Mikhail Bakhtin

Works

• 1929Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art

  Dostoevsky created the polyphonic novel, in which the voices of characters stand beside the author’s as independent consciousnesses (revised edition 1963).

• 1965Rabelais and His World

  A study of medieval and Renaissance carnival culture: laughter, the grotesque body and the temporary overturning of hierarchy.

Position

Bakhtin’s early fragments, written around 1920 and published only in the 1980s, develop an ethics of the singular act: each person occupies a unique place in being, for which there is no alibi, and theoretical systems miss this answerability. In the Dostoevsky book he argued that the novelist does not subordinate his characters to one authorial truth but lets independent voices meet – polyphony. Later essays such as “Discourse in the Novel” (1934–35) treat every utterance as a response within a dialogue of social languages. The Rabelais book reads popular laughter and carnival as a temporary suspension of hierarchy. Julia Kristeva introduced him in France in 1967 and derived intertextuality from his dialogism; Tzvetan Todorov presented him as the theorist of the dialogical principle (1981). Whether Bakhtin wrote the books published under the names of Voloshinov (“Marxism and the Philosophy of Language”, 1929) and Medvedev (“The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship”, 1928) is disputed: Vyacheslav Ivanov claimed so in 1973, Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist (1984) largely agreed, while many scholars treat them as works of their named authors within a shared circle. Critics such as Terry Eagleton have called carnival a licensed release that confirms rather than overturns order.

Life & context

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was born on 16 November 1895 in Oryol into a family of bank employees. He later stated that he had studied classics at Petrograd University; whether he completed a degree is not documented and is doubted in recent research. From 1918 he taught in Nevel and from 1920 in Vitebsk, where a circle formed around him that included the philosopher Matvei Kagan, the musicologist Valentin Voloshinov and the literary scholar Pavel Medvedev. In 1924 he moved to Leningrad. In December 1928 he was arrested in connection with a religious-philosophical circle; his Dostoevsky book appeared in 1929, and his sentence of five years in the Solovki camp was commuted to exile in Kustanai in Kazakhstan, where he lived until 1936, working among other things as a bookkeeper. He then taught in Saransk, lived in small towns near Moscow, lost a leg to osteomyelitis in 1938 and in 1940 submitted his dissertation on Rabelais, defended in 1946. From 1945 to 1961 he taught at the pedagogical institute, later the university, in Saransk. He saw the revised Dostoevsky book (1963) and the Rabelais book (1965) published. He died in Moscow on 7 March 1975.

Further main works

• Toward a Philosophy of the Act (K filosofii postupka, written early 1920s, published 1986)
• Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity (Avtor i geroi v esteticheskoi deiatel’nosti, written 1920s, published 1979)
• Discourse in the Novel (Slovo v romane, written 1934–35, published 1975)
• The Problem of Speech Genres (Problema rechevykh zhanrov, written early 1950s, published 1979)