BAKHTIN, MIKHAIL MIKHAILOVICH

(1895–1975), considered to be Russia's greatest literary theoreticians, whose work has had an important influence, in Russia and abroad, on several other fields in the social sciences and humanities.

Born in Orel into a cultured bourgeois family, Bakhtin earned a degree in classics and philology. During the Civil War, he moved to Nevel, where he worked as a schoolteacher and participated in study circles, and later moved to Vitebsk. In 1924 Bakhtin and his wife moved back to Leningrad, but he found it difficult to obtain steady employment. He was arrested in 1929 and charged with participation in the underground Russian church, but managed nevertheless to live most of the 1930s and 1940s in productive obscurity, publishing regularly. He and his work were rediscovered during the 1950s, and over the years his writings have continued to influence the development of philology, linguistics, sociology, and social anthropology, to name just a few related disciplines.

Many of Bakhtin's contemporary systematizers of Russian thought sought to discover laws of society or history and to formulate models designed to explain everything. Bakhtin, however, sought to show that there could be no such comprehensive system. In this sense he set himself against the main currents of European social thought since the seventeenth century, and especially against the traditional Russian intelligentsia. Drawing upon literary sources, he tried to create pictures of self and society that contained, as an intrinsic element, what he called surprisingness. In his view, no matter how much one knows of a person, one does not know everything and cannot unfailingly predict the future (even in theory). Instead, he argued, there is always a surplus of humanness, and this is what makes each person unique. Like Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy before 1880, and Anton Chekhov, Bakhtin belongs to the great anti-tradition of Russian thought that, unlike the dominant groups of the intelligentsia, denied that any system could explain, much less redeem, reality.

In his earliest work, Bakhtin developed various models of self and the other, and attempted to develop an approach to ethics. He believed that ethics could not be a matter of applying abstract rules to particular situations, but comes instead from careful observation and direct participation in ultimately unrepeatable circumstances. He argued that through a reliance on rules and ideology, rather than really engaging oneself with a given situation, one is using an alibi and, thus, abdicating responsibility. He countered this approach by saying that, in life, there is no alibi.

As an enemy of all comprehensive theories, Bakhtin opposed formalism and structuralism, although he learned a good deal from them. Basically, he accepted the usefulness of certain formal approaches and methods employed by these theoretical schools, but insisted that human purposefulness and intentionality lay behind these formal models. Unlike the formalists and structuralists, he developed a theory of language and the psyche that was based on the concrete utterance (what people actually say), and on open-ended dialogue. This latter is perhaps the most famous of the concepts he introduced.

Bakhtin developed a theory of polyphony, which he elaborated in his book on Dostoyevsky (1929). With this theory, he tries to show how an author deliberately creates without knowing what his or her characters will do next, and, in so doing, the author also creates a palpable image of true freedom. Bakhtin equated that freedom to that which is enjoyed by God, who did not foresee the outcome of the creatures made by God. In taking this stance, he argued against the determinists or predestinarians, for he believed that people are truly free and ever-surprising, if they are as the polyphonic novel represents them.

Bakhtin's work on the novel during the 1930s and 1940s is justly renowned. It is certainly his most durable contribution to semiotics. He identifies how novelistic language works; how the self and plot are tied to concepts of time and becoming; and how elements of a parodic (or carnivalistic) spirit have infused the novel's essence. This theory, as well as in theories of culture that he developed during the 1950s, emphasized dialogue, temporal openness, surprisingness, the uniqueness selfhood, and fundamental principles of ethical responsibility.

See also: chekhov, anton pavlovich; dostoyevsky, fyodor mikhailovich; tolstoy, leo nikolayevich

bibliography

Bakhtin, Mikhail. (1968). Rabelais and His World, tr. Hélène Iswolsky. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and tr. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Clark, Katerina, and Holquist, Michael. (1984). Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Morson, Gary Saul, and Emerson, Caryl. (1990). Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Gary Saul Morson