Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (November 17, 1895 – March 7,1975), a Russian philosopher and literary scholar, wrote influential works in literary theory and literary criticism.

Biography

Bakhtin was born in Oriel, Russia outside of Moscow to a middle class family. His father was the manager of a bank and Bakhtin grew up in Vilnius and Odessa until he moved to Petrograd to study at the university there in 1913. Bakhtin completed his studies in 1918, but the civil war that raged throughout that time made settling in the capital impossible. He moved first to Nevel and then to Vitebsk where he worked as a school teacher. An intellectual circle formed around him including Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev. It was during this period that he married, and contracted osteomyelitis in his leg, an illness which hampered his productivity, and rendered him an invalid.

In 1924, Bakhtin considered Russia's situation sufficiently calm to move to Leningrad, where he struggled financially as his illness and lack of acceptable Stalinist credentials made finding employment difficult. His position deteriorated even further in 1929, when he was swept up in one of the many purges of artists and intellectuals Stalin conducted during the early years of his reign. Bakhtin was accused of participating in the Russian Orthodox Church's underground movements — a charge whose truthfulness is not clear even today. Bakhtin was sentenced to exile in Siberia but appealed on the grounds that, in his weakened state, it would kill him. Instead, he was sentenced to six years of 'internal exile' in Kazakhstan.

Throughout the 1930s Bakhtin remained in Kazakhstan, first as a bookkeeper on a collective farm and then, in 1936, in Mordovia State Teacher's College in Saransk. An obscure figure in a provincial college, he dropped out of view and taught on and off in Saransk, periodically moving to even more remote villages to escape further purges. In 1938, his osteomyelitis had become bad enough to require leg amputation. His health subsequently improved, and he became more prolific. In 1941 he submitted the manuscript of his project on Rabelais — now published as Rabelais and His World — to the Gorky Institute of World Literature. The book's earthy, anarchic topic caused a scandal and Bakhtin was granted a lesser degree instead of a full doctorate. After World War II, he returned to teach in Saransk, where he continued to teach until his death in 1975.

In the post-Stalinist period of the late 1950s, Russian scholars rediscovered Bakhtin's work, and his fame quickly grew. Even more surprising to them was the fact that he was still alive. In his later life Bakhtin was lionized by Soviet intellectuals and he continued to write. After his death in 1975 authors such as Julia Kristeva and Tzvetan Todorov brought Bakhtin to the attention of the Francophone world, and from there his popularity in the United States, the United Kingdom, and many other countries continued to grow. In the late 1980s Bakhtin's work experienced a surge of popularity in the West, and he continues today to be regarded as one of the most important theorists of literature and culture to have written in the twentieth century.

Bakhtin's work and ideas

First Period

As a literary theorist, Bakhtin is usefully compared with Russian Formalists, as well as with the work of Yuri Lotman. His career is often described as being broken into four periods. During the 1920s, Bakhtin's work tended to focus on ethics and aesthetics in general. Early pieces such as Towards a Philosophy of the Act and Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity are indebted to the philosophical trends of the time that Bakhtin followed as a student — particularly the Marburg School Neo-Kantianism of Max Scheler and, to a lesser extent, Nicolai Hartmann.

Second Period: Problems of Dostoeyvsky's Poetics

The second period of his thought — most closely associated with his time in Leningrad — includes a shift towards the notion of dialogue and the beginning of his engagement with the work of Dostoevsky. He compiled these notions into his Problems of Dostoevsky's Oeuvre (1929), later republished as Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1963). This text had the effect of helping to rehabilitate the critical view of Dostoevsky as an author and artist. Dostoevsky had been considered many things: religious prophet, pre-Freudian psychologist and existentialist philosopher. But as a novelist, his style was considered messy, lacking any real artistic merit. Bakhtin gave the world a language for discussing the features of Dostoevsky's artistic vision.

First among these is his notion of an unfinalizable self: individuals cannot be finalized or completely understood or known or labeled. As such, though it is possible to understand people and to treat them in ways as if they are completely known, Bakhtin's conception of unfinalizability respected the possibility that a person could change or that a person is never fully revealed or fully known in the world. Readers may find that this conception reflects the idea of a soul; Bakhtin had strong roots in Christianity and in the Neo-Kantian school led by Hermann Cohen, both of which emphasized the importance of an individual's potentially infinite capability, worth, and the hidden soul.

Second is the idea of the relationship between a self and others or other groups: every person is influenced by others in an inescapably intertwined way, and so no voice can be said to be isolated. As Bakhtin would say in an interview before his death: "In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding—in time, in space, in culture. For one cannot even really see one's own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space, and because they are others." (New York Review of Books, June 10, 1993) As such, Bakhtin's philosophy greatly respected the influences of others on a self: not just in terms of how a person comes to be, but even in how a person thinks and how a person sees oneself truthfully.

Third is the idea of the carnival, in which distinct individual voices are heard, flourish, and interact together. This concept is the dominant concept associated with Bakhtin as a literary theorist, whereas the above concepts relate more to an overall philosophy. The carnival was Bakhtin's way of describing Dostoevsky's polyphonic style: each individual character is strongly defined, and at the same time the reader witnesses the critical influence of each character upon the other. That is, the voices of others are heard by each individual, and each inescapably shapes the character of the other.

Third Period: Dialogism, Heteroglossia, Chronotope

Works from his third period during his exile include some of the key concepts associated with Bakhtin's works today, including dialogism, heteroglossia (многоязычие), and chronotope. His work on Rabelais, also associated with this period, focuses on the notion of the carnivalesque. Finally, his later work focuses not so much on the novel, but on problems of method and the nature of culture, concerns exemplified by the volume 'Speech Genres and Other Late Essays'.

Disputed texts

Famously, some of the works which bear the names of Bakhtin's close friends Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev have been attributed to Bakhtin — particularly The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship and Marxism and Philosophy of Language. These claims originated in the early 1970s and received their earliest full articulation in English in Clark and Holquist's 1984 biography of Bakhtin. In the twenty years since then, however, most scholars have come to agree that Voloshinov and Medvedev ought to be considered the authors of these works. Although Bakhtin influenced these scholars and he (and others) may have had a hand in composing the works attributed to them, it now seems clear that if it was necessary to attribute authorship of these works to one person, Voloshinov and Medvedev respectively should receive credit.

Major works

• Toward a Philosophy of the Act
• Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics (1929)
• Rabelais and His World (1968)
• The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin
• Speech Genres and Other Late Essays

Sources and further reading

• Mikhail Bakhtin: A Biography. Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist. Harvard University Press, 1984
• Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy. Ken Hirschkop. Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson. Stanford University Press, 1990.
• Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World, Second Edition. Michael Holquist. Routledge, 2002.

See also

Pavel Medvedev

Valentin Voloshinov

External links

• The Bakhtin Circle, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• The Bakhtin Centre (University of Sheffield)
• A Bakhtin profile (James P. Zappen)
• Another Bakhtin profile (Vincent Hevern)
• Bakhtin Timeline

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