Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov about Semiotics, Languages of the Brain and History of Ideas

Abstract

The interviews with one of the founders of the Moscow-Tartu school, Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov (1929–2017) from August 2010 and from October 2012, describe V. V. Ivanov’s opinions on several scholars (Evgenij Polivanov, Mikhail Bakhtin, Andrej Kolmogorov, Nikolaj Marr etc.) and their work, on his relationships with his father Vsevolod Ivanov, as well as V. V. Ivanov’s views on the past and future of sciences, with some emphasis on neurosemiotics, zoosemiotics, semiotics of culture, cybernetics, history of linguistics, study and protection of small languages. The first interview also deals with V. V. Ivanov’s book Even and Odd; the second interview discusses the key notions of semiotics: sign, the very definition of semiotics, its connections with other disciplines, as well as V. V. Ivanov’s main achievements in the field of semiotics.