Към преобразуване на понятието мимесис: Юрий Лотман и Тодор Павлов

The paper explores the divergent concepts of mimesis in the works of Bulgarian orthodox Marxist philosopher Todor Pavlov and Yuri Lotman, founder of the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School. With his Theory of Reflection, completed in Moscow in 1936 as an elaboration of Lenin’s ideas of knowledge, Pavlov became one of the major proponents of the understanding of mimesis as reflection, which for decades defined the dogmatic Marxist-Leninist aesthetics in Eastern Europe. Beginning with the 1960s, Lotman’s conceptualization of dual code structures begins to work in the direction of reloading the mimetic theory beyond the official discourse. Lotman explicitly states that his methodological wager is an attempt to join the formal-structural paradigm of Roman Jacobson and the contextual-dialogical paradigm of Mikhail Bakhtin, which makes his position a synthesis of the two schools that challenged the theory of reflection dogma.