Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman (, ) (28 February 1922 – 28 October 1993) was a prominent literary scholar, semiotician, and cultural historian, who worked at the University of Tartu. He was a member of the Estonian Academy of Sciences. He was the founder of the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School and is considered to be the first Soviet structuralist because of his early essay On the Delimitation of Linguistic and Philological Concepts of Structure (1963) and works on structural poetics. The number of his printed works exceeds 800 titles; and his archive (which is now kept at the University of Tallinn and at the Tartu University Library) which includes his correspondence with a number of Russian intellectuals, is immense.