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Unit 16: Mikhail Bakhtin and his ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse-Dialogics in Novels: Introduction

Nicolai Hartmann. Bakhtin began to be discovered by scholars in 1963, but it was only after his Notes
death in 1975 that authors such as Julia Kristeva and Tzvetan Todorov brought Bakhtin to the
attention of the Francophone world, and from there his popularity in the United States, the United
Kingdom, and many other countries continued to grow. In the late 1980s, Bakhtin's work
experienced a surge of popularity in the West.
Bakhtin's primary works include Toward a Philosophy of the Act, an unfinished portion of a
philosophical essay; Problems of Dostoyevsky's Art, to which Bakhtin later added a chapter on the
concept of carnival and published with the title Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics; Rabelais and
His World, which explores the openness of the Rabelaisian novel; The Dialogic Imagination,
whereby the four essays that comprise the work introduce the concepts of dialogism, heteroglossia,
and chronotope; and Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, a collection of essays in which Bakhtin
concerns himself with method and culture.
In the 1920s there was a "Bakhtin school" in Russia, in line with the discourse analysis of Ferdinand
de Saussure and Roman Jakobson.
16.1 Early Life of Mikhail Bakhtin

Bakhtin was born in Oryol, Russia, to an old family of the nobility. His father was the manager of
a bank and worked in several cities. For this reason Bakhtin spent his early childhood years in
Orel, Vilnius, and then Odessa, where in 1913 he joined the historical and philological faculty at
the local university. Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist write: "Odessa..., like Vilnius, was an
appropriate setting for a chapter in the life of a man who was to become the philosopher of
heteroglossia and carnival. The same sense of fun and irreverence that gave birth to Babel's
Rabelaisian gangster or to the tricks and deceptions of Ostap Bender, the picaro created by Ilf and
Petrov, left its mark on Bakhtin." He later transferred toPetersburg University to join his brother
Nikolai. It is here that Bakhtin was greatly influenced by the classicist F. F. Zelinsky, whose works
contain the beginnings of concepts elaborated by Bakhtin.

16.2 Career
Bakhtin completed his studies in 1918 and moved to a small city in western Russia, Nevel (Pskov
Oblast), where he worked as a schoolteacher for two years. It was at this time that the first
"Bakhtin Circle" formed. The group consisted of intellectuals with varying interests, but all shared
a love for the discussion of literary, religious, and political topics. Included in this group were
Valentin Voloshinov and, eventually, P. N. Medvedev, who joined the group later in Vitebsk.
German philosophy was the topic talked about most frequently and, from this point forward,
Bakhtin considered himself more a philosopher than a literary scholar. It was in Nevel, also, that
Bakhtin worked tirelessly on a large work concerning moral philosophy that was never published
in its entirety. However, in 1919, a short section of this work was published and given the title "Art
and Responsibility". This piece constitutes Bakhtin's first published work. Bakhtin relocated to
Vitebsk in 1920. It was here, in 1921, that Bakhtin married Elena Aleksandrovna Okolovich. Later,
in 1923, Bakhtin was diagnosed with osteomyelitis, a bone disease that ultimately led to the
amputation of his leg in 1938. This illness hampered his productivity and rendered him an invalid.
In 1924, Bakhtin moved to Leningrad, where he assumed a position at the Historical Institute and
provided consulting services for the State Publishing House. It is at this time that Bakhtin decided
to share his work with the public, but just before "On the Question of the Methodology of Aesthetics
in Written Works" was to be published, the journal in which it was to appear stopped publication.
This work was eventually published 51 years later. The repression and misplacement of his
manuscripts was something that would plague Bakhtin throughout his career. In 1929, "Problems
of Dostoevsky's Art", Bakhtin's first major work, was published. It is here that Bakhtin introduces
the concept of dialogism. However, just as this revolutionary book was introduced, Bakhtin was
accused of participating in the Russian Orthodox Church's underground movement. The
truthfulness of this charge is not known, even today. Consequently, during one of the many
purges of artists and intellectuals that Joseph Stalin conducted during the early years of his rule,

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