Dialogism

Bakhtin and His World

Michael Holquist

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134465392
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Holquist's masterly study draws on all of Bakhtin's known writings providing a comprehensive account of his achievement. Widely acknowledged as an exceptional guide to Bakhtin and dialogics, this book now includes a new introduction, concluding chapter and a fully updated bibliography.

He argues that Bakhtin's work gains coherence through his commitment to the concept of dialogue, examining Bakhtin's dialogues with theorists such as Saussure, Freud, Marx and Lukacs, as well as other thinkers whose connection with Bakhtin has previously been ignored.
Dialogism also includes dialogic readings of major literary texts, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Gogol's The Notes of a Madman and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, which provide another dimension of dialogue with dialogue.

1
BAKHTIN’S LIFE

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was born on November 16, 1895 (November 4, old style) in Orel, a medium-sized town south of Moscow.¹ His father was a bank executive who came of an old but not particularly distinguished family of the minor nobility. As a child, Bakhtin was educated at home; his governess was a German woman of unusual gifts, and from an early age Bakhtin was bilingual in German and Russian. His life up to 1918, when he left Petersburg (or, as it then was, Petrograd) University, could not have been more in character for a man who was to become a student of heteroglossia (many-languagedness). Since his father’s job required frequent transfers, the adolescent Bakhtin spent his gymnasium years in Vilnius and Odessa, two cities that stood out even in the patchwork Russian empire as unusually heterogeneous in their mix of cultures and languages. Vilnius was part of the ancient Lithuanian kingdom that had been ceded to the Romanovs after the third partition of Poland in 1795; thus the “official language” was Russian, but the majority of citizens spoke Lithuanian or Polish. Vilnius was also the intellectual center of East European Jewry, the “Jerusalem of the North” famous for its Talmudic exegetes, so Yiddish and Hebrew were also in the air. Odessa, a busy port on the Black Sea, was another of East Europe’s large Jewish enclaves, and a city in whose streets mingled several different cultures, each with its own language.

In 1913, Bakhtin entered the local university in Odessa, but transfered the following year to St Petersburg University; in his gymnasium years he had passionately studied Latin and (especially) Greek, so he registered in the classics department of the historico-philological faculty, following in the steps of his older brother Nikolai, who was two years ahead of him at the university. Nikolai, an extraordinary figure in his own right, inspired Mikhail’s lifelong love affair with the Hellenistic age. Indeed, he was in general the greatest influence on the youthful Bakhtin until the two were separated in 1918, never to see each other again. Nikolai joined the White Guards and, after many adventures, ended up as professor of linguistics in Birmingham University, England, where he died in 1950.

In the spring of 1918, Bakhtin, like many others, sought relief from the chaos that followed in the immediate wake of the revolution by going into the country districts where food and fuel were more abundant. He ended up first in Nevel, and then in nearby Vitebsk. In both places, he quickly became a member of a small group of intellectuals who feverishly threw themselves into the debates, lectures, demonstrations, and manifesto writing that characterized life at that extraordinary time. It was in this atmosphere of immense intellectual and political intensity that Bakhtin sought to think through for himself some of the problems then of most concern to philosophers, such as (to name only a few) the status of the knowing subject, the relation of art to lived experience, the existence of other persons, and the complexities of responsibility in the area of discourse as well as in the area of ethics.

Bakhtin had already immersed himself in philosophy from a very early age, particularly in ancient Greek, Hellenistic, and modern European philosophy. He read the German systematic philosophers, as well as Buber and Kierkegaard, while still a gymnasium student in Vilnius and Odessa. At university, he trained as a scholar in the Greek and Latin classics as they were taught in the old German philological tradition, in which the study of literature and language were inextricably bound up with each other. In addition, Tadeusz Zielinski, his eminent professor of classics, emphasized the need to know the complete spectrum of classical civilization, including philosophy.

Thus Bakhtin’s interests were broad, but no more so than those of the group of young people he joined in 1918, although it was the latest work in philosophy that attracted their most passionate attention. It was here, in the study and disputation of texts by contemporary German philosophers, that the nucleus of an ongoing “Bakhtin circle” was formed. It included the then musicologist Valentin Voloshinov, and the then journalist and organizer of literary events Pavel Medvedev, both of whose names would later become intertwined with Bakhtin’s in disputes over the authorship of several texts written in the 1920s.

Until 1924 at least, then, Bakhtin was surrounded by intense philosophical debates. These took place not only in his friends’ study circle (of which he very soon became the intellectually dominant member), but in public forums organized by the local Communist Party committee.

The particular school which dominated the academic study of philosophy in Europe during these years, and which was of great importance to the young Bakhtin, was Neo-Kantianism. Since this school has now fallen into some obscurity, a few words will perhaps be helpful on at least those aspects of it that are germane to Bakhtin. By 1918, Neo-Kantianism had been the dominant school of philosophy in Germany for almost fifty years. From roughly the 1870s until the 1920s, most professors of philosophy in Germany defined themselves by taking a position vis-à-vis Kant. This period corresponds to a time when Germany was considered by most Russians to be the home of true philosophical thought. Chairs at the leading universities not only in Germany but in Russia as well were held by Neo-Kantians of one kind or another. They were particularly well entrenched at Petersburg University during the years when Bakhtin was a student there.²

Although Neo-Kantianism was widespread phenomenon embracing several philosophies that were highly varied in their concerns, the one feature of Kant’s thought they all had to confront was his formulation of the mind’s relation to the world, the insistence on a constructive epistemology at the heart of his “Copernican revolution.”

In Kant’s view, his predecessors had either, like Leibniz, overemphasized the role of ideas, thus diminishing the role of the world outside the mind; or, like Locke, they had gone too far in the opposite direction and by sensualizing concepts had made the mind merely a receptor of information provided by sensations from the world. Kant’s breakthrough was to insist on the necessary interaction—the dialogue as Bakhtin would come to interpret it—between mind and world.

Kant argued that what we call thought is really a synthesis of two forms of knowledge: sensibility and understanding. “Sensibility” may be taken roughly to mean what empiricists such as Locker or Hume assumed to be the sole basis of knowledge, the realm of physical sensation. And Kant’s use of “understanding” is roughly what rationalists, such as Leibniz, assumed to be the sole basis of knowledge, the realm of concepts in the mind.

The ability to think, which Kant assumed to mean the ability to make judgments, requires both forms of knowledge, which he triumphantly brought together in his “transcendental synthesis”: a priori concepts exist in the mind, but they can be used to actively organize sensations from the world outside the mind. The world, the realm of things-in-themselves, really exists, but so does the mind, the realm of concepts. Thought is the give and take between the two.

Those who came after Kant interpreted this synthesis in various ways. The Marburg School, the particular Neo-Kantianism in which the young Bakhtin steeped himself, was founded at the University of Marburg by Hermann Cohen.³ Cohen radically revised the mind/world relation as Kant had defined it. He emphasized the transcendental aspects of Kant’s synthesis, pursuing the quest for a oneness so immaculate that it made him a hero to other seekers after metaphysical purity, such as the young Pasternak who in 1912 travelled to Marburg to sit at the feet of the great man. And it was the same lust for unity in Cohen that inspired another Russian, Lenin, to attack him as a particularly virulent idealist.⁴ What attracted Pasternak and repelled Lenin was the same quality in Cohen: his opposition to the potential dualism in Kant’s account of how internal thought relates to the external world. Cohen had a remarkably precise mind, and his philosophy is a model of the kind of systematic thought that sought to unify all operations of consciousness. Roughly stated, his method for doing so was to abandon Kant’s notion of the thing-in-itself in order to declare a “logic of pure knowing”⁵ in which there is only a realm of concepts: the world exists as the subject of thought, and the subject of thought, no matter how material it might appear, is still always a subject that is thought.

Bakhtin’s connection with the Marburg School was relaltively direct, in that his closest friend during the years he was in Nevel’ and Vitebsk was Matvei Isaevich Kagan, who returned to Nevel’ from Germany almost simultaneously with Bakhtin’s arrival there from Petrograd. Kagan was a man of remarkable intellect who commanded the respect of all who came into contact with him. Originally fleeing from Russia’s Jewish Pale to Germany to escape persecution, and intending to pursue study in mathematics and physics, he had instead taken up the study of philosophy with Cohen in Marburg. Kagan’s move from the exact sciences to philosophy was not unusual in the years before the First World War, when scientists such as von Helmholtz sought to reinterpret Kant through the logic of mathematics and the workings of the human nervous system, or when physicists such as Ernst Mach applied what they had learned about the nature of matter and energy in the laboratory to the great questions of metaphysics. The Marburg School was the version of academic Neo-Kantianism most concerned to unite new discoveries in the sciences with the study of philosophy; so Kagan, the erstwhile mathematician, felt quite at home in the old German university on the heights above the river Lahn. But Kagan’s budding career as a philosopher in Germany was interrupted by the outbreak of the war in 1914. For the next four years he was held as an enemy alien (although Cohen himself had intervened on his behalf), being released for repatriation to Russia only after the signing of the treaty of BrestLitovsk in 1918. The enthusiasm of Bakhtin and his other friends for German philosophy was given new depth and impetus by Kagan’s return.

Two general aspects of Marburg Neo-Kantianism that played an important role in the composition of Bakhtin’s early work should be emphasized. The first of these is the Neo-Kantian desire to relate traditional problems in philosophy to the great new discoveries about the world and nature being made in the exact and biological sciences on the cusp of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bakhtin himself was greatly interested in science, particularly the new physics of Planck, Einstein, and Bohr, as well as in current developments in physiology, or more precisely the study of the central nervous system, an area in which Petersburg was one of the world centers. His closest friends were either lapsed mathematicians such as Kagan or, in later years, the biologist (and historian of science) Ivan Kanaev. This aspect of his activity will perhaps explain the attention paid to questions of perception and materiality in Bakhtin. Dialogism shares in the general effort of thinkers after Einstein and Bohr to come to grips with new problems raised by relativity and quantum theory for anyone concerned with the traditional issues of how mind relates to body, and how physical matter connects with such apparently immaterial entities as relations between things. There is a certain ambiguity about these issues in Bakhtin’s philosophy, deriving in some measure from ambiguities inherent in the treatment of the same topics in contemporary science. Einstein was arguing that physical objects were not static matter, but forms of volatile energy. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that matter while still being a basic category for philosophers and physicists alike—should have lost the kind of certainty that had previously made it seem so convincing when materialists confounded their more idealistic colleagues by merely kicking a stone. In Bakhtin’s youth, the clear-cut distinctions that had so unproblematically been assumed in traditional (binary) distinctions between matter and mind, or body and soul were fast being eroded.

A second aspect of the Marburg School’s activity that proved to be important in Bakhtin’s development was the emphasis of its founder on unity and oneness. Bakhtin was not merely a passive receptor of Neo-Kantian ideas. One of the most important ways he demonstrates his independence from Cohen, even at this early stage, is in his resistance to the idea of an all-encompassing oneness, or Allheit. In this, Bakhtin is perhaps best understood as a figure who is trying to get back to the other side of Kant’s synthesis, the world, rather than the mind (and in particular the rational mind), the extreme to which Cohen tended. The original Kantian concept of the heterogeneity of ends is much closer to Bakhtin’s work than the later Neo-Kantian lust for unity.

During his years in Nevel’ and Vitebsk, from 1918 to 1924, Bakhtin pursued a number of different writing projects, all of which, in one form or another, may be seen as an attempt to rethink the possibility of constructing a wholeness in terms more complex than those provided by the Marburg School. Kant’s version of how mind and world related to each other defined the knowing subject as one who made sense out of the otherwise inchoate matter of the world. In such early essays as “Author and hero in aesthetic activity” or “Toward a philosophy of the deed” Bakhtin’s understanding of perception as an act of authoring brings him closer to Kant himself than to Cohen, in so far as he rethinks the problem of wholeness in terms of what is an essentially aesthetic operation. In those essays, the individual subject is conceived as similar to the artist who seeks to render brute matter, a thing that is not an art work in itself (independent of the artist’s activity), into something that is the kind of conceptual whole we can recognize as a painting or a text. Cohen’s lust for unity, with its attendant rationalism, was not what drew Bakhtin to the sage of Marburg. It was rather his emphasis on process, the radical “un-givenness” of experience, with its openness and energy—the loopholes in existence—that attracted him.

With the exception of one small piece that was published in a shortlived provincial newspaper, none of what Bakhtin was writing during these years was published. But the philosophical underpinnings of the work he would do for the rest of his life were established during these crucial years.

In 1924, Bakhtin returned to Petrograd, on the eve of its transformation into Leningrad. Although a time of great hardship, during which he lived on the earnings his wife eked out by making stuffed animals from old rags, the next six years were the most active of his life. Bakhtin was unable to take a normal job, because he was both politically suspect (for participating in several discussion circles which had connections with banned groups of Orthodox believers in the “catacomb church”) and an invalid (in Nevel’ he had contracted the severe osteomyelitis which would necessitate amputation of his right leg in 1938). Although there was hardly money for the endless tea and cigarettes Bakhtin required to work, life was not bad: not working meant there was more time to read and talk to friends, some of whom went back to the Nevel’ Vitebsk discussion circle, and others of whom were newly made, such as the eminent biologist Ivan Kanaev, who permitted the Bakhtins to live in his relatively spacious quarters just off Nevsky Prospekt, the city’s main thoroughfare.

But most of all, there was time to write, and during the years from 1924 to 1929 Bakhtin wrote several of the books that would later bring him fame. He abandoned his earlier, rather technical philosophical style for one that was more popular—or at least easier for most people to read. He (and others) would later claim that he published some work from this period under the names of his friends Medvedev (“The formal method in literary study,” 1928), Voloshinov (“Freudianism: a critical sketch,” 1927; “Marxism and the philosophy of language,” 1929), and Kanaev (a two-part article, “Contemporary vitalism,” 1926).⁶ The claim has struck many subsequent scholars as questionable, and a whole literature has developed on the topic of these texts’ disputed authorship.⁷ This is not the place to go into the arcana of the dispute, but the reader of this book should be aware that I hold to the opinion that Bakhtin is, in his own charged sense of the word, primarily responsible for the texts in question and that I have treated them accordingly in this book.

One consequence of doing so is to see a shift in the conversation Bakhtin conducted throughout his life. During the late 1920s and early 1930s Bakhtin switched from participation in debates about aesthetics, the status of the subject, and the philosophy of religion (which is not the same as religion itself)— topics heavily influenced by contemporary events in German intellectual life—to the great issues of the day in the Soviet Union. These included controversy in several different disciplines about the relation their traditional methodologies bore to Communist doctrine: how would psychology, linguistics, and literary theory look when inter-illuminated by Marxist theory and Bolshevik practice?

Bakhtin participated (under his own name or that of one of his friends) in all these methodological and political struggles. In the 1928 Medvedev book he took exception to work done by the Russian Formalists, while also pointing out limitations in the still very poorly developed area of Marxist literary theory. In the Voloshinov books, he attacked Freud for his inability to imagine a collective subject for psychoanalysis, and Saussure for failing to recognize the importance of history and everyday speech in his theory of language. And under his own name, he published a book (Problems in the work of Dostoevsky, 1929) that argued against the hegemony of absolute authorial control. Thus all of the work that can be associated with his name during this period —while continuing to extend his attacks on the transcendental ego, continuing further to underline the need always to take others and otherness into account, and continuing to emphasize plurality and variety—also lent itself to the new conditions as arguments against the increasing homogenization of cultural and political life in the Soviet Union that would culminate in the long night of Stalinism.

A sign of how things were going was Bakhtin’s arrest in 1929; although he was never told exactly why he had been picked up, it can reasonably be surmised that it was in connection with a sweep of intellectuals associated with the underground church. After a brief period when it looked as if he was going to be sent to certain death in the dreaded hard labor camp in the Solovetsky islands of the far north, Bakhtin was sentenced to an easier exile in Kazakhstan. He was saved from this camp by his patently bad health, but only after intervention by (among others) the wife of Maxim Gorky, who had been approached by Bakhtin’s wife, Elena Alexandrovna, and his old friend Kagan, who had become a rising star as a mathematician in the prestigious governmental commission on Soviet energy reserves. Bakhtin was sent to Kustenai, where he worked during the day teaching the almost illiterate former partisans who now ran Kazakhstan how to do bookkeeping, while at night continuing his studies on the history of the novel. Supplied with crates of books by Kagan and Kanaev, Bakhtin finished a number of monographs in the general area of the theory of the novel, including the very important “Discourse in the novel” (1934–5) and the long essay on the chronotope (1937–8).

Bakhtin’s term of exile came to an end in 1934, but he stayed on in Kazakhstan for another two years, for although the area was particularly hard hit by the horrors of collectivization (it has been estimated that over 1.5 million Kazakhs lost their lives at this time, either through execution or starvation), he was able to make a better life in Kustenai than if he returned to Leningrad or Moscow, where many released political prisoners were being rearrested. In the years leading up to the Second World War, Bakhtin moved about a great deal; he worked for a year in Saransk, at the Mordovian Pedagogical Institute, where he was virtually a one-man literature department, but escaped possible rearrest in the great purge of 1937 by fleeing to Savelovo, a small town on the Volga, where he was able to work fairly undisturbed. During this period he finished two more long manuscripts. The first, called “The novel of education and its significance in the history of realism,” was completed in 1938, but was mostly lost because the publishing house that was to bring it out was destroyed by the Germans in the early months of the war; the second was to be submitted to the Gorky Institute of World literature for a postgraduate degree. It was completed in 1941, but was not published until twenty-five years later as a book on Rabelais. Both books were directed in subtle (and some not so subtle) ways against the official doctrine of Socialist Realism, further indications of Bakhtin’s peculiarly decentered way of acting out his responsibility in the historical events of his time.

After the German invasion, restrictions were loosened all over the Sovi...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION
• 1 BAKHTIN’S LIFE
• 2 EXISTENCE AS DIALOGUE
• 3 LANGUAGE AS DIALOGUE
• 4 NOVELNESS AS DIALOGUE
• 5 THE DIALOGUE OF HISTORY AND POETICS
• 6 AUTHORING AS DIALOGUE
• 7 THIS HETEROGLOSSIA CALLED BAKHTIN
• NOTES
• BlBLIOGRAPHY