Mikhail Bakhtin

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The Flesh of Time: Mikhail Bakhtin

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SOURCE: Kelly, Aileen M. “The Flesh of Time: Mikhail Bakhtin.” In Views from the Other Shore: Essays on Herzen, Chekhov, and Bakhtin, pp. 192-216. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999.

[In the following essay, Kelly compares Bakhtin's approach toward utopian systems and systemic thinking to that of his compatriot and predecessor Alexander Herzen, considered the father of Russian socialism.]

In June 1995 an international conference was held in Moscow to celebrate the centenary of one of Russia's best-known intellectuals—the philosopher and critic Mikhail Bakhtin. Participants from twenty countries came together to discuss the legacy of a thinker who had emerged from obscurity in his old age to become the object of a cult, first in his own country and then in the West. His influence on literary and linguistic studies and the human sciences has grown steadily from the mid-1970s, creating a Bakhtin industry of monumental proportions; as the commentaries on his work pile up, Bakhtin centers are beginning to dot the globe from Saransk to Sheffield. But as Caryl Emerson's study of Bakhtin's first hundred years reveals, no clear sense of his place in twentieth-century thought has yet emerged from these labors.1 On the contrary, his heritage has become ever more fiercely contested by rival claimants. In the West his ideas have been appropriated by structuralists and poststructuralists, Marxists and post-Marxists, liberals, Christians, materialists, sociolinguists, and postmodern pragmatists. In post-Soviet Russia attempts to place Bakhtin are part of the revaluation of an entire intellectual heritage that was distorted or suppressed under communism. His ideas are now a focus of contention among Russian nationalists, neohumanists, and religious revivalists, all of whom have sought to claim him as a precursor, while others maintain that his true significance for the new Russia lies in his nonconformism and his independence from all schools of thought: V. L. Makhlin describes him as a non-Marxist, a nonformalist, a nonstructuralist, a non-Freudian, a nonexistentialist, a noncollectivist, a nonutopian, a nontheologian, and a nonmodernist.2

Bakhtin's most searching critics in the West have approached him in a similar spirit, citing his consistent opposition to systematizing theories of literature, culture, and the self. Emerson and G. S. Morson argue that Bakhtin's suspicion of what he called theoretism or monologism places him among the minority of Russian thinkers who resisted the ideological intransigence of the majority tradition, defending the claims of the individual and the particular against the tyranny of systems, maintaining that not all values could or should be harmonized, and warning of the dangers of seeking final solutions to open problems. In his rejection of absolutist approaches to ethics Bakhtin was, as Morson and Emerson show, particularly close to Tolstoy.3 But his position was more consistent than that of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and many other Russian writers and thinkers who were torn between their pluralistic vision and their yearning to uncover a single unitary pattern which would resolve all the contradictions of experience and give a firm sense and direction to their lives. Bakhtin was not immune to the attractions of utopian thought but was more aware of its dangers than most. He began very early in his career to meditate on the ways in which language, culture, and intellectual habits lead human beings to idealize abstractions and to devalue the world of immediate experience. In this he was covering ground explored in the previous century by the greatest of Russian philosophers of freedom, Aleksandr Herzen. By focusing on certain congruences in their thought, I intend to situate Bakhtin more precisely in his Russian context, as a representative of a tenuous but robust strand of anti-ideological thought which has survived in Russia from the early nineteenth through all of the twentieth century and has much potential for the twenty-first.

The story of Bakhtin's astonishing career is too well known to need detailed retelling here. Born in 1895 to a cultivated gentry family in the south Russian city of Oryol, he studied philosophy and classics at Petrograd University, where he developed a strong interest in German philosophy from Kant to the Marburg school of neo-Kantians. After the Revolution, plagued by ill health, he supported himself with intermittent teaching and lecturing, while developing his ideas within a small group of similarly gifted intellectuals who met to discuss literature and philosophy. In 1924 he settled in the newly renamed Leningrad, where his circle included the biologist I. I. Kanaev, the poet N. A. Kliuev, and the experimental writers Konstantin Vaginov and Daniil Kharms. The climate of the time made publication difficult. Bakhtin's first major work, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, which expounded his theory of dialogism, appeared only in 1929, shortly after his arrest in one of the roundups of intellectuals that accompanied the launching of Stalin's “cultural revolution.” A favorable review of the book by Anatoly Lunacharsky, the commissar of enlightenment, helped get his sentence reduced: he was exiled to Kazakhstan, where among other odd jobs he taught bookkeeping to collective farm members while working on the theory of the novel. In 1946 he submitted a doctoral dissertation on François Rabelais, which was rejected as ideologically unsound. After the war he taught literature at the Teachers' College (later University) of Saransk, a remote town east of Moscow. He emerged from obscurity in the early 1960s when a group of young Moscow scholars who admired his book on Dostoevsky were amazed to discover that he was still alive. That book was republished in an expanded edition in 1963, followed two years later by his reworked dissertation, Rabelais and Folk Culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Both books caused a sensation in Russian literary circles unaccustomed to original, independent thought. Brought back to Moscow, Bakhtin was treated as a celebrity by literary scholars. Confined by illness to his apartment in his last years, he continued to write until his death in 1975; meanwhile, his work had become well known in the West through the translations of his two books and his essays on the historical poetics of the novel, published collectively in 1981 as The Dialogic Imagination.

Academic excitement over Bakhtin grew as it became evident that his key concepts, including heteroglossia, chronotope, polyphony, unfinalizability (nezavershennost), outsideness (vnenakhodimost), dialogue, and carnival, challenged systematic thought across a range of disciplines, offering new and fruitful approaches not merely to language and literature, but to human experience in general. But assessments of his work have become more discriminating, and the last two concepts (buzzwords throughout the humanities in the 1980s) have come to be seen as the most problematic in an oeuvre whose originality and scholarly precision are now widely held to have been overvalued.

Certainly, Bakhtin's admirers have tended to inflate the philosophical importance of his analysis of self-other relations. Although aspects of it anticipate later theories of intersubjectivity, it lacks philosophical rigor. Its value lies in the way in which, by challenging conventional thinking about language, psychology, and cultural history, it encourages the reader to reconsider the question of his or her moral responsibility in the everyday world. Referring to the widespread tendency to approach Dostoevsky's novels as the vehicles of a single authorial ideology, Bakhtin observed, “The scientific consciousness of contemporary humanity has learned to orient itself in the complex circumstances of ‘the probability of the universe’; no ‘uncertainties’ are capable of confusing this scientific consciousness, for it knows how to allow for them and to calculate them. It has long since grown accustomed to the Einsteinian world with its multitudinous systems of measurement, etc. But in the realm of artistic cognition people sometimes continue to demand the crudest, most primitive certainty, which is self-evidently not true.”4

In the best tradition of Russian thinkers, Bakhtin was preoccupied with questions of practical ethics.5 He believed that human beings could be morally coherent and maximally creative only if they learned to live without the traditional props of faith in absolutes and final certainties. He argued that, like all phenomenal being, the self is intrinsically dialogical: its viability depends on the quality of its responses to its environment. It cannot be understood or expressed except in relation to an audience whose real or imagined responses continually shape the way in which we define ourselves. Bakhtin diverged from traditional and Saussurian linguistics in approaching language not as a formal system, but as utterances whose meaning is contingent on relationships of “intense interaction and struggle” between the points of view of speakers, readers, and writers in socially specific circumstances at particular historical moments. Each word, he wrote, “tastes of the … contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life.” The dialogical nature of our relationship with an evolving environment invalidates the notion of fixed and final truths. The more highly differentiated a society becomes, the greater importance its members attach to each others' values as the subject of “interpretation, discussion, evaluation, rebuttal, support, further development.” There are no limits to the dialogic context: it embraces the remote past as well as the present. Novelistic images (for example, Cervantes's Don Quixote) live different lives in different epochs, “reaccentuated” in a variety of ways which are a continuation of the unresolved argument embodied in them: “Nothing definitive has yet taken place in the world, the final word of the world and about the world has not yet been said, the world is open and free.6

In Rabelais and in a chapter added to the second edition of his book on Dostoevsky, Bakhtin explores the way in which “official monologism” with its claim to possession of a ready-made truth has been subverted throughout history by a carnival sense of the world: a grasp of the primal realities of existence—birth, decay, metamorphosis, rebirth, and the impermanence of all human structures and powers. Traditionally expressed in folkloric humor and the rituals of the common people, this sense of truth was acted out on streets and squares in the spectacles of carnival, in which institutions were travestied, authorities mocked, and divinities profaned. During the carnival the population lived a “life turned inside out,” their costumes and actions depicting grotesque contrasts and pairings of opposites: youth and age, noble and lowly, sacred and blasphemous.7 The laws and hierarchies governing everyday existence were temporarily suspended and symbolically overturned, as in the ritual performance of the mock crowning and subsequent uncrowning and beating of the carnival king. Bakhtin traced carnival ambivalence in literature from its beginnings in the Menippean satires of antiquity to the Renaissance, when in the hands of Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Rabelais it became the vehicle of a new humanism, rehabilitating the world which medieval eschatology had taught humanity to despise. Gargantua and Pantagruel are carnival heroes; the gigantic scale of their physical functions mocked medieval asceticism and celebrated the earthy realities of life.

In his writings on the novel Bakhtin tracks the seepage of the carnival attitude into modern literature through the picaresque novel and the techniques of parody and the grotesque, which presented life “drawn out of its usual rut,” approaching the established order of things in a spirit of play. Through this “muted laughter” such writers as Dostoevsky had explored the subterranean processes whereby traditional beliefs and dogmas begin to lose their hold on minds, accepted categories and distinctions break down, and new ways of perceiving the world evolve. Mid-nineteenth-century Russia had experienced such a revolution in consciousness when profound economic and social changes had shattered old institutions and certainties. At that time “not only people and their actions, but also ideas broke out of their self-enclosed hierarchical nests and began to collide.”8 Bakhtin argued that Dostoevsky conveyed this phenomenon with exceptional power through the carnivalistically scandalous scenes in his novels and through their polyphonic structure, which presented characters as a plurality of independent voices, points of view on the world that engage in a genuine open-ended dialogue. Refusing to be finalized by others' definitions of them, their every thought a rejoinder in a debate with themselves and others on the values by which they live, Dostoevsky's characters embody that capacity to surprise which frustrates all attempts to enclose human beings within the confines of systems.

Ironically, the analysis of Dostoevsky that brought Bakhtin to world attention is now widely considered to be the most flawed aspect of his work. His interpretation of the novels as polyphonic has been judged a misreading of Dostoevsky's intentions and an oversimplification of his technique, while his view of dialogism as open-ended and liberating exchange does not take us far in understanding Dostoevsky's most self-obsessed and tragic heroes, who experience the utterances of others as entrapment or use them to consolidate a prior vision of the world. Bakhtin's historical account of folk carnival has attracted equally severe criticism as a utopian fantasy which opposes an idealized common people to an alien “official culture” and lends itself to distorted and schematized readings of literary texts and historical periods.9

Bakhtin addressed this last charge in 1946 in his defense of his doctoral dissertation on Rabelais. The transcript of the discussion records that he accepted his examiners' view that his interpretation of medieval and Renaissance society was selective and simplistic and that he had exaggerated the joyous aspects of popular life; but he maintains that he had not intended the work to be a compilation of the facts that historical research had already made widely available. He was well aware of the dark side of the people's life and of carnival revolt; but his aim had been to reveal the role that laughter could play in transforming human consciousness and in liberating people from fear.10 This may sound suspiciously like the forcing of fact to conform to theory, but unlike some of his Western neo-Marxist interpreters, he never presented carnival as a manifestation of the dialectical movement of history toward the overcoming of self-alienation.11 He observes that laughter is “essentially not an external but an interior form of truth”; its insights were ephemeral and followed by a reversion to old beliefs and fears.12 But these brief moments, by revealing the world in a new light, opened the way to investigation and experiment. As a mode of literary creation, carnivalization was “a sort of heuristic principle” that made new discoveries possible. In European literature it had performed the momentous function of breaking down boundaries between styles, genres, and self-enclosed systems of thought: “It destroyed all kinds of isolation and mutual neglect, it brought together things that were far apart, and united things that were separated.” In the works of the great Renaissance writers the carnival sense was expressed as a “truly divine freedom” of approach to the world and the human being. In the scandalous scenes in Dostoevsky's novels, full of carnivalized contrasts, “the ‘rotten strings’ of the official and personal lie are snapped (or at least weakened for an instant) and human souls are laid bare. … A different—more authentic—sense of themselves and their relationships to one another is revealed.”13

In the course of an interview in 1973, when asked whether in the twenties he had considered himself “more of a philosopher than a philologist,” Bakhtin replied, “More of a philosopher, and such I have remained until the present day.”14 His brand of philosophy was distinctively Russian in its concern with applied ethics: his writings on the carnivalesque are best approached not as contributions to literary criticism, cultural history, or political theory but rather as reflections on the phenomenology of fear and the spiritual resources that can defeat it.15 Bakhtin's study of carnival was modest in compass but vastly ambitious in purpose: by tracking successive incarnations in history and literature of one aspect of human potential, he hoped to contribute to a transformation of our inner relationship with the world.

“I am an obsessed innovator,” Bakhtin told his examiners in 1946; such people “are very rarely understood.”16 In the search to understand Bakhtin the emphasis has recently shifted from his studies of genre to their philosophical grounding. Scholars have found this exceptionally difficult to define: the relevant source material is frustratingly scrappy, consisting of essays and larger fragments written in the 1920s and published posthumously, and Bakhtin's often gnomic responses to his questioners in interviews given in the 1970s. This material has been heavily annotated by commentators searching for parallels between Bakhtin's insights and those of philosophical heavyweights from Henri-Louis Bergson and Martin Buber to Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger;17 but very few either in Russia or the West have pointed to the remarkable parallels between his thought and that of another misunderstood innovator, Aleksandr Herzen.18 I believe that a comparison of their respective obsessions will lead us to the elusive essence of Bakhtin's philosophical enterprise.

The first chapter of Bakhtin's book on Rabelais starts with a quotation from Herzen: “It would be extremely interesting to write the history of laughter.” In a long footnote Bakhtin includes the passage from which this quotation is taken—Herzen's response to criticism of the satirical tone used by his paper the Bell in discussing the attitudes of the Russian nobility and tsarist officialdom. “Laughter is no joke,” Herzen declared, and he had no intention of desisting from it. “No one laughs in church, in palaces, when waging war, in front of the office chief, or the commissioner of police. … Domestic serfs have not the right to smile in the master's presence. Only equals laugh among themselves [Bakhtin's italics].”19 Authority has always feared laughter's subversive force, and with reason: to smile before the ancient bull-god Apis would have been to demote him to the status of a common farmyard animal. “Truly, there is something revolutionary in laughter. … The laughter of Voltaire destroyed more than the tears of Rousseau”: Bakhtin cites these words from another article in which Herzen responds to Russian liberals who had attacked him for an irreverent approach to the culture and institutions of their “elder brothers”—the advanced democracies of the West. Herzen saw no reason to apologize: “A person looks freely at an object only when he does not bend it to his theory and does not himself bow before it. … An object about which one cannot speak smilingly without falling into blasphemy, without fearing pangs of conscience, is a fetish. People are crushed by it, they fear to mix it with ordinary life. Thus Egyptian sculpture and our primitive iconography gave idols unnatural poses and unnatural coloring in order to distinguish them from the despised world of earthly beauty and the color of warm, living flesh.”20

Bakhtin may seem excessively reverent in his praise of the profundity of Herzen's reflections on the historical function of laughter; but he rightly perceived that he and Herzen were engaged in the same serious philosophical project. Both of them used laughter as a shorthand term for what Bakhtin described as “a specific aesthetic attitude to reality … untranslatable into logical language …, a specific means of artistic perception and cognition.” Using Dostoevsky as his example, Bakhtin calls it “an unusually flexible” form of artistic vision that “makes possible new things” through its capacity to grasp the many-sidedness and potential of the fleeting moment and of the most commonplace individuals and events.21 Herzen had described a similar approach, which did not impoverish the world by forcing it into systems, as “artistic thinking.”22 Such a vision, Bakhtin explains, is able to capture phenomena in the process of change and transition, “in their continuous, creative, renewing changeability; death is foreseen in birth and birth in death, defeat in victory and victory in defeat, discrowning in coronation.” Its world is one of “birth, renewal, fertility, abundance”—the untidy world of everyday reality that cannot be encompassed by fixed concepts or reduced to single meanings. Laughter “does not deny seriousness but purifies and completes it. … it liberates from fanaticism and pedantry, from fear and intimidation, from didacticism, naiveté and illusion, from the single meaning, the single level, from sentimentality.” It does not permit seriousness to atrophy and break away from the unfinished wholeness of everyday existence: “It restores this ambivalent wholeness.”23

The last two words encapsulate the approach to the world that Herzen had preached in opposition to the idealists of his age: every historical moment, every action, is both aesthetically and ethically open—full of unrealized possibilities and yet complete in itself, independently of its hypothetical place in any larger scheme of things. Both thinkers believed that such an understanding of the world must become general if humanity's creative powers were to be maximally developed: hence their attack on what Bakhtin refers to as “the great interior censor”:24 the deference to authorities and norms anchored in our cultural past that fetters thought and circumscribes our actions in the present. They believed that in order to make new things possible, we have to change the way we think and speak about the everyday world.

Bakhtin and Herzen had both begun their rehabilitation of that despised sphere with critiques of the great utopian systems that dominated progressive thought in their respective ages. Herzen witnessed the transformation of Hegel's schema of rational progress into the revolutionary messianism of the Left Hegelians and Karl Marx, while Bakhtin's early development as a philosopher took place in the context of the religious and neo-Kantian idealism that shaped much of Russian thought and literature in the two decades before the Revolution, before it was swept away by the new orthodoxy of Marxist dialectical materialism. His first surviving philosophical work, written in 1919-21 and published for the first time in 1986 under the title Toward a Philosophy of the Act, is a fragment of a never-completed project on the phenomenology of the individual deed and is centrally concerned with the theme that inspired some of Herzen's finest passages—the way in which teleological systems and doctrines of progress distort the reality of human participation in the historical process and the nature of moral responsibility. Bakhtin contends that all modern philosophy is guilty of this sin:

We are presented as it were with two value-contexts, two kinds of life: the life of the whole boundless world … and my small personal life. …


Instead of bringing all theoretical (possible) knowledge [poznanie] of the world into communion with our actual life-from-within as answerable cognition [uznanie], we attempt to bring our actual life into communion with a possible, theoretical context, either by identifying as essential only the universal moments in our actual life, or by understanding our actual life in the sense of its being a small scrap of the space and time of the large spatial and temporal whole, or by giving it a symbolic interpretation.


What happens in all these cases is that the living, compellent, and inescapable uniqueness of our actual life is diluted with the water of merely thinkable empty possibility …, is declared to be valid only as a moment of infinite matter, toward which we are indifferent, or as an exemplar of Homo sapiens, or as a representative of his own ethics, or as an embodiment of the abstract principle of the Eternal Feminine [a reference to the “sophiology” of Vladimir Solovyov]. That which has actual validity always turns out to be a moment of that which is possible: my own life turns out to be the life of man in general, and this latter life turns out to be one of the manifestations of the world's life.25

As Herzen had done in his early reflections on the nature of moral freedom, Bakhtin homed in on Kant's reliance on moral norms as exemplifying the approach to the self characteristic of Western philosophy since Descartes. He studied and lectured on Kant intensively in the early 1920s and later wrote that while using Kant's ideas of the importance of space and time in the cognitive process, he differed from Kant “in taking them not as ‘transcendental’ but as forms of the most immediate reality.”26 As he explains in his attempt to sketch out a philosophy of the act, Kant's moral doctrine was a system of generalizations based on theoretical transcriptions of moral acts that was of limited use as a guide to how to perform such acts in real-life situations, which could not be precisely predicted or replicated. There are no moral norms that are determinate and valid in themselves, “but there is a moral subiectum with a determinate structure … and it is upon him that we have to rely.” Our moral responsibility derives from our “nonalibi in Being,” an acknowledgment of the fact that we each occupy a unique and unrepeatable place in time and space: “That which can be done by me can never be done by anyone else.” Moral consciousness is the acceptance of answerability for one's irreplaceable participation in Being: “My uniqueness is given yet at the same time only exists to the extent to which it is really actualized by me. … I am actual and irreplaceable, and therefore must actualize my uniqueness.” We may seek to prove our alibi in Being by representing our lives as the ritualistic acting out of some universal principle, but if we are no more than embodiments of eternal truth whose validity is independent of our acts, these acts would be rendered superfluous. By attempting to shift our personal responsibility onto ideologies and systems, we become “imposters and pretenders.”27

In “Robert Owen” Herzen mocks the notion of a historical arrière-pensée which “becomes incarnate whatever the cost, and attains its ends by means of kings and peoples, wars and revolutions. … With what purpose, if it exists already, does it constitute itself again?” The moral value and the dignity of our lives lie not in the incarnation of some universal principle but in the fact that each one of us can be “an irreplaceable reality,” able to do what no one else can do.28

Both men were intensely aware that their insistence on the primacy of individual and concrete manifestations of being ran counter to assumptions deeply embedded in European culture. Herzen observed that all our ways of thinking about human beings and morality, all our images and metaphors, tend to privilege the universal and eternal over the particular and the transient, and he regretted that philosophy had not yet mastered the concept of individuality. Bakhtin argues that even philosophers who have consciously attempted to free themselves from the legacy of rationalism have succumbed to a “fatal theoreticism” based on the belief that “the truth of a situation is precisely what is repeatable and constant in it. Moreover, that which is universal and identical … is fundamental and essential, whereas individual truth [pravda] is artistic and irresponsible.” He continued to meditate on this tendency of the intellect throughout his life, observing (in a note made at the beginning of the 1970s) that in explaining a phenomenon “what we foreground is the ready-made and finalized. Even in antiquity we seek out what is ready-made and finalized, not what has originated and is developing.”29

Toward a Philosophy of the Act was intended as a master plan in four parts—only one of which has survived—for a “first philosophy” (Aristotle's term for a fundamental ontology that lays the foundations for all further philosophizing).30 Bakhtin argues that as theoretical transcriptions from concretely historical being-as-event, modern philosophies (up to and including neo-Kantianism) were all inadequate in this respect. The need of the “striving and action-performing consciousness” to orient itself in the world of events had given rise to historical materialism, but that doctrine committed the common methodological sin of failing to distinguish between what is and what ought to be. A first philosophy could not proceed by constructing general propositions about the world. The subject of moral philosophy is “a world of proper names, a world of these objects and of particular dates of life”; it can be approached only “participatively,” in the way we experience the world through our actions:

The ongoing event can be clear and distinct, in all its constituent moments, to a participant in the act or deed he himself performs. Does this mean that he understands it logically? That is, that what is clear to him are only the universal moments and relations transcribed in the form of concepts? Not at all: he sees clearly these individual, unique persons whom he loves, this sky and this earth and these trees … ; and what is also given to him simultaneously is the value, the actually and concretely affirmed value of these persons and these objects. He intuits their inner lives as well as desires … and he understands … not the abstract law of his act, but the actual, concrete ought conditioned by his unique place in the given context of the ongoing event. And all these moments, which make up the event in its totality, are present to him as something given and as something-to-be-achieved in a unitary light, in a unitary and unique answerable consciousness. … And this event as a whole cannot be transcribed in theoretical terms if it is not to lose the very sense of its being an event, that is, precisely that … with reference to which [the performed act] orients itself.31

Bakhtin contends that while we should not exaggerate the power of language to express the experience of the “concrete truth” of being-as-event, we should also not regard that truth as something ineffable which cannot be clearly articulated. Language developed historically in the service of participative thinking and performed acts, and while lived experience could never be conceptually represented in any fully adequate form, the task “is always present as that which is to be achieved.”32 Herzen had expressed a similar cautious hope that after many false starts and confusions, humanity would be cured of the worship of abstractions, “as they have been of other historical diseases.” Both men focused their critique on the habits of thought inculcated by more than two millennia of Western civilization which, as Herzen put it, had advanced under the twin banners of “Romanticism for the heart” and “Idealism for the mind,”33 leading human beings to seek self-realization in some transcendent sphere cut off from humdrum daily existence. In a short essay of 1919, “Art and Responsibility,” Bakhtin attacks the notion (exemplifed in the romantic image of the alienated artist) of a divorce between aesthetic creativity and everyday life, as a pernicious fiction that blinds us to the fact that our every response to our environment is a creative act. He suggests that the real motive behind attempts to contrast the exalted concerns of art with the humble prose of daily life “is nothing more than the mutual striving of both art and life to make their own tasks easier, to relieve themselves of their own answerability. For it is certainly easier to create without answering for life, and easier to live without any consideration for art.”34

Bakhtin and Herzen both argue that one should speak not of moral norms or systems but of moral creativity—in Bakhtin's words, “the process of creating the ethical deed”; his term for this is “architectonics”—the shaping of a relationship between the individual and his or her constantly changing natural and cultural environment: “It is this concrete architectonic of the actual world of the performed act that moral philosophy has to describe, that is, not the abstract scheme but the concrete plan or design of the world of a unitary and once-occurrent act or deed, the basic concrete moments of its construction and their mutual disposition. These basic moments are I-for-myself, the other-for-me and I-for-the-other. All the values of actual life and culture are arranged around the basic architectonic points of the actual world of the performed act or deed; scientific values, aesthetic values, political values (including both ethical and social values), and finally, religious values.”35

The architectonics of responsibility that Bakhtin attempted to work out in the early 1920s have been described as not a theory, but rather an agenda of topics so complex that one lifetime would not have sufficed to think them through.36 He made a start in that direction through his work on the novel form. He argued that the very characteristics of the novel which have led it to be widely regarded as artistically inferior to other genres—its structural and stylistic openness and its diversity of voices—constitute its unique virtue as a source of moral understanding. Above all, it sharpens our sense of the particular. Characters make choices in situations that cannot be represented in neat formulas. They express their beliefs and values in their individual styles and in “heteroglot” social environments in which no view is incontestable. Some, like Konstantin Levin in Anna Karenina, are obsessed with the search for timeless truth; but their moral stature emerges through their ability to respond meaningfully to the unfinished ambivalence of quotidian existence. Hence Bakhtin's term for the distinguishing feature of the novel form: “prosaic wisdom.”37 The “living discourse” of the novel, “still warm” from the passions and struggles of everyday life, the genre's ability to convey the “density and concreteness of time” with such markers as a human life, provide an education in moral discrimination which no system of universal norms can furnish. By situating actions and events in well-determined temporal frames and spatial areas, the novel “makes narrative events concrete … causes blood to flow in their veins.” Time “thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible.”38

Thought must “take on flesh, descend into the marketplace of life, unfold in all the splendor and beauty of transient existence”: this was Herzen's advice to those who sought to understand and influence historical processes. In their search for methods and approaches that would convey the “ambivalent wholeness” of the contingent world, both thinkers turned to the natural sciences. Herzen recommended their experimental methods for the training of historians. Bakhtin was intensely interested in physical and biological science: critics have pointed to the way in which his notions of dialogism and addressivity mirror the interdependence of organisms and their physical environments.39 Great novelists, he believed, possessed a “relativized, Galilean linguistic consciousness” which could represent a wide diversity of voices, worldviews, meanings, and values engaged in open-ended struggle and evolution.40 Like Herzen, he paid especially close attention to the discoveries that were progressively replacing linear thinking with multiperspectivism in the human and natural sciences. He records that a lecture in 1925 by the eminent physiologist A. A. Ukhtomsky on the interconnectedness of spatial and temporal relations in biology inspired his own study of the chronotope, or space-time (a term he adopts from Einstein's theory of relativity), in the novel.41

True “artistic thinking,” as defined by Bakhtin and Herzen, shares the scientist's fascination with the evolving forms of an unpredictable and unfinalizable world. They each cite the example of Goethe, who was engrossed both as artist and scientist in the study of existence as process. Bakhtin admired Goethe's “heroic” struggle to introduce ideas of emergence and development into the natural sciences. He devotes much of an unfinished work on the Bildungsroman to a discussion of the feeling for historical time that enabled Goethe to perceive in the concretely visible not static existence but emergence, development, and history: “For [Goethe] contemporaneity—both in nature and in human life—is revealed as an essential multitemporality: as remnants and relics of various stages and formations of the past and as rudiments of stages in the more or less distant future.”42 Bakhtin's work on Goethe in the late 1930s coincided with and evidently influenced the writing of his doctoral thesis on Rabelais and the carnival vision of the world. As the misunderstood innovator explained to his examiners, he had aimed in his study “to catch existence in the process of becoming.”43

This emphasis on the unfinalizability of history and human beings stood in radical opposition to the dominant eschatological tendency of Russian thought which looked to some formula—whether sobornost or socialism—for a final resolution of all conflicts between essence and existence, the part and the whole. Herzen insisted that social and political forms must, like uniforms, “adapt willy-nilly to a living content”; if they do not, that is a sign that the given society lacks the freedom or the creative vitality to shape its own existence.44 Bakhtin writes in similar vein,

An individual cannot be completely incarnated into the flesh of existing sociohistorical categories. There is no mere form that would be able to incarnate once and forever all of his human possibilities and needs, no form in which he could exhaust himself down to the last word, like the tragic or epic hero; no form that he could fill to the very brim, and yet at the same time not splash over the brim. There always remains an unrealized surplus of humanness; there always remains a need for the future, and a place for this future must be found. All existing clothes are always too tight, and thus comical, on a man.45

Herzen had argued that we should be comforted, not distressed, by the empirical evidence that humanity was not programmed to reach a final state of harmony. If such a future could be predicted confidently, our lives would come to seem no more than shadowy anticipations of the fulfillment promised to future generations. The romantic longing for wholeness was equally foreign to Bakhtin's thought. He spoke not of alienation but of alterity (drugost)—not a fall from some Eden that would one day be regained, but an empirical state which had both limitations and advantages. No two bodies can simultaneously occupy the same place or see the same thing, nor can we ever see ourselves entirely; each of us in any given context has an “excess of seeing” with regard to others, whose perspectives can in turn supplement our view of ourselves. Bakhtin believed that this is a condition whose creative potential is to be celebrated. He deplores “the false tendency toward reducing everything to a single consciousness, toward dissolving in it the other's consciousness.”46 The overcoming of all tension and struggle, even if it were possible, would result in the creative impoverishment of humanity: “In what way would it enrich the event if I merged with the other, and instead of two there would now be only one? And what would I myself gain by the other's merging with me? If he did, he would see and know no more than what I see and know myself. … Let him rather remain outside of me, for in that position he can see and know what I myself do not see and do not know from my own place, and he can essentially enrich the event of my own life.”47

Human creative fulfillment does not come about through the synthesizing of points of view: “On the contrary, it consists in the intensification of one's own outsideness [vnenakhodimost] with respect to others, one's own distinctness from others: it consists in fully exploiting the privilege of one's own unique place outside other human beings.” This outsideness must be preserved if solidarity with others, expressed in ethical actions, is to be fruitful. A pure projection of myself into the other would represent no more than an infection with another's suffering. Aesthetic and ethical activity begins only when what we receive through our empathy with others is completed with elements of our own perspective. “Sympathetic understanding is not a mirroring, but a fundamentally and essentially new valuation, a utilization of my own architectonic position in being outside another's inner life.”48

Bakhtin rejected the claim that in order to understand a foreign culture one should seek to view the world wholly from its perspective: on the contrary, one's location outside a given culture permits one to uncover meanings and potential hidden from those within: “For one cannot really even 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.49 Through this process both the foreign culture and one's own are enriched in new and unexpected ways.

Bakhtin and Herzen both vigorously exploited the advantages of their outsideness in relation to Western culture. Herzen was equally opposed to the Slavophiles' belief that Russian culture should seal itself off from foreign influences and to the Russian Westernizers' demand that their country abandon its native institutions and merge culturally with the West. He believed that the great unsolved problem of the modern age—to discover a form of social organization that would combine the values of individual autonomy with social solidarity—could best be approached if Russia, with its still existing peasant communes, and the West, with its tradition of the defense of individual freedom, brought their differing perspectives to bear on each other's values and experience. His own outsider's reflections on the strengths and weaknesses of European political culture contain some profound perceptions, but he has had few listeners. In contrast, Bakhtin's studies of European literary genres and folk culture have become milestones in Western literary and cultural theory. He owed some of his most significant insights to his perspective as a thinker on the margins of his own society, who had lived through one of the two greatest revolutions of the modern age. Hence his affinities with another historical turning point, the early Renaissance, which he celebrates as a time when a creative thinker could exist simultaneously in different cultures and value systems, approaching each from the perspective of an outsider. He was fascinated with such thresholds and border zones, where norms and canons lose their force and language sheds that “hidden dogmatism” which follows from the strict demarcation of vocabularies. At such points in history, he maintained, creative freedom and inventiveness reach their height, expressed in images that are “completely new, self-criticizing, absolutely sober, fearless.”50

This last phrase signals a significant difference between the two thinkers. When Herzen writes of the fight against stultifying dogma and repressive authority, it is usually with specific reference to the contemporary situation in Russia or Europe, and he warns the reader not to believe that there are any easy solutions to real conflicts. When Bakhtin writes on the same theme it is often unclear whether he is talking about literature, life, or both, and this indeterminacy allows him to indulge in a degree of wishful thinking that Herzen would have dismissed as pure utopianism. The implied other in Bakhtin's dialogues has been described as being “as a rule benignly active, always at work to define us in ways we can live with and profit from.”51 Herzen's analysis of social struggle in France in 1848 and peasant revolts in Russia led him to question the realism of those who believed that any genuine dialogue was possible between the ideals of a cultured minority and the demands of a desperate, vengeful mass movement. We have seen that Bakhtin admitted that his benevolent depiction of carnival revolt had been deliberately one-sided in order to force home a philosophical point, but it can be argued that even on the level of theory his discussion would have benefited from a clear distinction between two fundamentally different ways in which humans have historically sought to free themselves from repressive authorities and norms. As Tzvetan Todorov puts it, “Dialogue favours the establishment of the individual, of the ‘Thou’ as much as the ‘I’; carnival dissolves the individual into the collective action of the crowd. Dialogue is choice and freedom, carnival demands submission to the group. Dialogue is order and sense, carnival chaos and orgy: dialogue is Apollo, carnival Dionysus.”52

Dialogue is Bakhtinian: Rabelaisian carnival is Bakuninist in its celebration of the creative force of the passion for destruction—a principle which (as Herzen often reminded Bakunin) was attractive in theory but usually catastrophic in historical application. Some Russian scholars have explained Bakhtin's apparent blindness to the violence of mass movements and their potential for abuse as the result of conditioning by the rhetoric of Stalinism.53 Certainly, it cannot easily be reconciled with his belief in the inalienable responsibility of individuals for their actions; but by far the greater part of his work is a consistent articulation of that belief. Despite his utopian propensities, Bakhtin's rejection of an alibi in Being set him squarely against the forms of imposture on which Stalin's tyranny relied.

As Caryl Emerson has observed, “Discrediting the absurd dichotomy between ‘system or nothing’” was Bakhtin's single major task.54 He distanced himself equally from relativism and dogmatism, pointing out that relativism made authentic dialogue about meanings and values unnecessary, while dogmatism made it impossible. But most commentaries on his work have tended to ignore his warnings about how not to categorize him. On the one hand, his ideas have been compared with those of relativists and neopragmatists like Richard Rorty;55 on the other, his thought is frequently approached as a coherent ideological system. On the basis of texts whose authorship remains disputed, he has been represented as a Marxist, a Freudian, a formalist, and a semiotician;56 while because he was a believer and associated with religious circles in the 1920s, his work is often approached as a coded theology. Parallels have been drawn between his thought and Orthodox religious philosophers, and with Buber, whom he is known to have admired. But the I-thou relationship in Buber's thought is grounded in an absolute Thou, whereas Bakhtin avoided discussion of ends and essences, focusing exclusively on processes in time and space. His concept of moral responsibility did not exclude the possibility of God but did not require a deity as the source of moral norms. For the same reason, attempts to interpret dialogism and even carnival as expressions of the traditional concept of sobornost, while impressively ingenious, do not carry conviction.57 We long to believe that the meaning of our lives will not end with their factual existence, but “in being there are no guarantees of the ought-to-be,” he wrote in the 1920s.58

Herzen frequently complained of being identified with systems that he opposed or, alternatively, of being represented as a pessimistic nihilist. He attributed these misunderstandings to his critics' persistence in interpreting his thought with the aid of the very categories that it was intended to subvert. Bakhtin, as we have seen, was engaged in a similar form of subversion, attempting to articulate a new way of describing the world—to which (as the most probing studies of his work have recognized) familiar dichotomies, such as rationalism/irrationalism, do not apply. The philosopher G. L. Tulchinsky describes Bakhtin's thought as a fundamentally other approach to reason and logic (inoratsionalnost) which rejects the teleological and programmatic interpretation of rationality as optimal effectiveness in the realization of preset goals; Bakhtin, he argues, is rational according to different criteria of effectiveness, rooted in the ancient idea of the harmonious wholeness of the Cosmos, which approach the world as “the reciprocal supplementarity of unrepeatable individualities.”59 In an article of 1976 the eminent classicist and philosopher S. S. Averintsev described Bakhtin as a “wisdom-lover among the specialists,” who resisted the dehumanizing effects of the obsession with methodology in the humanities, offering instead “philosophical anthropology,” the “ability to see the literary word as a human word.”60

Bakhtin admired Averintsev, whose description of the study of symbols he cites in support of his own approach to methodology in the humanities: “not an unscientific, but a differently scientific [inonauchnaia] form of knowledge that has its own internal laws and criteria for precision”—a description that has been greeted as particularly appropriate to Bakhtin's own thinking.61

Herzen had the same kind of inoratsionalnost and inonauka in mind when he wrote in 1859, “There is not one kind of reason, there are two: the reason of the world that is going down like the evening sun does not coincide with the reason of the world that is rising like the dawn.62 He and Bakhtin were among that avant-garde of thinkers who since the mid-nineteenth century have focused their attention on the erosion of faith in teleological systems and the ways it must affect our understanding of the world and of human relations. They both belonged to an even more select subset who were undismayed by the challenge of having to justify contingent existence without reference to first causes or final ends. Schopenhauer reacted to the role of chance in history by declaring all phenomenal existence worthless, while Nietzsche responded to it with his tragic “pessimism of strength.63 But Herzen and Bakhtin wholeheartedly welcomed the discrediting of teleological thinking as a belated rehabilitation of the “world of earthly beauty” which idealists had disfigured, devalued, and despised for so many centuries. They did not believe that a genuinely scientific approach to the human personality would deny or diminish its value. To the narrow dogmatists among the Russian Left, who appealed to scientific method to justify their contempt for people and ideas that did not conform to their a priori systems, Herzen retorted that true science “even more than the Gospel teaches us humility. She cannot look down on anything, she does not know what superiority means, she despises nothing, never lies for the sake of a pose. … Science is love.” Instead of seeking to impose their political recipes on the masses, the Left should attentively study the existing values and aspirations of those whose lives they sought to improve: “Manna does not fall from the sky, as it does in children's fairy tales; it grows up from the soil. … Learn to listen to the grass growing and don't lecture it on how to form ears of wheat.”64

“Lovelessness, indifference,” Bakhtin wrote, “will never be able to generate sufficient power to slow down and linger intently over an object, to hold and sculpt every detail and particular in it, however minute. Only love is capable of being aesthetically productive.”65 Aesthetic love was the defining characteristic of his and Herzen's approach to the world—as is also true of the third great innovator treated in this book: Chekhov, who, like the character in his story who aspired to “keep pace with everything,” was lovingly attentive to the inexhaustible diversity of natural phenomena and human character. Bakhtin wrote in his old age of his “love for variations and for a diversity of terms for a single phenomenon. The multiplicity of focuses.”66 Apart from occasional excursions into utopian optimism, he remained faithful throughout his life to the views expressed in his early essay on art and answerability: “Inspiration that ignores life and is itself ignored by life is not inspiration but a state of possession,” while on the other hand the person who complains that great art has no relevance to his humdrum daily existence “ought to know that the fruitlessness of art is due to his unwillingness to be exacting and to the unseriousness of the concerns in his life.”67

Bakhtin's, Herzen's, and Chekhov's aesthetic approach to life was no hazy, all-embracing benevolence: it demanded an attention to the “humble prose of living”68 (Bakhtin's term) that was far more exacting and serious than the attitude of those who relied on ready-made rules to guide their actions. Herzen often remarked on the depth of the human fear of freedom: the last thing we rely on is ourselves. The absence of universal norms opens up terrifying vistas: we can advance in any direction or remain stationary, with no certainty as to the outcome of any of our choices, knowing only that they will matter. Science has shown the world to be neither system nor chaos: open and largely unpredictable but not a directionless flux. Our every act has consequences that will affect the unitary texture of existence. It is therefore our moral responsibility to develop a sense of aesthetic measure and balance that will allow us to combine a coherence in our responses with an openness to the specific contours of individual situations and human personalities that will elicit their potential without demanding of them what they cannot give.

According to the testimony of their contemporaries, Herzen, Chekhov, and Bakhtin each possessed this sense of measure to a remarkable degree. It was expressed most clearly in their dislike of all forms of bullying and of the doctrinaire intolerance that seeks to force life down one path rather than considering the value of alternative ways of living and seeing. Chekhov speaks for all three when he reserves his most severe criticism for the “lazy, philosophizing, cold” type of intellectuals who “are ready to deny everything, because it is easier for a lazy brain to deny than to affirm.”69

Notes

  1. C. Emerson, The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin (Princeton, 1997). As will become evident, this chapter is greatly indebted to Emerson's book.

  2. V. L. Makhlin, “Nasledie M. M. Bakhtina v kontekste zapadnogo postmodernizma,” eds. L. A. Gogotishvili and P. S. Gurevich, M. M. Bakhtin kak filosof (Moscow, 1992), 209-10.

  3. G. S. Morson and C. Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford, 1990), 23-32.

  4. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo (Moscow, 1979), 314.

  5. Like earlier Russian moralists Bakhtin is an object of reverence among many Russian intellectuals as an ethical mentor: Georgii Gachev, one of the group who discovered him in the 1960s, relates that he became for them “something like a living church.” Emerson, Bakhtin, 50.

  6. MB [Mikhail Bakhtin], The Dialogic Imagination, ed. M. Holquist, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin, 1981), 354, 293, 357, 410; MB, Problemy, 193.

  7. MB, Problemy, 126, 141.

  8. Ibid., 141, 193, 195.

  9. For a survey of criticism on these themes, see Emerson, Bakhtin, chaps. 3, 4. She notes that at the Bakhtin Centennial Conference nobody, neither Russians nor non-Russians, devoted a paper to Bakhtin on Dostoevsky (134).

  10. See ibid., 94-96.

  11. See Terry Eagleton's interpretation of Bakhtinian carnival as “a political weapon against ruling-class idealism's paranoid fear of the flesh” (“Bakhtin, Schopenhauer, Kundera,” eds. K. Hirschkop and D. Shepherd, Bakhtin and Cultural Theory [Manchester, 1989], 180); and see Holquist's view that Bakhtin introduces a “kink” into traditional Marxist categories which has the potential for renewing socialist thought. Holquist argues that such critics as Eagleton and Fredric Jameson have demonstrated convincingly that Bakhtin “can serve as an armoury of conceptual weapons that will advance the cause of Leftist social analysis” (R. Barsky and M. Holquist, eds., Bakhtin and Otherness: Discours social/Social Discourse, vol. 3, nos. 1-2 [1990]). In contrast, the Soviet scholar Viktor Shklovsky accused Bakhtin in 1970 of not defining the political targets of carnival laughter sufficiently precisely. See Emerson, Bakhtin, 104-05.

  12. MB, Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 94.

  13. MB, Problemy, 155, 184, 168-69.

  14. Cited by J. Frank, “Lunacharsky was impressed,” London Review of Books, 19 February 1998, 20.

  15. Caryl Emerson argues that carnival for Bakhtin “is simply a name given to that moment of enablement—inevitably transitory—during which the self feels itself to be an agent in the world, that moment when a human being no longer feels helpless, nor prays, nor begs” (Bakhtin, 103).

  16. From the stenographic transcription of Bakhtin's dissertation defense (cited in ibid., 95).

  17. See the discussion of such parallels in V. Liapunov's notes to MB, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, trans. and annotated by V. Liapunov, ed. M. Holquist and V. Liapunov (Austin, 1993).

  18. Herzen's name occurs very rarely in the context of discussions of Bakhtin. Two exceptions are Morson and Emerson, who mention Herzen as a representative of the tradition of Russian anti-ideological thinkers to which they believe Bakhtin belongs (Mikhail Bakhtin, 23); and K. G. Isupov, who points to (but does not discuss) a resemblance between Bakhtin's and Herzen's approaches to ethics as moral creativity. “Ot estetiki zhizni k estetike istorii (Traditsii russkoi filosofii u M. M. Bakhtina),” M. M. Bakhtin kak filosof, 70.

  19. MB, Rabelais, 59; SS [A. I Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii, 30 vols. (Moscow, 1954-66)], 13:190.

  20. SS, 5:89.

  21. MB, Problemy, 191.

  22. See above, chap. 2.

  23. MB, Problemy, 191; Rabelais, 95, 122-23.

  24. MB, Rabelais, 94.

  25. MB, Philosophy of the Act, 50-51.

  26. M. Holquist, ed., The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin, 1981), 85.

  27. MB, Philosophy of the Act, 6, 40, 41, 52.

  28. SS, 11:248, 252.

  29. MB, Philosophy of the Act, 27, 37; Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. V. McGee, ed. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin, 1986), 139.

  30. MB, Philosophy of the Act, 19.

  31. Ibid., 20, 53, 30-31.

  32. Ibid., 31.

  33. OS [A. I. Herzen, From the Other Shore and The Russian People and Socialism, trans. M. Budberg and R. Wollheim (Oxford, 1979)], 38, 24.

  34. MB, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, ed. M. Holquist and V. Liapunov, trans. and annotated by V. Liapunov (Austin, 1990), 2.

  35. MB, Philosophy of the Act, 54.

  36. K. Clark, M. Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 64.

  37. See Morson's and Emerson's discussion of the significance of this concept in Bakhtin's theory of the novel form (Mikhail Bakhtin, chap. 8), and their own use of the term “prosaics” to characterize Bakhtin's thought (ibid., 15-36).

  38. MB, The Dialogic Imagination, 331, 250, 84.

  39. See Clark and Holquist, Bakhtin, 66-67.

  40. MB, The Dialogic Imagination, 327.

  41. Ibid., 84.

  42. MB, Speech Genres, 28.

  43. Cited in Emerson, Bakhtin, 96.

  44. SS, 19:191.

  45. MB, The Dialogic Imagination, 37.

  46. MB, Art and Answerability, 22-27; Speech Genres, 141.

  47. MB, Art and Answerability, 87.

  48. Ibid., 88, 103.

  49. MB, Speech Genres, 7.

  50. MB, Rabelais, 472.

  51. Morson and Emerson, Bakhtin, 470. The authors observe that “Bakhtin presumes no absolute conflict between an organism and its surroundings, just as he presumes no conflict in principle between self and society” (ibid.).

  52. T. Todorov, “I, Thou, Russia,” Times Literary Supplement, 13 March 1998, 7.

  53. See Emerson, Bakhtin, 169-71.

  54. Ibid., 71.

  55. See ibid., 276n13.

  56. The texts in question—P. Medvedev's The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, V. Voloshinov's Freudianism: A Critical Sketch, and Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (a work on semiotics), as well as a number of articles by Voloshinov and Medvedev—are all avowedly Marxist and at odds with Bakhtin's fundamental opposition to “theoretism.” On the controversy over their authorship and the reasons for the practice of attributing these works to Bakhtin, see Morson and Emerson, Bakhtin, 100-19. In my view their analysis demonstrates conclusively that Bakhtin was not the author of the disputed works.

  57. See G. Gachev's view, based on acquaintance with Bakhtin in the 1960s: “In Bakhtin's understanding of sobornost … everyone gazes not upward, toward heaven, nor forward, at the priest or the altar, but at one another, realizing the kenosis of God, on the low horizontal level that is our own.” Emerson, Bakhtin, 158-59. On religious interpretations of his concept of carnival, see ibid., 172-79. See also Emerson, “Russian Orthodoxy and the Early Bakhtin,” Religion and Literature 22, no. 2-3 (1990): 109-31. She describes Bakhtin's religion as “a very uncertain entity” (113).

  58. MB, Art and Answerability, 128. Bakhtin defines faith as “need and hope … non-self-contentment and … possibility” (ibid, 144).

  59. G. L. Tul'chinskii, “Dvazhdy ‘otstavshii’ M. Bakhtin: postupochnost' i inoratsional'nost' bytiia,” M. M. Bakhtin i filosofskaia kul'tura XX veka. Problemy bakhtinologii, part 1 (St. Petersburg, 1991), 59.

  60. Cited by Emerson, Bakhtin, 112.

  61. MB, Speech Genres, 160. See Emerson's Afterword on the prospects for Bakhtin's “inonauka”: Bakhtin, 264ff.

  62. SS, 14:107.

  63. F. Nietzsche, Werke in Drei Bänden, ed. K. Schlechta (Munich, 1954-56), 1:9.

  64. SS, 20:345, 16:27.

  65. MB, Philosophy of the Act, 64.

  66. MB, Speech Genres, 155 (from notes made in 1970-71).

  67. MB, Art and Answerability, 2.

  68. Ibid., 1.

  69. AC [Anton Chekhov] to A. S. Suvorin, 27 December 1889. Polnoe sobranie (Pis'ma), 3:309.

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