Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher and Russian thinker, a theorist of European culture and art. He was a scholar of language, epic forms of narrative, and the genre of the European novel. He created a new theory of the European novel, including the concept of polyphonism (multivoicedness) in a literary work. In studying the artistic principles of François Rabelais’s novel, Bakhtin developed the theory of a universal folk laughter culture. He is credited with such literary terms as polyphonism, laughter culture, chronotope, carnivalization, and menippea (a euphemism referring to the main and leading line in the development of the European novel in “great time”).

Bakhtin was the author of several linguistic works devoted to general theoretical questions, stylistics, and the theory of speech genres. He was the intellectual leader of the scholarly and philosophical circle known as the “Bakhtin Circle.”

He was born in Orel into the family of a bank employee. There were six children in the family. He later lived with his family in Vilna (now Vilnius; 1905–1911) and Odessa (1911–?); according to his own account, he studied at Petrograd and Novorossiysk Universities (there is no documentary confirmation); he did not graduate from university.

From 1918 he lived in the town of Nevel, where he taught at a unified labor school. There a close circle of like-minded intellectuals took shape: M. I. Kagan, L. V. Pumpiansky, V. N. Voloshinov, M. V. Yudina, and B. M. Zubakin. In 1919, his first published article, “Art and Responsibility,” appeared. Bakhtin.jpg

From 1920 he lived in Vitebsk, taught at the pedagogical institute and the conservatory, and gave public lectures on philosophy, aesthetics, and literature. His acquaintances included P. N. Medvedev and I. I. Sollertinsky. In 1920–1924 he worked on unfinished philosophical treatises and an early version of the book on Dostoevsky.

In 1921 he married Elena Aleksandrovna Okolovich.

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