Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975)

Bakhtin is generally regarded as the most influential twentieth-century Russian literary theorist and philosopher of language whose wide-ranging ideas significantly influenced Western thinking in cultural history, linguistics, literary theory, and aesthetics.. His writings on literature, language, ethics, authorship, carnival, time and the theory of culture have shaped thinking in criticism and the social sciences. His name is identified with the concept of dialogue, which he applied to language and numerous other aspects of culture and the psyche.

The son of a bank manager, Bakhtin studied classics and philology at the University of Petrograd (1913 - 1918). His meticulous knowledge of obscure ancient writers is reflected throughout his work. Most of his subsequent life can be seen as a series of escapes into obscurity. During the Russian Civil War, he moved to the small towns of Nevel and Vitebsk, where he worked as a schoolteacher, discussed philosophy and acquired his two best-known disciples, Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev. Interested in Neo-Kantianism, Bakhtin worked on a comprehensive treatise about ethics, authorship and the relation of the self to others. In the 1920s, he also encountered the most influential non-Marxist school of criticism, Russian Formalism, learned from their ideas, and rejected their fundamental approach: their reduction of content to form ran counter to his view that literature and language are repositories of wisdom acquired by human experience over ‘great time’. In 1924, he moved to Leningrad, where he failed to find stable employment, perhaps because of a bone disease eventually leading to the amputation of his right leg in 1938. In 1929, he published his book on Dostoevskii Problemy tvorchestva Dostoyevskogo, which was recognised as a classic. In the book Bakhtin expressed his belief in a mutual relation between meaning and context involving the author, the work, and the reader, each constantly affecting and influencing the others, and the whole influenced by existing political and social forces.

Nevertheless, his bourgeois background, his interest in religion and his non-Marxist approach made him suspect in the Soviet Union, and in 1929 he was arrested. A sentence that would have meant his death in a harsh labour camp was commuted to six years of internal exile in Kazakhstan. During the 1930s he worked at odd jobs, including bookkeeper on a collective farm. During these years he wrote his classic essays on language and the novel. The Rabelais thesis was submitted for a doctorate, but only a lesser degree was awarded, and the book did not appear in print until 1965. Later, it became the first of his works to be widely known in the West.

In 1936 he became a professor at the remote Mordovia State Teachers College, but soon resigned so as to remain less visible during the years of mass arrests. He returned to his professorship at the end of the Second World War. He continued to write essays on general problems of culture from the perspective of dialogue.

Bakhtin viewed literary genres as implicit worldviews, concrete renditions of a sense of experience. Strongly objecting to the idea that novelists simply weave narratives around received philosophical ideas, he argued that very often significant discoveries are made first by writers and are then 'transcribed', often with considerable loss, into abstract philosophy.

Believing in contingency and human freedom, Bakhtin described individual people, and cultural entities generally, as ‘unfinalisable’. Bakhtin therefore opposed all deterministic philosophies and all cultural theories that understate the messiness of things and the openness of time. He rigorously opposed Marxism and semiotics, although, strangely enough, in the West his work has been appropriated by both schools. Stating his own thought as a paraphrase of Dostoevskii, he wrote: “Nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken, the world is open and free, everything is still in the future and will always be in the future.”