The five participants in this project, being closely connected by a long-standing co-operation, will together study various aspects of modern Russian culture. The methodological basis of the joint project is cultural semiotics, especially as it has been developed by Professor Yu Lotman of Tartu University, Estonia. Cultural semiotics can be applied to all cultural phenomena, and has proved to be an excellent method for comparing the various branches of art and describing changes in the development of culture.

The project will concentrate on three important topics of Russian culture. Firstly the Russian futurism; special attention will be paid to the mutual influence of and close correspondences between poetry and painting in this important movement at the beginning of the century (ca. 1910-1925); secondly the Russian prose during the first two decades after the revolution and the enormous changes in the literary process due to political circumstances; and finally contemporary cultural processes; recent cultural changes, particularly the effect on literature of the disappearance of censorship.