Communities -- 5. State Power, Hegemony, and Memory: Lotman and Gramsci -- 6. The Ever-Tempting Return to an Iranian Past in the Islamic Present: Does Lotman's Binarism Help? -- Margins and Selfhood -- 7. The Self, Its Bubbles, and Its Illusions: Cultivating Autonomy in Greenblatt and Lotman -- 8. Lotman's Karamzin and the Late Soviet Liberal Intelligentsia -- 9. Bipolar Asymmetry, Indeterminacy, and Creativity in Cinema -- 10. Post-ing the Soviet Body as Tabula Phrasa and Spectacle -- 11. Eccentricity and Cultural Semiotics in Imperial Russia -- 12. Writing in a Polluted Semiosphere: Everyday Life in Lotman, Foucault, and de Certeau -- Afterword: Lotman without Tears -- Bibliography -- Contributors -- Index.