This annotated book is a first English translation of 12-hours of interviews of Victor Duvakin with Mikhail Bakhtin recorded in 1973. From Freud to Kant, from the French Symbolists to the German Romantics, Bakhtin shares his knowledge and appreciation of various Western European authors and thinkers. As a result, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Interviews, 1973, invites us to reconsider the importance of Western art and thought to Bakhtin himself, and Russian culture in general.

This classic work by the Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) examines popular humor and folk culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. One of the essential texts of a theorist who is rapidly becoming a major reference in contemporary thought, Rabelais and His World is essential reading for anyone interested in problems of language and text and in cultural interpretation.

A concise, readable and up-to-date introduction to Bakhtin, which provides students with an accessible but sophisticated guide to his work.

Among Western critics, Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) needs no introduction. His name has been invoked in literary and cultural studies across the ideological spectrum, from old-fashioned humanist to structuralist to postmodernist. In this candid assessment of his place in Russian and Western thought, Caryl Emerson brings to light what might be unfamiliar to the non-Russian reader: Bakhtin's foundational ideas, forged in the early revolutionary years, yet hardly altered in his lifetime. With the collapse of the Soviet system, a truer sense of Bakhtin's contribution may now be judged in the context of its origins and its contemporary Russian "reclamation." A foremost Bakhtin authority, Caryl Emerson mines extensive Russian sources to explore Bakhtin's reception in Russia, from his earliest publication in 1929 until his death, and his posthumous rediscovery. After a reception-history of Bakhtin's published work, she examines the role of his ideas in the post-Stalinist revival of the Russian literary profession, concentrating on the most provocative rethinkings of three major concepts in his world: dialogue and polyphony; carnival; and "outsideness," a position Bakhtin considered essential to both ethics and aesthetics. Finally, she speculates on the future of Bakhtin's method, which was much more than a tool of criticism: it will "tell you how to teach, write, live, talk, think."

Books about thinkers require a kind of unity that their thought may not possess. This cautionary statement is especially applicable to Mikhail Bakhtin, whose intellectual development displays a diversity of insights that cannot be easily integrated or accurately described in terms of a single overriding concern. Indeed, in a career spanning some sixty years, he experienced both dramatic and gradual changes in his thinking, returned to abandoned insights that he then developed in unexpected ways, and worked through new ideas only loosely related to his earlier concerns Small wonder, then, that Bakhtin should have speculated on the relations among received notions of biography, unity, innovation, and the creative process. Unity--with respect not only to individuals but also to art, culture, and the world generally--is usually understood as conformity to an underlying structure or an overarching scheme. Bakhtin believed that this idea of unity contradicts the possibility of true creativity. For if everything conforms to a preexisting pattern, then genuine development is reduced to mere discovery, to a mere uncovering of something that, in a strong sense, is already there. And yet Bakhtin accepted that some concept of unity was essential. Without it, the world ceases to make sense and creativity again disappears, this time replaced by the purely aleatory. There would again be no possibility of anything meaningfully new. The grim truth of these two extremes was expressed well by Borges: an inescapable labyrinth could consist of an infinite number of turns or of no turns at all. Bakhtin attempted to rethink the concept of unity in order to allow for the possibility of genuine creativity. The goal, in his words, was a "nonmonologic unity," in which real change (or "surprisingness") is an essential component of the creative process. As it happens, such change was characteristic of Bakhtin's own thought, which seems to have developed by continually diverging from his initial intentions. Although it would not necessarily follow that the development of Bakhtin's thought corresponded to his ideas about unity and creativity, we believe that in this case his ideas on nonmonologic unity are useful in understanding his own thought--as well as that of other thinkers whose careers are comparably varied and productive.

Traces the life of Bakhtin, a Russian literary critic recently rediscovered, and discusses his major works on Freud, Dostoevsky, Rabelais, Marxism, and the philosophy of language.