This paper studies the origins of literary semiotics in Russian formalist theory, relying on two major investigational contexts for defining the semiotics of literature: its disciplinary status as related to cultural semiotics and the problem of semiotic translation and mediation. The paper focuses mainly on Jakobson and Tynjanov’s “Problems in the Study of Language and Literature” (1928), Tynjanov’s “On Literary Evolution” (1927) and Jakobson’s “What is Poetry?” (1933–1934). It points to two conceptions of semiotics of literature, the genesis of which can be traced back to Russian formalism: external and internal cultural literary semiotics. These two complementary cultural semiotic approaches to literary discourse are framed in terms of mediation, models of historic evolutionary processes and intersemiotic structures. It is argued that within the framework of these two cultural semiotic metasystems, the structuralist and the Peircean pragmatic semiotic orientations form a harmonious whole.