Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman was a Russian philologist by education, specializing in Russian literature. His works, however, exhibit a clear tendency to surpass the traditional boundaries of disciplines; the scope of Lotman's truly encyclopedic knowledge is not limited solely to Russian literature and includes European history and literatures, classical history and art, and other disciplines. What distinguishes Lotman from many other theoreticians is that he never developed any theory for the sake of theory and even his most theory-laden works were as a rule based on actual historical material, ranging from medieval to modern literature.