Multilingualism and the European University: A view from the EU-Russian frontier

• Department of History

Lecture with David Ilmar Lepasaar Beecher (University of Tartu)

From its earliest medieval incarnation, the origin and mission of the European university has been caught between the reality and demands of a multilingual society on the one hand and the promise of pan-European political, intellectual and even spiritual integration on the other.  Thus, the nearly thousand year history of the European University can be told in terms of an enduring tension between specialisation and universalisation—between studying, developing, and empowering the languages (both literal and figurative) of proliferating peoples and disciplines, while at the same time seeking a transcendental universal (meta)language of truth to overcome the persistent Babel of disciplinary nations and actual mother tongues. Nowhere has this tension been more dramatically (or uniquely) on display than on the EU-Russian frontier at the University of Tartu, where the university’s lingua franca across the last four centuries has never been self-evident but always contested.  This was especially true under Soviet rule from 1944-1991, a period of official Russian-Estonian bilingualism, when Tartu’s most famous and remarkable scholar, a displaced Leningrad-born professor of Russian literature, Yuri Lotman, developed his semiotic theory of culture to transcend the limits of all particular languages. Initially he and his colleagues hoped semiotics would be a kind of integrative scholarly metalanguage to overcome all national and disciplinary differences and render Russian cultural particularism legible in a more universal European context. Eventually, however, Lotman came to see semiotics (and Europe) less in terms of overcoming Babel than by making the most of it—that is, less by developing a universal metalanguage than by turning multilingual particularism and the need for translation between particular languages into an epistemological model for cultural knowledge in its own right. Ultimately, this lecture will use Yuri Lotman's evolving semiotic cultural theory in the context of the history of Tartu University and its languages across several centuries to reflect on the historical nature, meaning and value of the European University as a fundamentally multilingual enterprise and institution. 

David Ilmar Lepasaar Beecher is Lecturer in Political Thought and Cultural History at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Study at Tartu University. He earned his PhD in European and Russian History at the University of California Berkeley in 2014 with a dissertation on the University of Tartu as an observatory upon European and Russian relations across four centuries. His research and teaching profile includes topics such as world history, human rights, nations and empires, Europe and Russia, political economy, and universities and dissidents.