Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman (1922-1993) is an outstanding Soviet literary and cultural critic, one of the founders of the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school. In his large-scale study “The Structure of an Artistic Text,” he examines art through the prism of sign systems, and expands the concept of “text” into the smallest components. Lotman's closest study includes the figurative meanings of symbols and signs, the rules of encoding and composition, as well as the problems of characters.