Rabelais and His World

Introduction

Bakhtin wrote the study in the late 1930s and submitted it in 1940 as a dissertation to the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow; after a contentious defence in 1946 he received only the lower candidate’s degree, and the book appeared in 1965. It reads Rabelais’ “Gargantua and Pantagruel” against the background of medieval and Renaissance popular culture: feasts, the speech of the marketplace, curses and parody. Carnival suspends the official order for a time; its laughter is ambivalent, mocking and renewing at once, and its “grotesque body” – eating, drinking, giving birth, dying – is open to the world. Historians have objected that it idealises carnival and draws the line between popular and official culture too sharply; whether it was meant as a veiled commentary on Stalinism is disputed.

More works by Mikhail Bakhtin

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