Most accounts of Yuri Lotman’s legacy describe the evolution of his oeuvre from structuralism to a systemic version of post-structuralism. This article, however, suggests that Lotman valued highly the heuristic possibilities of the structural method throughout his career – he saw that, as a methodological approach, it enables the whole sphere of cultural studies to be taken into the realm of ‘science’. Lotman connected structuralism with semiotics and, as a result, produced a hybrid in the form of structural semiotics. Over time he enriched the structural method by making it more flexible, so that it could encompass as many cultural phenomena as possible. The principal difficulties in a structural description of a text arose from a fundamental conflict that exists between the integral and the dynamic nature of the text, and the static and analytical nature of the description. For Lotman, the way to make description more dynamic was to multiply the number of descriptions.