Bakhtin After the Boom: Pro and Contra
[In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture on 30 October 2001, Emerson reviews controversies in Bahktinian scholarship, provides insight into Bakhtin as a teacher and reader of texts, and speculates on possible future directions for Bakhtin studies.]
My topic today is the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) and the contours of his posthumous life. The 1970s and 1980s witnessed an explosion of interest in Bakhtin, a thinker who hitherto had been almost wholly unknown outside his native land. Indeed, in Soviet Russia itself he was ‘discovered’ only in the early 1960s, already an old man teaching in a pedagogical institute in the provinces, with one major publication to his name (1929), a dissertation defended after the Second World War, and a trunk of manuscripts stretching over fifty years. Suddenly translations proliferated, intermediaries emerged to explain them, a biography was heroically pieced together—and Bakhtin's categories spread like wildfire through the academies of the world, encouraging literary critics and cultural theorists to rethink familiar terrain in terms of dialogue, carnival, chronotope. None of those concepts were completely new, nor were any of them especially precise. But to a much greater extent than the earlier booms in structuralism, deconstruction and post-structuralism, Bakhtin was accessible—and palpable. Although his writing style could not be called elegant, it swarmed with living, moving consciousnesses. Bakhtin did resemble the structuralist thinkers in his love for overarching binaries, categorical generalizations, and the clever diagram, yet readers did not feel especially oppressed or depersonalized by these geometries. At times it even seemed that Bakhtin purposely set up a binary so that it would not stand, so that he could reveal both sides as equally, fatally deficient. His best arguments were made or broken not on abstract metaphysics but on bodies and voices.
Most importantly, it was clear that Bakhtin had no interest in undermining the tools of his trade. In this, he was being true to the conservative, custodial approach to high culture characteristic of the Soviet literary establishment in the 1930s through the 1950s. Russian intellectuals of that time were so harassed, so accustomed to political intervention and violence against both poetry and poets, that they valued this martyred aesthetic sphere to an extraordinary degree and lived a good deal of their real lives within its precious space. Quite understandably, they were not easily persuaded that the primary resources of literature were somehow suspect or impotent. Ideologies which decreed that the word could not hold meaning, or that the author could not realize an intent, or that we are governed not by consciousness but by obscure, uncontrollable, pre-scripted impulses, were slower to catch on in Soviet Russia—and not only because of state-mandated Marxist-Leninist-humanist constraints on texts and methodologies. Bakhtin belonged to a generation of literary professionals that believed in the literary word as an indestructible, almost sacred thing. This high status lent both the literary word, and the author who employed that word, a certain spiritual autonomy. During the Stalinist years, many Russian literary scholars became excellent textologists, literary historians, and translators, because the general feeling was that in times of very great trouble, the most vulnerable and valuable dialogues to preserve were not the so-called ‘relevant’ ones, that is, discussions about the text such as routinely crop up with every new generation of readers or critics (communications of that sort were bound to be capricious, manipulated, unfree) but rather the dialogues that were already fixed inside the work, those taking place between author and text, or among the created characters within the fictional world. In any event, it was imperative to save the artwork from falling victim to the time and space that surrounded it.
I emphasize this Russian context for Bakhtin, because by and large such a custodial attitude toward art has not answered to the experience or priorities of the sunnier academies in the West. During the years preceding the Bakhtin boom, we had been dazzled by a contrary set of operations: suspect the intentions of the artist, elevate the critic, interrogate the tools, and encourage as much leakage between artwork and world as you can—because it was relevance, not custodial reverence, that would best serve the interests of culture and society. Since Sartre in the late 1940s, the pendulum had swung between ‘engaged literature’, answering resolutely to the anguish of its time, and literary production perceived as entirely disengaged, even as disabled, caught up in the contradictions of language itself. Thus the advent of Bakhtin's rich, self-sufficient voice felt like a sort of liberation from these two theoretically pure extremes, a return to the ‘real thing’. Here was a theorist clearly in love with literature for its own sake, literature as a primary nutrient, who never tired of reminding us of all those thousands of years during which the fictional text has served as a storage-vault for human voice and consciousness. Literature was an act of courage. Barren abstract philosophy was out; a hermeneutics of suspicion was on the retreat. Without appearing naïve or ridiculous, it was again becoming possible to trust.1
I will return at the end of this talk to the nature of Bakhtin's trust, because it is a curious phenomenon, one that survives both the subversions of carnival and the chipping away of authorial perogatives in polyphony. Let it suffice for now that at the centre of Bakhtin's system was trust in the word. In the 1920s, Bakhtin shared with both Futurism and progressive Marxism an insistence that art be proactive, unsettling, transfigurative, capable of estranging and revivifying the world. In the early years of Soviet power, Bakhtin and his circle contributed to this pro-active public trend, which Bakhtin kept alive until the end of his life as one of the central truths of his beloved carnival. Later, in the more cautious Stalinist era, Bakhtin shifted ground. Art's most valuable purpose became its potential for providing a refuge for individual consciousness—whence the celebration of the novel, with its distinction of being the only modern literary genre designed to be both composed, and consumed, alone. As Charles Lock has recently argued, the triumph of the mute novel over the noisy declaimed genres was a revolutionary milestone in the privatization of experience.2 With a novel in hand, ‘the reading body makes for itself a private non-collective space’; since novelistic discourse resists any easy or unambiguous voicing, communities that once had gathered ‘around a text read aloud, now disintegrate: one person, one text’ (p. 74). At last, a genre is born that subverts the social order by allowing the ‘eruption of the unspeakable’ into discourse (p. 75). Lock concludes his essay by suggesting that the novel as a genre ‘liberates us as civic and domestic subjects from the duties and burdens of rational conversation, and reconstitutes us in ways yet to be understood: subjects without obligation to enunciate’ (p. 85). In the bourgeois West, such an option might seem quite unmarked and even humdrum. In Stalinist Russia, of course, where a failure to join the chorus could itself be the crime that cost you your life, it was heroic and potentially heretic. In a word, Bakhtin seemed to offer something for all seasons. He was the patron saint of engagement and subversion as well as silence, of communality as well as privacy. His arrival on the critical scene felt like a return of the old values in a thrillingly new, more flexible synthesis.
Now, three decades after his Western debut, Bakhtin has become a classic. He is massively anthologized, taught in graduate seminars the world over, pursued in half a dozen journals devoted solely to his work, and already well ‘institutionalized’ (a Bakhtin Centre has been founded at the University of Sheffield, and to date ten international conferences have been devoted to Bakhtin's work, the last of which took place in July 2001 in the northern Polish city of Gdagnsk). The extant translations of Bakhtin, which regrettably are full of inconsistencies and errors, are being corrected and standardized—and, as part of a huge cyber-project at the Centre, Bakhtin is well on his way to being established authoritatively on-line. His collected works in seven volumes are slowly emerging from Moscow, under the general editorship of Sergei Bocharov (volume 5 was published in 1996, volume 2 in 2000; the remaining volumes, optimistically, have been promised before 2003). In the fastidious tradition of Soviet textology, every archival scrap is perused and commented upon. No major new books have been uncovered in the archive, but the genesis of those we do have is being reconstructed and Bakhtin's sources cautiously investigated. It turns out that almost every text we have translated was, to a greater or lesser degree, corrupt.
Two clarifications, forthcoming in volumes 3 and 4, promise to be of special interest. The first is Bakhtin's huge study of the ‘Bildungsroman and its Significance in the History of Realism’, a project shrouded in mystery. One of the most durable Bakhtin stories still in circulation is that this manuscript was ‘smoked away’ by the chain-smoking Bakhtin, who, as an impecunious exile, could not afford cigarette papers during the 1930s, or (in a supplementary legend) that its page proofs were bombed out of existence at the beginning of the Second World War. This book, it now seems, was never finished at all. Volume 3 of the collected works will contain all of its extant drafts and archival traces. And, second, there are the three versions of the Rabelais study—1940, 1950 and 1965—each different, and each with its own ratio of literary history to carnival theory to plain old pleasurable obscenity. (Apparently it was this ubiquitous, exuberant obscenity in the earlier versions, rather than any strictly theoretical indiscretions, that caused the Soviet authorities to postpone and censor the manuscript for so many years.) All three versions of Bakhtin's book on Rabelais will be published separately in the huge, two-part volume 4.
So the mass of strictly scholarly material surrounding Bakhtin has grown to enormous size, as befits the apparatus accompanying a ‘classic’. But because scientific precision applied to a popular figure always involves debunking and demythologizing, the Bakhtin cult and industry, as it grows, is being slowly disciplined and cleansed of its accretions. Legends and mysteries are being replaced by documented events, big claims are whittled down, and ideas credited to Bakhtin are being restored to their original owners. In Ken Hirschkop's engaging phrase, ‘For a long time we knew very little about Bakhtin's life. Thanks to the efforts of post-glasnost Bakhtin scholarship, we know even less.’3 Now that the boom has levelled off, what's left on the ground? What issues remain most productive? How have the hot spots around Bakhtin shifted over the years? My personal speculation, as an old ‘Bakhtin hand’, on these questions will be the substance of the remainder of this talk.
The ‘hot spots’ first. Several areas caused scandals—real turf wars—in the 1980s, which have now either ended in a draw or moved their indignation elsewhere. Primary among these quarrels was ‘who wrote what’: the question of the ‘disputed texts’. Did Bakhtin in the mid-1920s simply hand over to his friends Pavel Medvedev and Valentin Voloshinov three very good manuscripts as ‘gifts’ to be published under their names (to Medvedev a book criticizing Formalism, and to Voloshinov a screed against Freud, followed by a very impressive text on the philosophy of language)? Or were these manuscripts in some way ‘co-authored’ efforts? Since Medvedev and Voloshinov were sincere Marxists, and Bakhtin himself relied very little on Marxism for the fundamental tenets of his worldview, how one answered this question had serious ideological consequences. To this day, the evidence remains inconclusive. But two things can be said about this debate. First, a crudely satirical anti-Marxist reflex, popular during the early, angry post-communist 1990s in both Russia and abroad, is no longer in fashion. Bakhtin's trademark intellectual tolerance and his ability to appreciate and absorb a multitude of languages has at last begun to infect scholarship on this topic. Just as Bakhtin was no Freudian but nevertheless acknowledged the creative power of Freudian vocabulary because, in his view, every great thinker adds something new to the potential of the word, so was he no Marxist—but he respected its potency as an ‘idea-horizon’ and a provocative organizer of concepts.4 Recent research suggests that the early Bakhtin, in company with thinkers as diverse as Nicolas Berdyaev and Georg Simmel, fully acknowledged the value of Marxism as social criticism (especially its charismatic concept of alienation); what they rejected was Marxism's thoroughgoing materialism.5 In January 1999, one sober review of the Bakhtin-and-Marxism question in the Russian press put it this way: all attempts to ‘cleanse Bakhtin from any suspicion of inner inclinations to Marxism, whether direct or oblique … have been failures’, and are untrue to his temperament as well as to the times in which he lived.6
So: Bakhtin's own inclusive, ‘all sides are partly true’ cast of mind is having a benign effect on the old feuds. In a complementary move, thanks in large part to the scrupulous scholarship of Galin Tihanov, attention has been re-focused away from the contentious Marxist connection in Bakhtin and toward the Hegel connection—which is less partisan, more speculative, and indisputably profound.7 But the second thing that must be said about the ‘authorship debates’ is far more awkward than whether or not Bakhtin's purported Marxism was a mask. Namely, grounds for that debate have shifted from the manuscripts and ideas that Bakhtin generously gifted to others, an image compatible with the hagiography of Soviet-era martyrs, to the ideas—indeed, to the verbatim paragraphs and pages—that Bakhtin appropriated, without credit, from others, and wrote up as his own. Most of these others turn out to be luminaries in the German philosophical and philological tradition, a language and culture Bakhtin knew intimately from childhood. They include Max Weber, Max Scheler, Broder Christensen, Friedrich Spielhagen, Georg Simmel and most egregiously Ernst Cassirer, whose powerful theses on the Renaissance and its carnival-body worldview Bakhtin simply downloaded silently into his own texts.8 The Bakhtin archive contains abundant pages of pure translation, as well as rough paraphrase, from German into Russian, which Bakhtin apparently incorporated into his working notebooks.
These ‘immoral borrowings’ have caused real distress in the field. Especially unattractive is Bakhtin's piracy of a Jewish intellectual from Nazi Germany such as Cassirer, persecuted, blacklisted and then in exile during the inter-war years. Accusations of plagiarism and suspicions of intellectual theft are such that some Bakhtinians have gone on the defensive. Two Danish scholars recently remarked, with some impatience, that Michel Foucault often handled his sources in a comparable manner, but in Foucault's case the technique is celebrated as a ‘philosophical masquerade’; but ‘when the same technique is discovered in Bakhtin, it has been taken as a sign of scientific and ethical shortcomings’.9 This comparison with a high guru of French cultural theory is instructive. For all that Bakhtin might talk of tricksters and jesters, and for all that he is said to have remarked, sadly, in the early 1970s that he had been ‘no better than his time’ and that everything, everything produced on that soil and under those skies was a distortion, a betrayal of homeland and culture,10 the fact is: we do expect Russian literature, and Russian critics, to be morally better than their time—and we more easily exempt other nationalities from this requirement. In a Russian context, it appears, even carnival trickery must be heroic and highminded.
The second ‘hot spot’ upon which some progress has been made is not political or ethical but more a matter of definition. Was Bakhtin at heart a literary scholar and critic (what the Russians call a filolog, a philologist), or a philosopher? At the end of his life, in his conversations with the Soviet Mayakovsky scholar Viktor Duvakin, Bakhtin claimed that he had always been the latter: ‘more a philosopher than a philologist—and such I have remained to the present day. I am a philosopher, a thinker [myslitel']’.11 He also let drop the remark that literary criticism was to a certain extent a ‘parasitical profession’.12 This issue matters not for professional ‘c.v.’ reasons (Bakhtin never took such official labels seriously), but because of its impact on the famous, and at times famously eccentric, literary readings that Bakhtin produced: of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Rabelais, Goethe. If Bakhtin drew these master novelists into his worldview largely to illustrate a philosophical thesis, then we could excuse the occasional counter-intuitive conclusion that emerged on the literary front. For much here is open to dispute. There is, for example, Bakhtin's famous claim in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics that Leo Tolstoy was everywhere ‘monolithically monologic’, and that Dostoevsky was so thoroughly polyphonic that he did not care about plot, did not register a unified worldview in his novels, and was not successful in embedding there any authoritative voices.13 Bakhtin's surviving fragment on Goethe, entitled ‘The Bildungsroman and its Significance in the History of Realism’, suggests that the great German writer valued above all ‘organic vision’.14 Likewise Nikolai Gogol, in a chapter excised from the Rabelais dissertation, is reduced largely to a practitioner of carnival.15 On the question of Rabelais as author it is difficult to criticize Bakhtin, to be sure, for in his study of that author's work there is hardly any mention of the formal act of narrating at all: Bakhtin focuses entirely on themes (the grotesque body, holiday feasts, public-square profanity), on folklore motifs—more Russian than French, it must be said—and on carnival plenitude. In the face of such simplifications, and given the force of Bakhtin's own quite monologically intoned pronouncements about the authors he cares about, a great deal of effort has gone into rehabilitating these writers and restoring to them the complexity that Bakhtin trims away. For how can one call the ingeniously multivalent, stratified and genuinely developmental world of War and Peace ‘monologic’? Or suggest, as Bakhtin does, that since Book Six of The Brothers Karamazov, ‘The Russian Monk’, is unapologetically authoritative, it therefore ‘falls out of the work’16—when Dostoevsky himself slaved over Book Six, considering it to be the spiritual core of the novel? How can the black comedy of Gogol be reduced to joy-bearing carnival? Or, for that matter, how can the Faustian striving of Goethe's major plots be reduced, as Bakhtin is wont to reduce them, to some ‘utopian pastoral’, where readers need only open their eyes and gaze upon the scene and the world will again become an integrated, harmonious place?17 These are all substantial worries for those votaries of Bakhtin whose main concern is literature.
If, however, these world-class writers served Bakhtin more as raw material, as ‘value systems’ which could be raided, intelligently but selectively, to adorn philosophical ideas precious to him, then we can fret less over these verdicts. If the real goal of multi-voicedness is inner flexibility and freedom, and the real goal of carnival generosity is outer flexibility and freedom, then any functioning human world, real or fictional, can be mined for examples of it. Interdisciplinarity inevitably exploits one field on behalf of the other. Responsible Bakhtin scholars, so this argument goes, should worry less about the ‘full picture of an author and a work’ that Bakhtin routinely fails to provide and speculate instead on the contribution made by that author and work to Bakhtin's larger, freestanding worldview. An excellent recent example of such research is Vladimir Nikiforov's work on Bakhtin's ‘first philosophy’.18 Nikiforov begins with moral philosophy—in this case, with Bakhtin's insistence on an ethically uncompromised, irreversible, radically answerable ‘step taken’ (postupok) appropriate to the lost individual in a ruined post-Great War world—and from the urgency of that search he deduces Bakhtin's exaggerated claim, in the 1929 Dostoevsky book, that Dostoevsky's heroes exist in a vacuum, that they have no personal histories, that they confront eternal questions in no-time and no-space, and that they circulate in a text where ‘plot … is absolutely devoid of any sort of finalizing function’.19 Such a philosophically driven reading, incidentally, would be in keeping with Bakhtin's own reputed (and quite unfair) auto-critique of his pathbreaking work on Dostoevsky, which he later regarded as ‘morally unfree’, limited as it was to formal questions and of necessity excluding religious contexts.20
The attempt to separate Bakhtin's literary-philological pronouncements from his philosophy can also be pursued, however, from the other end. To do so would require some access to Bakhtin's literary judgements ‘straight’, before he attempted to prove a philosophy of Logos through them. And here we have some fascinating, if indirect, documentation. Among the extremely interesting material to appear in the most recent volume of Bakhtin's collected works (volume 2, 2000) are the complete texts of notes taken by one of Bakhtin's most diligent and loyal students, Rakhil' Moiseevna Mirkina (1906-87), during the ‘Home Course of Lectures on the History of Russian Literature’ that the unemployed Bakhtin delivered sporadically between 1922 and 1927 in various private apartments, first in Vitebsk, Belarus, and later in post-Civil War Leningrad.
To be sure, one never knows how much is lost between the lecturer's mouth and the note-taker's pen. What is more, Mirkina recopied her notes four times between 1927 and the 1970s, each time discarding the earlier copy (in this way the notes survived the siege of Leningrad, while the old school notebooks crumbled away).21 But there is a good chance that the conscientious Mirkina got down a lot of the actual words. We know that Bakhtin had a prodigious memory and a highly polished lecturing style: he was never chatty, not at all dialogic, and rarely distracted by local context. (Bakhtin's disciple and literary executor Sergei Bocharov later recalled Bakhtin's ‘well-trained voice, audible throughout a large auditorium’, and his ‘classic professorial manner’ of delivering lectures ‘with all the appropriate gravity’.22) Bakhtin would formally address his audience—whether of hundreds of persons, as in a Saransk lecture hall, or in the case of the ‘Home Course’, of three schoolgirls—in a resonant, authoritative, distanced manner, using no notes.23 What Mirkina's transcripts allow us to glimpse is Bakhtin speaking on Russian literature prior to devising his philosophical categories of monologue versus dialogue, single- versus double-voiced word. Tolstoy here is simply Tolstoy, not some sort of ‘anti-Dostoevsky’. And Dostoevsky's fictional worlds are described not by means of a line or two of dialogue casually extracted from the whole, nor by some meta-philosophical polyphonic strategy, but in a more conventional manner, work by work, profiling the heroes and outlining the plots. Bakhtin functions here not as a philosophical critic undertaking a holy crusade for the novel but as a practical, hands-on undergraduate teacher of literature—and the ideas for which he later became famous are scarcely hinted at.
To give you some idea of this ‘pedagogical Bakhtin’, that is, Bakhtin before he discovered dialogic relations or carnival laughter and began seeking in them the salvation of the world, let me remark on two writerly portraits recorded in Mirkina's notes: the first of Dostoevsky (MMB:SS [M. M. Bakhtin: Sobranie sochinenii,] vol. 2: pp. 266-87), the second of Tolstoy (pp. 238-65). From the transcripts, it seems clear that before he took the ‘linguistic turn’, Bakhtin was an open-minded, even-handed reader of these two master novelists and rivals. After that brilliant turn, of course, Dostoevsky is credited with polyphony and polyphony is equated with freedom—and at that point Tolstoy (together with the epic voice in general) comes to stand for a sort of bondage, and falls out of Bakhtin's favoured world.
So: first Dostoevsky. The Mirkina notes begin with the observation that Dostoevsky used ideas the way most writers use emotions. Ideas are much more difficult to build with. Whereas emotions unfold in a familiar sequence and their effects can be watched from the outside, an author working with ideas really does not know, and cannot know, where that idea is going. Portraying the process of a thought must be done from the inside. Since in novels there are many different thought centres developing at once, the author who works with ideas must get his own consciousness out of the way as quickly as possible and pull the reader into the interior of his heroes; this is why, Bakhtin says, we so often cannot imagine the exterior appearance of Dostoevsky's heroes, we cannot see them. ‘We must either be in the hero, or close the book’ (p. 266). For this reason too, Dostoevsky's novels are such failures on the dramatic stage: drama requires well-lit, well-populated spaces viewed from the hall, but in Dostoevsky there is a ‘dark scene with voices, nothing more’ (p. 267). Bakhtin concludes that Dostoevsky is basically an impressionist, never providing us with whole objects but only with impressions from objects. Thus ‘we [readers] jump from soul to soul, and the object begins to ripple, it becomes illusory and is deprived of all stability’ (ibid.).
What is immediately clear from this thumbnail sketch of Dostoevsky's art is that Bakhtin builds it almost entirely out of spatial and body imagery, ‘where we must stand to see another person’, which was very important to him in the early 1920s. It is also evident that Bakhtin already understands the idea not as something facelessly analytic, ‘unfoldable’ on its own terms, but fused with personality and unexpected potential. Although there are indications that ideas will sooner or later become the heroes of the Dostoevskian novel—as indeed they do by 1929, in Problems of Dostoevsky's Art—little attention is paid, in these lecture notes, to what the heroes utter, or how they utter it.
The lectures on Tolstoy are more exciting. In part this is because they are longer; Bakhtin devoted four sessions to Tolstoy, the ‘farewell lectures’ in his Vitebsk series (1924), after which the ‘Home Course’ resumed again in Leningrad in the fall of 1925 with Dostoevsky. In part it is because, elsewhere in Bakhtin's writings, Tolstoy is so under-appreciated and reduced. But here, too, little fuss is made over the structure of utterances or narrators, whether polyphonic—‘innerly persuasive’ or authoritative. Thus Tolstoy's hyper-serious, preachy tone does not turn Bakhtin off. He is hearkening to something else. And what he is after, it appears, is the source of Tolstoy's solitary, anarchic worldview. This turns out to be an ethically awkward space, the product of Tolstoy's condemnation of official institutions (a standard anarchist move) without the accompanying compensatory faith, which lies at the base of most anarchisms, in voluntarism, mutual aid, benevolent collectivist activity—in a word, without faith in the concrete reciprocating Other. Tolstoy's mature ideal denies the efficacy and reliability of both sides: both the entitled institution and the needy, deserving, singular other who is offering us love. We should learn to do without both. And here Mirkina's notes show Bakhtin to be a very astute (if harsh) reader of Tolstoy.
Bakhtin opens his Tolstoy lectures on one of his sturdiest oppositions, devised in the early 1920s as a tool for understanding how each of us assembles an individual self. This is our awareness of two basically different structures co-existing within our minds: an I-for-myself (how I look and feel from inside to my own consciousness) and an I-for-the-other (how I look from the outside to someone else).24I-for-myself is constantly in flux and thus is unreliable as a source of stories that would explain myself to my self; for this reason, Bakhtin writes, every self must put itself together out of bits of ‘finished surface’ that others provide and project on to it. Bakhtin insists that in matters of identity and self-worth, we always work with others' views of us. Looking in the mirror is a fiction. The only way to see myself ‘as I am’ is to see myself as others see me, preferably in the process of responding to them. I do not see myself accurately in a mirror, but only as mirrored in the pupils of your eyes. Or, as Bakhtin graphically puts the matter in a fragment from the mid-1940s: ‘it is not me who looks out on the world with my own eyes … out of my eyes, someone else's eyes gaze forth’.25
Having confirmed this dichotomy of I-for-myself and I-for-the-other, Bakhtin then walks us through Tolstoy's major works, from Childhood to ‘Notes of a Madman’. He demonstrates how all those themes that cause Tolstoy the most anguish involve a balancing act between these two types of ‘I’—a contest that Tolstoy, stubbornly and with astonishing consistency, manipulates over and over again into a dead end. The excruciating moments that we associate intuitively with Tolstoy—social awkwardness and embarrassment, sexuality to the exclusion of other types of male-female bonding, ‘dying well’ which in fact means ‘dying alone’ and neglecting the help offered by others: all these famous Tolstoyan scenes, Bakhtin intimates, are the result of a narcissistic inflation of the I-for-myself.26 Bakhtin's charge is an interesting one, of course, because by itself it is not so very unusual or bad. Most Romantic literature took for granted the selfishness and inflation of the hero's self-consciousness, and many of those heroes eventually find virtue—in shared love, in renewed social commitment. But crucially for their renewal, these heroes need others. They need to be needed. (Consider Raskolnikov, in the work of Russia's greatest ‘Romantic Realist’ Dostoevsky: even this isolated anarchist is, at the end of the novel, brought around to dependence on a singular love.) But Bakhtin's point seems to be that Tolstoy's swollen ‘I’ refuses on principle to credit the self that others see, need, reach out for, with any legitimacy at all. What is more: Tolstoy sees the I-for-the-other as a fallen, depraved state precisely because it is sensitized to needs and pressures from others. Ideally, one's ‘I’ should not respond to and incorporate these outside pressures, but strive to outgrow them. ‘Throughout the rest of his creative work’, we read in Mirkina's notes, ‘Tolstoy will distribute the world between these two categories; “I-for-others” will become all of society, while “I-for-myself” will be isolated and alone’ (p. 239).
In the early to mid-1920s, then, Bakhtin—who still considered himself a full-time philosopher moonlighting as a literary critic—was rather indifferent to Tolstoy's style of verbal discourse. Although the sin of monolithic monologism might be hovering in the air, the Word and its manifold orientations have not yet become the singular benchmark for measuring one's progress toward humility or human freedom. But in his brief survey of Tolstoy's literary corpus, Bakhtin already senses that the balance between self and other in the mature Tolstoyan hero spells trouble. What matters to Tolstoy is exclusively how the self acts vis-à-vis its own sense of what is right—not vis-à-vis what some outside Other might think is right, or necessary, or important, or lovingly expected. Which is to say: the response of the Other is the other's problem, not a problem for me. This picture of the world was contrary to Bakhtin's understanding of life's ethical task. Increasingly for Bakhtin, a willed step (postupok) and the other's response to that step are taken to constitute a single indivisible unit. This conviction comes to dominate Bakhtin's ‘centrifugal’ worldview, in which the greatest challenge faced by the self is to remember, minute by minute, that it is not the permanent centre of anything, that it is transitory, peripheral, and must be constantly supplemented by other unexpected perspectives.
For this reason, the relative emphases that Tolstoy places on I-for-myself versus I-for-the-other could only suggest to Bakhtin a terrible and skewed set of options. Either I turn outward, which means corruption; or I cast off my need for other people (and their need for me), which becomes virtue. From here it is a small step to equating spiritual growth with indifference to community, and love with riddance. And this, Bakhtin's lectures suggest, is the route taken by the mature Tolstoy. His most courageous literary heroes demonstrate their humanness by outgrowing others and by suffering (especially by dying) alone. To be ‘for the other’—even as a local expedience, out of kindness for the other's pain or loss—is to be cowardly and thus untrue to oneself.
What look like exceptions to this law are just optical illusions. Take, for example, Platon Karataev in War and Peace. He can embrace everyone and everything equally—but only because, Bakhtin insists, he is completely fatalistic, indifferent to good and evil, ‘without personal views or personal will’ (p. 244). Or take the patriarchal marriage, of which Tolstoy deeply approved and which Bakhtin sees as an utter triumph of the I-for-myself: the wife in such a marriage is not an Other but simply a part of the self, a limb growing out of the husband's trunk. (Soon after his own marriage, Tolstoy referred to his deliriously happy relations with his wife Sofia Andreevna in exactly those terms.) If, however, a wife's potential for genuine otherness is activated in a marriage, then ‘Family Happiness’ ends up as ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’ (p. 258). The key everywhere is to trust only the prompting of the isolated self and to distrust, or disregard, input from the outside.
Mirkina's notes reveal Bakhtin to be a better than average, and at times quite shrewd, reader of Tolstoy's most famous characters. Selfish, successful, happy characters like Stiva Oblonsky, Anna Karenina's brother, are given their due—although Oblonsky's view on life is ‘terrifyingly lightened’, as it knows ‘neither guilt nor retribution’ (p. 253). The glossy Count Vronsky begins trivially, caring only for the distractions of society, but then changes and deepens as a tension develops between his passion for Anna and his vanity, which he does not command the resources to transcend (pp. 252-3). Socially awkward, bumbling heroes like Pierre Bezukhov or Konstantin Levin, plain speakers cast in the role of society's fools, are of course saved; while complex, ambitious, disciplined and gracefully integrated heroes like Prince Andrei Bolkonsky are brought low, because—as Mirkina records in her notes—‘Tolstoy understood simplicity not as wholeness, but as an exposé of unnecessary complexity’ (p. 244).
It is important to note how far Bakhtin has gotten without once having raised the vexed, inflammatory issue of Tolstoy's ‘authoritative word’. Important for him at this stage is not single-voiced versus double-voiced, not monologue versus dialogue, but self versus other and simplicity versus complexity. Bakhtin saw clearly that Tolstoy was one of the world's great simplifiers. And he did not, at least in these notes, think very highly of Tolstoy's religious strivings, which, he said, merely repeated eighteenth-century deism and ‘Protestantism in a naïve form’ (p. 255). In Bakhtin's view (one shared by many thinker-philosophers of his generation, including Nicolas Berdyaev27), a strong, resourceful, confident self, whatever its religious confession, could never be achieved through Tolstoy's renunciatory strategy, which was hostile to grace and went against the grain of the multiplicity natural to the world. This did not mean, of course, that one was obliged to endorse the complexity of modern technology or the mindless proliferation of wants that fuels a bourgeois consumer economy. In that regard, both Tolstoy and Bakhtin were modest men, with marked archaic tastes. But it was imperative, Bakhtin felt, to endorse the complexity and multiplicity of personality. In the years to come, this multiplicity will be called polyphony in Dostoevsky, and carnival plenitude in Rabelais. Tolstoy would have access to neither—because of his insatiable confidence in the I-for-myself, a self that took pleasure in simplifying others out of it.
Are these early, ‘pre-dialogic’ readings of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky preferable to what came later, judged strictly as literary analysis? In the case of Tolstoy, the answer is clearly yes. In the case of Dostoevsky, although much in the 1925 Leningrad lectures is routine, it is pleasurable to see Bakhtin considering all aspects of Dostoevsky's art, ethics and plot as well as the role of the word. For a significant backlash has developed in the past several years against the idea of polyphony as the sole formal strength of Dostoevsky's art. (Such may be the fate of all great critical insights that succeed too well.) Suspicions that began with the book on Rabelais have now migrated to the domain of a novelist closer to home: the charge that Bakhtin had mined Dostoevsky to illustrate his dialogic philosophy and then—due to the brilliance and power of that philosophical idea—everything in Dostoevsky's literary world that did not support that idea was flattened out.
For a taste of this ‘contra-Bakhtin’ intonation we might consider an essay that appeared in the spring 2001 issue of the journal Voprosy literatury (‘Questions of Literature’), entitled ‘Perechityvaia Dostoevskogo i Bakhtina’ (‘Rereading Dostoevsky and Bakhtin)’.28 The Western academy has long practised the genre of ‘Rereading’ or ‘Rethinking’ this and that, which usually means passing a set of conventional wisdoms through a newly fashionable theoretical lens. But, until recently, this critical habit was encountered far less often in the sober Russian literary establishment, where more common for a scholarly article was the formulaic title ‘K …’, ‘towards’ the clarification of a topic or problem, a self-effacing phrase that promised not to reconceptualize a whole field but merely to make a limited contribution to it. Now impatient Western criticism is leaving its mark. As quickly became clear in this instance, ‘rereading’ Bakhtin meant a de-reading, a reclamation and return to square one.
Its author, the critic S. Lominadze, challenges the presumption of polyphony and dialogism in The Brothers Karamazov. He insists that Dostoevsky avoids dialogue every bit as forcefully as he engages in it. On crucial matters, Lominadze argues, the novelist stresses not the interaction of worlds but on the contrary, their non-commensurability. What is more, Dostoevsky hands over nothing of substance to his heroes wholesale; he always retains for himself the last word, because created characters are objects; they cannot be full subjects. Dostoevsky's heroes are not pure voice. For one thing, many of the most admirable heroes are significantly silent (consider Sonya in Crime and Punishment, or Christ before the Grand Inquisitor); for another, a ‘voice’ does not kill an old lady with an axe. In fact, Lominadze would have us believe, this whole frenzy over ‘dialogue’—and even more so ‘unfinalized dialogue’—is misdirected and self-contradictory. A completely unfinalized dialogue is not a dialogue at all, but simply a vicious circle. Dostoevsky had no interest in that mode of being and worked hard to bring us out of it. If The Brothers Karamazov is a great book, it is not for its dialogues but for its incomparably great monologues, uttered by more or less static, non-developmental heroes. These stretches of monologic text are given almost no attention by Bakhtin. The Elder Zosima, a human image much beloved by Dostoevsky, is utterly monologic. And although there doubtless is a hierarchy of monologues in this novel (some voices are wiser than others), not much actual listening to one another takes place in its pages. The only place a ‘great polyphonic dialogue’ happens is in the reader's head—and that is hardly new. The most conventional novel is set up to accomplish that. Lominadze concludes that there is no such thing as a polyphonic novel.
What can we learn from irritable, anti-cult, post-boom articles like this? Here I would like to hazard a comparison between Russian and non-Russian debunkings (or de-mythologizations) of Bakhtin. The Russians, for all their political constraints, aired their intellectual suspicions earlier. Back in the mid-1940s, during Bakhtin's dissertation defence in Moscow, Russian specialists on the Renaissance were questioning Bakhtin's radical thesis about Rabelais while we, bedazzled, seemed to swallow it whole (and apply it instantly) when it hit our shores in the 1970s. Both editions of the Dostoevsky book, 1929 and 1963, received sceptical, probing criticism on native soil.29 But Russian Bakhtinians have tended to be protective of the person himself, handling with great tact the direct plagiarisms and unacknowledged borrowings, passing lightly over the doctored c.v., tending to blame aberrations on historical pressure while ascribing the virtues to a-historical genius. This too has been in the tradition of custodial reverence familiar from threatened Stalinist times, in which academics function as the servitors (not as the deconstructors) of art. Since the demise of Soviet communism, however, and the Press Decree of 1990 ending state-sponsored censorship, Russian publishing has experimented with a full spectrum of ways to relate a national cult figure to its nation's literature, philosophy, history and to the very tradition of aesthetic criticism. Nevertheless, the major energies of Russian Bakhtin scholars went into archival research and textual annotation. And this vigorous native industry (as Ken Hirschkop recently reported) ‘has wasted no time in declaring the distinctiveness of its products, occasionally resorting to intellectual protectionism on the part of its native son’.30 Indeed, in today's frayed post-communist climate, Bakhtin's image can become spookily charged. It is often tied in to re-assertions of Russian nationalism, and thus burdened with the ambivalent, love-hate judgements that professional Russian humanists so often bring to the newly available smorgasbord of Western literary methodologies.
An essay reflecting this tension between our two critical traditions appeared in the January 2000 issue of Voprosy filosofii (‘Questions of Philosophy’) with the ambitious title: ‘Bakhtin: the Dialectic of Dialogue versus the Metaphysics of Postmodernism’.31 Its authors, manifestly nostalgic for more ordered times, argue that Bakhtin was a quintessentially Russian thinker because he alone was able to effect a synthesis between dialectics and dialogue. Unlike contemporary Western culture, stuffed with alienated goods, alienated words and random violence, Russian-style dialogue grows out of dialectics and is disciplined by it. Bakhtinian carnival is not some anarchic free-for-all, as Western radicals would have it, but a cleansing of all alienated form in order that the essence underlying this form can be revealed. Bakhtin is not postmodern. Postmodernism celebrates dehumanization and trivialization, whereas Bakhtin hears humanness in everything; he is a window out of alienation into a new world. Postmodernism is no more than a dead-end of the old world, a world of ‘global corporate capital’, in which Dostoevsky and Madonna are held to be of equal worth (p. 131).
Such crude anti-Western diatribes, juxtaposing the salvational qualities of Russian icon space (purified form, window on to a truer world) to the corrupt blandishments of market capitalism, are not without their grain of truth. But one does sense that the focus is no longer on Bakhtin the thinker but on Bakhtin as battering ram for the larger destinies of critical theory, or even of Russia's place in world culture. In this battle, some scholars rescue Dostoevsky from Bakhtin; others rescue Bakhtin from postmodernism. What is at stake in all such operations affecting our subject's posthumous life was well articulated by Ken Hirschkop: ‘No one doubts that Bakhtin's work was warped and garbled by Stalinism … Even a tragic history, however, cannot be cleanly separated from those who did their best to resist it.’32 When votaries attempt to cleanse the kernel of Bakhtin's teaching, purportedly free and eternal, from the shell, which consists of all those contradictory masks donned (it is assumed) by necessity, what results might well be simply another mask.
Let me now proceed to the final section of this post-boom update, where my comments will be organized in a self-serving, although not especially self-congratulatory, way. At the end of my 1997 book on Bakhtin's reception in Russia, The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin, I was bold enough to speculate on three areas where Bakhtin studies (primarily in Russia) seemed to be headed in the twenty-first century. One was ‘pedagogical’, linked with the revival of interest in the developmental psychology of Lev Vygotsky, and foresaw ever more open classrooms, dialogism in the schools, multiple perspectives in the syllabus. The second prediction was that there would be a return to ‘Bakhtin and Literature’, after the philosophical bases of his thought had been filled in. And, lastly, I predicted a renewed search for dialogism, and maybe even for carnival, in areas where Bakhtin himself had excluded it: in poetry, epic, drama, even the exact sciences. By 2002, how accurate have these predictions turned out to be?
As far as I can ascertain, on Russian soil those predictions have proved very inaccurate. After a few rhetorical flourishes in isolated sites, the secondary-school classroom as a ‘dialogue of cultures’ flopped utterly. For too long the Russian educational system had been run on the continental model, where a certain formality and professors' rights are taken for granted, to embrace overnight a radical softening of boundaries. (As we saw, Bakhtin himself was a classic exemplar of that distanced, monologically thrilling teaching style.) It has proved quite possible in post-communist Russia to humanize and de-Sovietize the curriculum without questioning basic hierarchies. But, not surprisingly, the pedagogical Bakhtin has taken off tremendously in the USA. There, advocates of John Dewey and of progressive ‘teacher's education’ (with its horizontal, democratizing impulses) have responded hungrily to Bakhtin's de-centralizing ideas. In April 2000 I was invited to address the Bakhtin-Vygotsky Study Group of the CCCC, the ‘Conference on College Composition and Communication’, one of the huge subsidiaries of the huge English-teaching industry. For a Slavist whose profession has now shrunk to the academic margins, this was a whole other world. I discovered that Bakhtin had long been a classic among professional educators and teachers of rhetoric and composition, at both the college and secondary-school level. Anthologies of ‘landmark essays’ on Bakhtin and the classroom are bestsellers. So immense is the market that books with titles like A Pedagogy of Possibility: Bakhtinian Perspectives on Composition Studies (1999) and Saying and Silence: Listening to Composition with Bakhtin (2001) come out immediately in paperback.33 These books contain some very good philosophical extensions of Bakhtin's more vaguely defined concepts—such as the superaddressee, the ‘Third’ (seen as relevant to composition assignments in the classroom), and the relation between dialogue and rhetoric. But, on balance, Bakhtin seems important to American educators as theoretical validation for ‘what is happening anyway’ in the reformist wing of the teaching profession. As an English teacher-Bakhtinian put it in 1994: ‘this move to embrace the dialogic is not surprising’ given ‘the increasing acceptance of student-centered pedagogies, growing emphasis on multicultural education for an increasingly diverse student population, and poststructuralist understanding of language’.34 Arguably, the aristocratic and highly formal Bakhtin would have sympathized with none of these practices. But that should not constrain his usefulness to other disciplines and peoples at other times—and especially to the Americans, who, a hundred and fifty years ago, were so acutely defined by Alexis de Tocqueville as the nation that needs philosophy (and aristocratic hierarchy) less than any people on earth.
What of my second prediction, a return to questions of ‘Bakhtin and literature’? This too has not fared very well, and what return there is has been more in the spirit of a critique or an irritable reclamation, not an enrichment. At fault here, clearly, is the fact that Bakhtin's literary readings have triumphed altogether too well. To get out of them, as we saw with Lominadze and The Brothers Karamazov, the revisionist critic has to bluster and batter, usually coarsening Bakhtin's arguments and thus doing a disservice to the history of ideas. (Here the Bakhtin industry might learn from the industry around Sigmund Freud—another astonishingly original, articulate, provocative thinker who was crudely simplified in the process of ‘catching on’, and then forced to answer for all sorts of moronic simplifications, when the best thing for all of us would have been to go back and reread Freud himself. This simpler and less metaphorical sense of the critical catchword ‘Rereading x or y’ deserves to be rehabilitated.)
What of the third area: finding dialogism where Bakhtin excluded it? Again, in Russia this task seems not to be a high priority—in part because, within the Russian research community, Bakhtin's deep love of poetry has never been questioned, his many years of diligent activity as a drama critic are acknowledged, and his reverence toward Homer and other masterworks of antiquity is well known. But the Anglophone world has engaged the issue enthusiastically. Full-length studies are forthcoming on Bakhtin and the classics (restoring dialogic potential to the ancient lyric and the epic) and on Bakhtin and poetry, focusing on the important, and under-studied, early Bakhtinian concepts of intonation and rhythm.35 In the process of such ‘restorations’ and extensions, the question arises: how pervasive is the dialogic principle? Clearly, everything that communicates emerges from some sort of dialogue, and has the potential for a dialogic reception. But equally clear is that dialogue is not always the most desirable on-the-spot relation. It can be inefficient, and is exasperatingly open to interruption. The other party might not deserve it. And we should have the right to suspend it when we feel the desire to rest for a while in aesthetic form, or to experience a moment of the Sublime. Such parameters are negotiable, as is the case with every utterance.
What is not negotiable for Bakhtin, it appears, is the responsibility to obligate yourself (in his early period, Bakhtin openly said ‘sacrifice yourself’) in some way toward a concrete other person—and, optimally, a person who does not share too centrally what you happen to hold sacred. Another responsibility follows: to resist ‘theorizing’ the deeds that arise out of this obligation: thus Bakhtin's impatience with Tolstoy and Tolstoy's ubiquitous I-for-myself, projecting its needs and rules upon all humanity; thus his tendency to turn away from the single-voiced genres that narrate either from on high or from an unreliable, slippery inside. And thus his fascination (as Nikiforov argues so persuasively) with postupok, the ‘responsible step taken’, which permits of no alibi, no matter how compelling the circumstances or how beguiling the theoretical loopholes.36
Finally. Bakhtin is now a classic. Thus it is probably not too early to speculate on where he belongs in the ‘Russian Idea’. Today, the question of Bakhtin's Russianness is highly contested, and in closing I will touch only on two areas where I think he partakes of a recognizably mainstream Russian tradition.
First, there is much in Bakhtin's thought that is anarchist. By which I mean: if Bakhtin can dispense with an institution, an impersonal norm, a mechanical causality, he will do so. For all his formal style as a professor and for all the reverence with which he approached the culture of the past, he had a powerful animosity against ‘official life’, ‘officialese’, lobbying for hierarchical recognition, all of which he perceived as cowardly alienation and irresponsibility. This animus fed both his fondness for carnival and sustained him during his long years of not being read and not being heard. But Bakhtin's anarchism is, of course, of the warmly organic and loving sort. It partakes not of Bakunin's bomb-throwing but rather of Kropotkin's mutual-aid society, with its uncompromising individuality and its repudiation of Social Darwinism. Cooperation and an open curiosity, Bakhtin felt, were just as natural to the human organism as struggle—although he was unsentimental about these processes, did not minimize the work involved, and had an extremely high threshold for acceptable human behaviours. For all his militarized rhetoric and his own life-long experience of excruciating pain in his own body, the struggles Bakhtin portrays tend to be carnivalized ones, cheerfully anaesthetized. He found real hostility theoretically uninteresting. By and large he was phlegmatic toward those who attacked him personally; and as regards his own person, he was uninsultable.
The first half of Bakhtin's idea, then, is anarchist; the second half, I suggest, is idealist. This does not mean utopian: by temperament, Bakhtin was far too patient, too much of a Stoic, and far too sly to qualify as a utopian thinker. He was also too committed to the Other to associate himself with any idealism limited to ‘the phenomenology of self-experiencing’.37 Bakhtin's idealism was of a special sort, just like his anarchism. It had learned much from the nascent science of sociology, and was turned outward into the world. It shares a great deal with that brand of Russian neo-idealism practised before the First World War, which included among its advocates such eminent philosophers as Peter Struve, Semyon Frank, Sergei Bulgakov and Nikolai Berdyaev38 (the last three became distinguished religious thinkers in the emigration). These thinkers were united in their belief that idealism—that is, ‘living by ideals’ rather than by materialist or deterministic doctrines—was the best guarantee of individual responsibility and civil liberty in Russian, or perhaps in any, society. How should we look on ideals, if we wish them to deliver our life into freedom?
First, an ideal—just because it is spatially or temporally distant—is not for that reason abstracting, homogenizing or depersonalizing. Philosophers of this Russian school, like Bakhtin one generation later, were committed personalists who regarded the individual self (in Russian, lichnost', ‘personhood’) as the central value of philosophy, its most precious capital. They took their inspiration from Kant's ‘subjective idealism’, with its insistence on the human being as an end in itself and not a means, rather than from those more monistic, objective idealisms—such as Hegel's—which aimed to restore lost unity in a future Absolute. But they were devoted to making Kantian categories more concrete. Thus did Bakhtin pursue with such interest Weber, Scheler, Rickert, Simmel. In this variant of sociologically informed philosophical pluralism, there are potentially as many ideals as persons.
Second. An ideal need not be a fixed or permanent value. The content of an ideal can change. All that is fixed is the status of the ideal within a given person's purview. And thus, third: living by ideals is not, in the denigrating sense of the word, ‘idealistic’. Quite the contrary. Absolute ideals—unlike the worldly utopia of the positivists—are not posited because we expect to arrive at them and live serenely inside of them. I posit an ideal because I want to orient toward it, in a world that otherwise offers me little by way of security, reasonableness or reward. Thus living by ideals is supremely realistic. Coherence or justice is at no point expected from the outside world, nor is it imposed upon that world. If early twentieth-century history taught these Russian thinkers anything at all, it was that external events could never be counted on to cohere for their individual benefit; their feet were planted securely on concrete, ruined ground. But if events could not be presumed beneficent, then at any moment each individual could always choose to answer for a coherent response to an event. It is this individual freedom over the response that the ideal facilitates. In a word, positing ideals makes wholeness possible in my life.
Radically personalist, responsive, anarchist, idealist: Bakhtin's vision of the world demanded very little of the world, and yet aimed to make every person feel less helpless within it. There are not many provisions in Bakhtin's writings for changing that world objectively. His primary tools are particularity, humility and trust. What that is called as a philosophy I am not sure. But now that the front of the boom has passed and we feel comfortable with dialogue, chronotope, carnival time-and-space, we might try to take that problem on.
Notes
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For an eloquent discussion of the second half of the twentieth century as an ‘age of suspicion’ for literary scholars, critics and primary creators, see Gabriel Josipovici, On Trust: Art and the Temptations of Suspicion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), esp. ch. 1.
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See Charles Lock, ‘Double Voicing, Sharing Words: Bakhtin's Dialogism and the History of the Theory of Free Indirect Discourse’, in Jorgen Bruhn and Jan Lundquist (eds), The Novelness of Bakhtin: Perspectives and Possibilities (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2001), pp. 71-87. Specific page references to quotes provided in text.
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See Ken Hirschkop, Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy, ch. 3, ‘Bakhtin Myths and Bakhtin History’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 111.
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According to the memoir literature, Bakhtin made comments in this openminded spirit throughout his life. In English, see Sergei Bocharov, ‘Conversations with Bakhtin’, PMLA 109, no. 5 (October 1994), pp. 1009-24, an abridged translation of his ‘Ob odnom razgovore i vokrug ego’ (‘About and around one conversation’), in Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2 (1993), pp. 70-89. When Bocharov asked Bakhtin if he had ever been ‘fascinated with Marxism’, Bakhtin answered: ‘No, never. I took an interest in it, as in much else—Freudianism, even spiritualism. But I was never a Marxist to any degree whatsoever’ (p. 1016).
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Vladimir Nikiforov (Liverpool, UK), ‘First Philosophy as Philosophy of Individual Postupok’, Symposion, 4-6 (1999-2001), pp. 61-105, esp. 6, ‘Postupok as Production: The Marxian Context’ (pp. 83-6). Nikiforov argues that Georg Simmel, Max Scheler and other German theorists trying to learn some lesson from the awful First World War were on balance more pessimistic than Bakhtin. They blamed the rift between producer and product (and the overall collapse of humanistic thought into nihilism) on immanent mechanisms of Culture, unaddressable by individuals, whereas Bakhtin, as early as his first tiny six-paragraph publication (‘Art and Responsibility’, 1919) insists on our freedom of choice. When we theorize the split, Bakhtin remarks, we evade responsibility for it (p. 81).
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Sergei Zemlianoi, ‘Chto takoe ezotericheskii marksizm?’ Review of Mikhail Bakhtin: Tetralogiia, compiled with commentary by I. V. Peshkov et al., in Knizhnoe obozrenie (28 January 1999), p. 3.
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Most recently, see Galin Tihanov, The Master and the Slave: Lukács, Bakhtin, and the Ideas of their Time (Oxford University Press, 2000), ch. 9, ‘Hegel and Rabelais’. Among Hegelian topics currently attracting attention in Bakhtin studies is a consideration of different types of dialectic: if Hegel focused on a dialectic of constraint, where freedom at any given point was ‘insight into necessity’, then Bakhtin, in the spirit of his Marburg School mentor Matvei Kagan, was more interested in the dialectic of spontaneity (an example of which would be the aha! experience following bewilderment and separating knowledge from non-knowledge). Both types of dialectic are arguably quite distinct from what Bakhtin later called ‘dialogue’.
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See Brian Poole, ‘Bakhtin and Cassirer: The Philosophical Origins of Bakhtin's Carnival Messianism’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 97, 3/4 (Summer/Fall 1998), pp. 537-78. This essay is part of Poole's comprehensive study-in-progress of Bakhtin's intellectual sources and debts.
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Bruhn and Lundquist, ‘Introduction’ to The Novelness of Bakhtin, p. 20.
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See Bocharov, ‘Conversations with Bakhtin’, p. 1020, and also Sergei Bocharov, ‘Sobytie bytiia: O Mikhaile Mikhailoviche Bakhtine’, Novyi mir, 11 (1995), pp. 211-21, esp. 219.
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See the first interview in Besedy V. D. Duvakina s M. M. Bakhtinym (Moscow: Progress, 1996), pp. 41-2.
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The ‘parasitical’ remark was possibly made in jest (but not entirely); see the memoir essay of G. B. Ponomareva, ‘Vyskazannoe I nevyskazannoe …’, Dialog. Karnaval. Khronotop, 3 (1995), p. 66.
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Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. and ed. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 56; for Dostoevsky's supposed ‘plotlessness’, pp. 276-7.
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See M. M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), pp. 25-50.
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See M. M. Bakhtin, ‘The Art of the World and the Culture of Folk Humor (Rabelais and Gogol)’ (first published in Russian 1972), in Henryk Baran (ed.), Semiotics and Structuralism: Readings from the Soviet Union (White Plains NY: IASP, 1976), pp. 284-96.
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See ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 344: ‘images of official authoritative truth, images of virtue (of any sort: monastic, spiritual, bureaucratic, moral, etc.) have never been successful in the novel. It suffices to mention the hopeless attempts of Gogol and Dostoevsky in this regard. For this reason the authoritative text always remains, in the novel, a dead quotation, something that falls out of the artistic context (for example, the evangelical texts in Tolstoy at the end of Resurrection).’
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Against the monologism of War and Peace (and in general against Bakhtin's view of Tolstoy), see Andrew Wachtel, An Obsession with History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), ch. 5 and David Sloane, ‘Rehabilitating Bakhtin's Tolstoy: The Politics of the Utterance’, Tolstoy Studies Journal (2001). The earliest to protest Bakhtin's excision of the authoritative word in Brothers Karamazov was Nina Perlina, Varieties of Poetic Utterance (Lantham, MA and London: University Press of America, 1985); Yuri Mann and other Gogol experts routinely lament the over-emphasis on the carnival connection in their author; and Galin Tihanov devotes a chapter in The Master and the Slave to Bakhtin's utopian reading of Goethe (ch. 8).
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Nikiforov, ‘First Philosophy as Philosophy of Individual Postupok’, p. 75. In Nikiforov's view, Bakhtin's thought was shaped by Simmel's writings on the crisis of culture through objectification and by Rickert's ruminations on Handlung (the act as human behaviour and product), but Bakhtin pushed the idea more radically in the direction of concreteness, wholeness and structuredness (Kant's architectonics, but without Kant's abstraction).
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Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, p. 276. (The claim is made in this bold form only in the 1929 version of the book, and is included as an Appendix to the translation of the 1963 second edition.)
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Bocharov, ‘Conversations with Bakhtin’, pp. 1020-1.
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See the Commentary to the Mirkina notes, ‘Zapisi domashnego kursa lektsii po russkoi literature (1922-27 gg.; Vitebsk-Leningrad)’, in Sergei Bocharov, general editor, M. M. Bakhtin: Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 2 (Moscow: Russkie slovari, 2000), pp. 560-73, esp. 565.
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See Bocharov, ‘Conversations with Bakhtin’, p. 1011.
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R. M. Mirkina, ‘Bakhtin, kak ya ego znala’, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2 (1993), pp. 66-7. Bocharov solicited this brief memoir from Mirkina when she was already advanced in years, and he corroborates Mirkina's impression of Bakhtin as a highly formal lecturer, ‘a born orator with an expressive, beautiful timbre’, a ‘brilliant improvisator’. The tapes made by Viktor Duvakin of Bakhtin's resonant voice at age seventy-three, reciting poetry in three languages, indicate that this oratorial gift never abandoned him.
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See, for example, ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, trans. by Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), pp. 37-8.
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‘Chelovek u zerkala’ (‘The person at the mirror’), in M. M. Bakhtin: Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5 (Moscow: Russkie slovari, 1996), p. 71.
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Such a view of Tolstoy was not, of course, uncommon in the 1920s and 1930s, in Russia and abroad. See, for example, D. S. Mirsky, ‘Some Remarks on Tolstoy’ (1929), reprinted in G. S. Smith (ed.), D. S. Mirsky: Uncollected Writings on Russian Literature (Berkeley Slavic Specialities, 1989), pp. 303-11. Mirsky considers Tolstoy's Narcissus complex to be his most un-Russian trait.
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See, for example, the enraged judgement passed on Tolstoy's asceticism, nihilism and maximalist individualism by Nikolai Berdyaev, in his essay ‘Dukhi russkoi revoliutsii’ (‘Spirits of the Russian Revolution’), in Iz glubiny: Sbornik statei o russkoi revoliutsii (1918) (repr. Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Moskovskogo universiteta, 1990), pp. 55-89, esp. 78-85.
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S. Lominadze, ‘Perechityvaia Dostoevskogo i Bakhtina’, Voprosy literatury (March-April 2001), pp. 39-58.
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I discuss the often hostile, and at times ominous, Russian reception of these two seminal studies by Bakhtin in my The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), chs. 2, 3 and 4.
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For a thoughtful discussion, see Ken Hirschkop, ‘Bakhtin in the Sober Light of Day (An Introduction to the Second Edition)’, in Ken Hirschkop and David Shepherd (eds), Bakhtin and Cultural Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), pp. 1-25, esp. 7.
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L. A. Bulavka and A. V. Buzgalin, ‘Bakhtin: Dialektika dialoga versus metafizika postmodernizma’, Voprosy filosofii, 1 (2000), pp. 119-31.
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Hirschkop, ‘Bakhtin in the Sober Light of Day’, p. 10.
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See Frank Farmer (ed.), Landmark Essays on Bakhtin, Rhetoric, and Writing (Mahwah, NJ: Hermagoras Press, 1998); Kay Halasek, A Pedagogy of Possibility: Bakhtinian Perspectives on Composition Studies (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999) and Frank Farmer, Saying and Silence: Listening to Composition with Bakhtin (Logan UT: Utah State University Press, 2001).
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Irene Ward, Literacy, Ideology, and Dialogue: Towards a Dialogic Pedagogy, cited in Halasek, A Pedagogy of Possibility, p. 3.
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See R. Bracht Branham, ed., Bakhtin and the Classics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), and Donald Wesling, Toward a Bakhtinian Poetics (under consideration by Bucknell University Press, 2001).
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See Nikiforov, ‘First Philosophy’, pp. 69 ff. According to this reconstruction, during and after the war years Bakhtin was deeply involved in the debates over personhood in the German academy (defined as ‘a harmonious microcosm formed by Bildung’). But Bakhtin added two new foci to the debate: first, he aimed to replace the elitist implications of ‘person’—which the worldwide catastrophe had made anachronistic and communist doctrine had made unpopular—with the more accessible, democratic concept of postupok, defined by Nikiforov as a ‘structured fragment of life in its wholeness and concreteness’. And, second, Bakhtin did not ascribe, as did Georg Simmel, to some inevitable tragedy of culture brought about by an alienation of the creator from the created product. ‘Bakhtin is not fatalistic’ (p. 81); human experience does not have to split down the middle between culture and life; we are responsible for choosing to do so, and to blame is the temptation of a theorized life.
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See Nikiforov, ‘First Philosophy’, p. 87, on the interaction of idealism and materialism in Bakhtin's thought and his reservations about both.
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An English-language edition of the signature collection of essays by this group, Problemy Idealizma (‘Problems of Idealism’) (1902), translated, edited and annotated by Randall A. Poole, is forthcoming from Yale University Press, 2002. My brief preface to this edition has supplied some of the concluding thoughts of the present essay.
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