Most readers will be surprised to hear that Mikhail Bakhtin, who
died in Moscow in 1975 at the age of 80, "is emerging as one of the
major thinkers of the twentieth century." And a list of Bakhtin's
chief works translated into English - Dostoevsky's Poetics, The
Dialogic Imagination, Rabelais and His World - only hints at what's
going on. But Clark and Holquist, who have translated Bakhtin and
publicized him in academic circles, are close to the mark in
comparing him to our own Kenneth Burke. Like Burke, Bakhtin is
tough to categorize - either by scholarly field or intellectual
fad. Philosophy, linguistics, and literary criticism are just parts
of what he weaves together. The connecting thread is the idea of
dialogue - where the concept of language as both preexisting
structure-of-meaning and specific instance-of-meaning comes
together with the centrality of self/other relations to form a
conception of knowledge, language, and history that is always open:
meaning is constantly being made and made over. These ideas - some
of which anticipated Heidegger, Sartre, and other fixtures in the
20th-century pantheon - were slow in coming to light. Clark and
Holquist follow Bakhtin's life as an itinerant thinker, not an
activist - who is seen moving from one "circle" to another where
brainy people drink tea, smoke, and talk about big things. But
though he stuck to his desk, Bakhtin got into trouble for belonging
to a religious group that was suppressed in Stalin's early years,
and he was arrested and sent into exile in Kazakhstan. (At age 35,
he had published little under his own name and had been unable to
obtain a teaching position.) His subsequent life consisted of
writing, some teaching, and other undramatic doings; but he was
suddenly discovered in the 1960s by a group of younger Soviet
literary intellectuals, and by the end of his life was something of
a renowned figure. In the West, his reputation has been building
with the publication of his works, though the piecemeal nature of
that publication had made it difficult for critics to place him.
This study may make that a little easier, but Bakhtin's life was so
resolutely intellectual that it's unlikely to speed up the Bakhtin
movement. His books will have to do that themselves. (Kirkus
Reviews)
In such diverse fields as semiotics, literary theory, social
theory, linguistics, psychology, and anthropology, Mikhail
Bakhtin's importance is increasingly recognized. His posthumous
fame comes in striking contrast to his obscurity during his
lifetime (1895-1975), much of it spent as a semi-invalid in a
succession of provincial towns. He received no public recognition,
in the Soviet Union or abroad, until the last dozen years of his
long life--not surprisingly, given the historical circumstances.
His books on Freudianism (1927), on Formalism (1928), and on
Marxism and the philosophy of language (1929) were published as the
work of others, as were a number of important essays. His study of
Dostoevsky appeared under his own name but only after his arrest
and sentence to exile, and it quickly disappeared from sight. Some
manuscripts were never published; one was used by Bakhtin for
cigarette paper. His book on Rabelais, completed in 1940, remained
unpublished for twenty-five years--until, in a less repressive
political climate, friends had succeeded in negotiating a reissue
of the book on Dostoevsky.
The Rabelais book, when translated, caused a stir among
folklorists, anthropologists, and social historians, with its
theory of carnival and of ritual inversions of hierarchy. The book
on Dostoevsky aroused intense interest among literary theorists in
the concept of the "polyphonic novel" and the many authorial voices
to be heard therein. Similarly, as Bakhtin's other writings have
appeared in translation, he has been hailed in disparate circles
for his contributions to linguistic, psychoanalytic, and social
theory. But among all those who have studied various aspects of
Bakhtin'swork, few have been in a position, or even attempted, to
assess his total achievement.
It is the great merit of Clark and Holquist's book that they
have endeavored, insofar as possible, to give us the complete life
and the complete works of this complex and multifaceted figure. The
authors have had unique access to the Bakhtin archive in Moscow,
have traced further material in other cities in Europe, and have
interviewed many persons who knew Bakhtin. The phases of his life
are placed in their physical and intellectual milieux, and accounts
are given of the figures who made up the various "Bakhtin circles"
over the years. All of the works, published and unpublished, are
discussed, in the context of European philosophical movements and
the currents of thought of the time. Underlying and informing
Bakhtin's particular theories in various fields was, in the
authors' view, his lifelong meditation on the relation between self
and other. The philosophy he evolved has come to be called
dialogism, since it conceives of the world in terms of
communication and exchange. It is a world view with wide-ranging
implications for the human sciences.
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