Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Bakhtin (Oryol, 1895 – Moscow, 1975) was a Soviet philosopher of language, literary historian and theorist of culture. His writings, on a wide range of subjects, inspired scholars in traditions as different as Marxism, semiotics, structuralism and religious criticism, and in fields ranging from literary criticism to anthropology and psychology. Although he took part in the aesthetic and literary debates of the 1920s, his ideas did not gain wide attention until Soviet scholars rediscovered him in the 1960s.

Born in Oryol into an old, declining noble family, he spent his childhood in Oryol, Vilnius and Odessa, as his father, a bank manager, moved between cities. In 1913 he entered the University of Odessa, then transferred to the University of St Petersburg to join his brother Nikolai. There he studied philosophy and literature, drawn to German thought, and was shaped by the classicist Faddei Zelinski, whose work contains early versions of ideas Bakhtin later developed. After finishing in 1918 he taught for two years in Nevel, a small town in western Russia, where the first Bakhtin Circle took shape. Its members, including Valentin Voloshinov, had varied interests but shared a passion for debating literature, religion and politics. Bakhtin began to think of himself more as a philosopher than as a literary scholar. He worked on a long study of moral philosophy that was never published in full; in 1919 a fragment, "Art and Responsibility", appeared, his first published text.

In 1920 he moved to Vitebsk, where he married Elena Okolovich and befriended the painter Marc Chagall. In 1923 he was diagnosed with osteomyelitis, a bone disease that years later led to the amputation of a leg. After losing his job over suspicions of religious practice, he settled in Petrograd in 1924. His key work of the 1920s, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, introduced the concept of dialogism: Dostoevsky's novels as spaces where independent voices coexist without one imposing its truth on the others. Shortly afterwards he was arrested over alleged ties to a clandestine religious group and sentenced to exile. He served six years in Kustanai, Kazakhstan, working as a bookkeeper, and there wrote essays such as "Discourse in the Novel".

After his exile he taught in Saransk and, fleeing the purges of 1937, took refuge in Kimry. His manuscript on the eighteenth-century German novel was lost during the German invasion. During the war he lived in Moscow and submitted a dissertation on Rabelais, which could not be defended until 1946 and provoked sharp disagreement. His most influential book, Rabelais and His World, examines carnival laughter, the public square and ambivalence as ways of questioning rigid norms. He retired from teaching in 1961 for health reasons and died in Moscow in 1975.

His ideas spread mainly in the West after his death. His influence reaches linguistics, narratology, sociolinguistics and cultural studies. Many details of his life are now treated with caution, since information was often hidden during his lifetime and Bakhtin himself helped shape inaccurate accounts of it.