Bakhtinian Thought

Simon Dentith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134813995
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

First published in 1994. Mikhail Bakhtin, and the writers associated with him, have come to be recognised as writers of trail-blazing importance. Working in the extraordinarily difficult conditions of Stalinist Russia, they nevertheless produced a body of writing in literary theory, linguistics, the history of the novel, philosophy, and what Bakhtin called 'philosophical anthropology', which continues to inspire and challenge people working in a number of different areas. Above all, Bakhtin insists on locating all utterances, whether spoken or literary, between the participants in a dialogue and thus involves them in considerations of power and authority. This introduction and reader serves a double function. In the first place, Simon Dentith provides a lucid and approachable introduction of the work of Bakhtin and his circle, taking the reader helpfully through the many areas of their thought, and indicating the points of controversy, difficulty and excitement. This introductory section culminates in a discussion of the particular emphases lent by Bakhtin to current debates in literary theory. The other feature of the book is the anthology of writing by Bakhtin, Voloshinov and Medvedev, drawn from all the major areas of their work. This provides an especially helpful reader for a body of work otherwise published in disparate and relatively inaccessible forms. Special emphasis has been given to the still unsurpassed linguistic thought of Voloshinov, and the practical analyses of the novel found in Bakhtin's writing on Dostoevsky and Dickens. This book will be especially interesting to readers new to the work of Bakhtin and his circle. The combination of an introduction and an anthology will allow such readers a context for their reading of Bakhtin, an indication of his importance for contemporary debates in literature, language and social history, and the opportunity to engage directly with the writings of this important and indeed, for the student of literary theory, essential writer.

PART I: An overview of the writings of Bakhtin and his circle

Introduction

One of Mikhail Bakhtin’s basic principles is that communicative acts only have meaning, only take on their specific force and weight, in particular situations or contexts; his is an account of the utterance, of the actual communicative interaction in its real situation. Nothing demonstrates this principle more clearly than the fate of Bakhtin’s own utterances, many of which could have no life, no specific force and weight, in his own lifetime, because they could not be published in the Soviet Union; and when they were published and translated in the West, they issued into specific situations which lent them the force of other expectations and agendas. There is no betrayal here, no departure from a fixed original meaning, for the life of any word is as a succession of utterances, in each of which its meanings are enriched, contested, or annexed. The words of Bakhtin himself are no exception. Yet there is an interesting corrolary to this emphasis on the ‘situatedness’ of all utterances, which is that they must issue forth from one historically unique and particular place to another, indeed from one person to another, necessarily caught up in the complexities and inequities of social life. In this first chapter I aim to give you a sense of the situation out of which Bakhtin, and Voloshinov and Medvedev, speak. These are extraordinary and courageous voices that speak out of the aftermath of the Russian Revolution about language and literature, and about ethics and history; and they speak to us in the West, now spectators of another Russian Revolution which might yet, among its more minor consequences, upset our notions of some key Bakhtinian themes. In short, dialogue with another—at the heart of Bakhtin’s thinking —does not invite us to cancel what historically separates us but rather to understand that other’s historical specificity as fully as possible.

I

The only biography of Mikhail Bakhtin was published in 1984, written by two American scholars, Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist.¹ What follows is of course deeply dependent on this pioneering work. It is a considerable achievement, not only for what it managed to discover, in inauspicious circumstances, about the actual life histories of Bakhtin and the members of his circle, but also because of the way it weaves together these biographical facts with the intellectual history which makes them important. For although Mikhail Bakhtin led a scholarly life, and was profoundly committed to such a life in the great tradition of the Russian intelligentsia, his life was not without its dramatic vicissitudes, thrust upon him by the times he lived in. There is reputed to be a Chinese proverbial blessing: ‘May you not live in interesting times.’ If anyone lived in interesting times, it was Mikhail Bakhtin, who was twenty-two at the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917, and thus lived through the Revolution, the Civil War that followed it, the excitements of the 1920s, the imposition of Stalinism, the purges of the 1930s, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the cultural freeze of the Cold War, the Khruschev thaw, and the stagnation of the Brezhnev years. Bakhtin’s writings were profoundly affected by this extraordinary history, not least because they could not be published between 1929 and the 1960s.

Mikhail Bakhtin was born in 1895 into a provincial banking family. He was the younger of two sons, and his elder brother Nikolai was to prove equally gifted. Mikhail grew up in Orel, and then in Vilnius and Odessa, both polyglot cities which gave him early experience of the linguistic heterogeneity which features so markedly in his later accounts of language. In addition, the two boys had a German governess who early made them fluent in German and introduced them to Classical literature. After studying for a year at Odessa University, Bakhtin followed his brother’s footsteps to study classics in the University of Petrograd between 1914 and 1918. But the paths of the two men permanently diverged as a result of the Revolution and Civil War, for Nikolai joined the army during the First World War and was then persuaded that he should join the White Guards. As a result he followed them into exile. When he died in 1950 he assumed that his brother had perished in the purges in the 1930s.

But this was not the case, though Mikhail did indeed come in danger of dying from Stalinist repression. In 1918, along with many other Petrograd intellectuals, he moved to Nevel, and then in 1920 to Vitebsk, small towns in which many sought to escape the hardships of the Civil War period in the great cities. Here he formed the intellectual friendships that were to last in some cases for the remainder of his life, though most of the friends of the 1920s were to die within twenty years, killed either by purges, illness, or the German invasion. At all events, in Nevel, Vitebsk, and from 1924 in Leningrad, Bakhtin was part of small informal groups of young intellectuals who together discussed philosophical and perhaps religious questions. Some of these intellectuals, like V.N. Voloshinov, whom Bakhtin met in Nevel, and P.N.Medvedev, whom he met in Vitebsk, wrote in an avowedly Marxist way; others, like the Jewish philosopher and mathematician M.I.Kagan, wrote and thought in quite a different idiom. Clark and Holquist do well to capure the heady excitement of those early revolutionary years, when the young members of Bakhtin’s circle could debate endlessly with themselves and with the equally young Marxists who governed in Nevel and Vitebsk; where the walls of the one-storey wooden buildings of this small provincial town were covered with avant-garde paintings; and where endless philosophical projects could be formed despite the acute poverty in which Bakhtin in particular lived. This was compounded by Bakhtin’s poor state of health—throughout his adult life Bakhtin suffered from osteomyelitis (an inflammatory disease of the bones), which was so severe that in 1938 he had to have his right leg amputated. In 1921 he married, though he was not to have a secure and permanent source of income until after the Second World War.

A number of unpublished writings have survived from the 1920s, of which the longest has now been published in English as ‘Author and hero in aesthetic activity’ (in AA, pp. 4–256). Characteristically for Bakhtin’s early concerns, it seeks to combine considerations of aesthetics with epistemology and ethics. Though there are undoubted continuities with the later work, and though Bakhtin was to return to some of the same questions at the end of his life, the extent to which this early writing is to be thought of as a ‘key’ to the whole of Bakhtin’s career is in fact controversial. The only piece of writing he published before 1929 was a short but dense article on the philosophy of authorship in a miscellany published in Nevel in 1919 (also in AA, pp. 1–3).

The year 1929 marks the end of this first phase of Bakhtin’s adult life, for it saw two important events: the publication of his book on Dostoevsky, and his arrest as part of a purge of religious intellectuals in Leningrad. While in Leningrad Bakhtin had no regular job, and was supported by small pensions due to him for his illness. He was at the centre of a group of active scholars and thinkers, but had no institutional position, though he did give private lessons. He was also a member of, or on the fringes of, some unofficial religious groups, which in their various ways sought to reconcile theology with the intellectual and scientific currents of the day. It was because of his association with one of these groups that he was arrested; he was variously charged with being part of anti-Soviet conspiracies and of ‘corrupting the young’, for which he was at first sentenced to five years in the rigours of Solovetsky Islands. However, after numerous appeals on his behalf, on the grounds of his health, and perhaps thanks to a favourable review of the Dostoevsky book by the Bolshevik intellectual Lunacharvsky, the sentence was reduced to five years of internal exile in the Kazakh town of Kustanai. Bakhtin left Leningrad in early 1930.

Bakhtin was to see no more of his writing published—except for an article on book-keeping in collective farms—until the 1960s. Thanks to his arrest he was now politically suspect, and his fortunes wavered with the political climate. Yet, paradoxically, the 1930s were an especially productive period for him; in this time he wrote a full-length study of the novel of education, several book-length articles on the history of the novel, and a doctoral dissertation on Rabelais. He did not spend the whole of this period in Kustanai. After he had served out the time of his sentence, he got a job at a teacher training institute in Saransk, in Mordovia, about four hundred miles east of Moscow. However, he was forced to resign from this post after a year at the height of the Stalinist repression in 1937, and in August of that year moved to a small town north of Moscow called Savelovo, where he remained until the end of the War. This was the nearest that one-time political exiles were permitted to live near Moscow. The mild political thaw at the end of the 1930s meant that his book on the bildungsroman or novel of education was accepted for publication and that he was permitted to submit his thesis on Rabelais for examination.

However, the German invasion of Russia prevented both of these projects from coming to fruition. Although the dissertation was submitted, the onset of war meant that it was not be examined until the late 1940s when the political climate had again changed and it became politically controversial. But a still more extraordinary fate overtook the book on the novel of education. The only complete manuscript was destroyed by a German bomb on the publishing house where it was stored. Two of Bakhtin’s own vices combined to destroy the partial manuscript that remained. Throughout his life he was cavalier with respect to his writing and his manuscripts; in addition he was a lifelong and incessant cigarette smoker. He solved the acute shortage of cigarette papers during the war by smoking the manuscript. Only a portion of it remains.

After the war he was reinstated in his job in Saransk, and played the role of an active teacher and academic administrator until his retirement in 1961. He was eventually awarded the candidate’s degree—not a full doctoral degree—for the dissertation on Rabelais in 1952 after political controversy had dogged the examination process. In brief, Bakhtin fell foul of the ‘anti-cosmopolitanism’ campaign of the late 1940s, which was not just a code for anti-Semitism but which made all intellectual students of non-Russian literature suspect. In addition, the celebration of the ‘lower bodily stratum’, which characterizes the thesis, offended the puritanism of the Soviet literary establishment. But in general Bakhtin was not productive during the years of his full-time employment. It was not until his rediscovery by a group of younger intellectuals in the early 1960s that he began to be published. One striking essay on ‘Speech genres’, written in the early 1950s, contrasts markedly with the prolific creativity of the 1930s.

The story of Bakhtin’s rediscovery in the 1960s is itself an interesting one. In 1960 some postgraduate students at the Gorky Institute in Moscow came across Bakhtin’s book on Dostoevsky and then his dissertation in the archives. At first they believed him to be dead. When they discovered he was still alive they undertook to get his work published. Even in the relatively liberal climate of the 1960s this was not easy, and the Dostoevsky book was successfully brought out, with substantial revisions by Bakhtin himself, before the more controversial Rabelais dissertation was finally published in 1965. Bakhtin became a cult intellectual figure in the Soviet Union before and after his death; in 1969 his state of health was such that he was brought from retirement in Saransk to a clinic in Moscow, and eventually, after his wife’s death, he was found a large flat with constant nursing attendance. He produced a series of notes and interviews in his final years, returning especially to the philosophical themes of his young adulthood. He died in 1975, and in the same year a collection of his writings from the 1930s and early 1940s was published. Since then practically all his unpublished writing has been brought out in Russian and translated into English.

In the most substantial of the early unpublished writings, ‘Author and hero in aesthetic activity’, Bakhtin insists that a life never appears completed from within; that since, strictly speaking, we do not experience our own birth and our own death, only the life of another can be complete for us. Thus we can never be the hero of our own lives; a condition of heroic completedness is that it should be perceived by another, situated outside the hero’s life. Bakhtin’s life is now certainly completed, and others, rightly and necessarily, have been busy constructing a completed meaning for it. But all such constructions are two-way affairs—dialogues—in which one historically specific moment comes into contact with another. Like many of Bakhtin’s ideas, this has at once the status of a description, apparently of the absolute conditions of human knowledge, and simultaneously appears as an ethical imperative, a profound urging to respect the otherness of the other person. In his early writing Bakhtin certainly felt the two to be inseparable. Part of the disagreements about the subsequent course of his writings involve precisely this issue, the extent to which these early, ethically-based concerns persist in the later, more explicitly social writing. Above all, the question is important with respect to the Marxist writings of V.N.Voloshinov and P.N.Medvedev, which have been confidently attributed to Bakhtin. This celebrated ‘authorship question’ is the topic of the next section.

II

In 1970 the Russian linguist Vyacheslav Ivanov attributed to Bakhtin books previously thought to be by Voloshinov and Medvedev. These books are the former’s Freudianism: A Marxist Critique (1927), and Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929), together with some articles also written in the 1920s; and the latter’s The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1928). The actual documentary basis of the attribution remains unclear, and when Bakhtin himself was asked directly on the matter he was silent or evasive. However, Clark and Holquist have accepted the attribution, though other scholars have challenged it. In the absence of any conclusive evidence either way, much of the argument on both sides of the question has been frankly speculative. But this much is clear. There really were two people called Voloshinov and Medvedev, who were members of the same intellectual circle as Bakhtin throughout the 1920s. So we are not dealing with a simple case of writing being published under pseudonyms. These two writers also published, under their own names, writing that is undoubtedly their own—indeed, Medvedev was a considerable journalist and publishing functionary in Leningrad in the late 1920s and 1930s. It is also clear that there is a very substantial coincidence between the arguments of the books appearing under their names, and, in particular, the arguments produced by Bakhtin in his unpublished writings of the 1930s. It is also clear that the books by Voloshinov and Medvedev are explicitly Marxist in idiom, while those of Bakhtin are less so, though at the very least Bakhtin, in his own writing, both published and unpublished, makes obeisance towards Marxism, and, more strongly, appears to be influenced by it in some fundamental respects.

So what is at stake in the dispute about the authorship of these books by Voloshinov and Medvedev? First and most evidently, of course, is the highly charged question of Bakhtin’s relationship to Marxism. If it can be shown that Bakhtin was the author of the disputed texts, it would follow, would it not, that he was therefore ‘really’ a Marxist; if it could be shown that he was not the author, then the attempt to claim him for Marxism and the left more generally would be that much weaker. But things are not quite as simple as that, so I will attempt to lay out what seem to me to be the fundamental argumentative moves in this remarkable controversy.

There are certainly those who have gratefully accepted the attribution of explicitly Marxist writing to Bakhtin as a way of claiming Bakhtin for a sophisticated and non-reductive Marxist account of literature and language. They are not altogether helped by the fact that there is some writing, indisputably by Bakhtin, which is written in the rather reductive idiom of Soviet Marxism of the late 1920s—two prefaces to Tolstoy which Bakhtin wrote in 1929, and which form part of a collected edition. At all events, the substantial coincidence between the writings of Voloshinov, Medvedev and Bakhtin has formed the ground for some intelligent appropriations of the whole Bakhtinian canon by writers on the left.

But in fact this has not been the dominant strategy adopted by those who have insisted on Bakhtin’s authorship of the disputed texts. In the West this position has most prominently been occupied by Clark and Holquist. In their biography they argue that the Marxism of the books by Voloshinov and Medvedev is more a matter of idiom—even, in one extreme formulation, a matter of ‘window-dressing’—which permitted otherwise controversial arguments to be published. This permits them to preserve the essentially non-Marxist character of Bakhtin’s writing intact. The philosophical key to unlock the whole body of writing, in this account, is to be found in Bakhtin’s neo-Kantian inheritance, and is grounded in the I-Thou relationship. Hence Holquist’s insistence, especially, on ‘dialogism’ as an overarching concept for encompassing the range of the writing. In this account, therefore, the Marxism of the disputed texts has almost to be argued away.

On the other hand those who have resisted the attribution have equally done so for different reasons. There have always been those who have done so on scholarly grounds—that the documentary evidence for changing the traditional attributions of the books to Voloshinov and Medvedev is simply too slight to warrant such a major change. But these scholarly reasons are inevitably caught up in ideological ones also. Thus there are those who wish to drive a wedge between Voloshinov and Medvedev on the one side, and Bakhtin on the other, because they are impressed by the sophisticated Marxism of the former two and are suspicious of what appears the softer, even liberal-humanist accents of the latter. In this they may have been excessively influenced by some of the ways in which Bakhtin has been assimilated in the West. Finally, there are those who wish to separate Bakhtin from the others because they do not see Bakhtin as an essentially Marxist writer. They see the Marxist gloss given to what are undoubtedly shared ideas as simplifications, distortions or ‘monologizations’ of Bakhtin. Sometimes this is driven by straightforward anti-Marxism, sometimes by a more productive recognition of the genuine differences that separate the various writings of the three.

So it can be seen that the stakes in this dispute are high—no less than the overall direction and emphasis to be given to the writings of Bakhtin and his circle. It has, moreover, generated some not always productive reading practices, in which the overt and primary meanings of the writing have been overlooked in order to decode those writings or to make them fit some constricting model of coherence. Nevertheless, whatever the extent of Bakhtin’s responsibility for the disputed texts, there is a substantial convergence between the ideas expressed in them and in those which are indisputably by Bakhtin alone. And finally this is what matters: the content of the arguments far outweighs the interest of the authorship question. So while the resolution of the attribution remains unsettled, and is likely to remain so, the sensible course seems to be to continue to refer to the authors of the various writings by the names which originally appeared over their writing. I shall be content to note both differences and similaritites between the three authors as appropriate. And finally it is important to recognize that there is as much variety of argument and idiom within the indisputably Bakhtinian texts as there is within the whole body of writing from the circle.

III

Whatever the status of the disputed texts, we need to get a better sense of the intellectual milieu out of which Bakhtin, Voloshinov and Medvedev emerged in the second and third decades of the twentieth century in Russia. If the most remarkable event of that period was the Russian Revolution, this by no means meant that the dominant intellectual force of the time was Marxism, or that Marxism was immediately imposed as the deadening intellectual orthodoxy one version of it was later to become. Both before and after 1917, Russia was a place of lively intellectual excitement, in which different currents of thought emerged and contested each other. Indeed, it is out of the contestation of several such currents that the distinctive emphases of Bakhtin and his circle emerge. It is by vitue of the extraordinary mutations of twentieth-century intellectual history that these emphases now appear, some sixty years later, to speak with the force and resonance that they do.

Bakhtin’s own intellectual formation, both before and during his time at university, was above all in classical German philosophy, especially in its then dominant form of neo-Kantianism. This influence largely reflects the prestige of German academic culture throughout Europe before the First World War, but this prestige was particularly important in Russian universities. At all events, Bakhtin’s starting-points for his intellectual development were in neo-Kantianism, though that certainly does not mean that his whole development is to be explained by the surviving writing in that tradition.

Neo-Kantianism is a philosophical position (or rather, the general name for a range of particular positions) which was especially important in German academic thought at the end of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century. It is a general philosophical orientation which sought to go back to Kant, in part as a reaction against what was felt to be the excesses of nineteenth-century positivism and empiricism. Perhaps its particular attraction to intellectuals ...