Life & Background
Bakhtin was born in Oryol in 1895 and educated at Petrograd. He spent the 1920s in a circle of scholars in Nevel and Vitebsk debating philosophy and literature, and published his book on Dostoevsky in 1929 — the year he was arrested, apparently in connection with underground church activity. Exiled to Kazakhstan, he taught bookkeeping and later at a provincial teachers' college in Saransk. A bone disease led to the amputation of a leg in 1938. His dissertation on Rabelais was submitted in 1940 and denied the higher degree; he did not receive it until 1952. Some of his 1920s work was published under his friends' names, and the disputed authorship question has never been settled. Young Moscow scholars rediscovered him in the 1960s, and he became internationally known only after his death in 1975.
Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics
Bakhtin argues that Dostoevsky created a genuinely new kind of novel, which he calls polyphonic. In the monologic novel — Tolstoy's, for instance — the author's consciousness frames and finally judges every character, however sympathetically drawn. In Dostoevsky, a plurality of independent consciousnesses meet on equal terms with the author's, so that Ivan Karamazov's arguments are not refuted by the structure of the book and Raskolnikov's position is not simply corrected. Bakhtin traces this to the Menippean satire and to carnival, and develops the idea of the word as always double-voiced: every utterance answers earlier utterances and anticipates a reply, so that language is never neutral but always addressed, contested, and inhabited by other speakers' intentions.
Bakhtin's terms have travelled further than his books. Dialogism holds that meaning arises between speakers rather than inside a single consciousness; heteroglossia names the stratification of a national language into social dialects, jargons, and generational speech that the novel orchestrates rather than unifies. The carnivalesque, developed in Rabelais and His World, describes the licensed inversion of hierarchy through festival, laughter, and the grotesque body — read by some as a theory of subversion and by others as an account of a safety valve that leaves power intact. Kristeva introduced him to French theory in the 1960s and coined intertextuality to render his account of the word's answerability.
Key Concepts
Why Bakhtin Matters
Bakhtin supplies the most influential twentieth-century theory of the novel as a form, and his vocabulary — dialogic, polyphonic, heteroglossia, carnivalesque, chronotope — is standard in examination answers on narrative. He stands outside both formalism and Marxist reflection theory, which makes him useful when a question asks for an alternative to either. His biography is itself an examinable topic: work written in the 1920s, suppressed, partly published under other names, and canonised half a century later.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics1929
- Rabelais and His World1965
- The Dialogic Imagination1975
- Speech Genres and Other Late Essays1979
- Toward a Philosophy of the Act1986