German philosophy was the topic talked about most frequently and, from this point forward, Bakhtin considered himself more a philosopher than a literary scholar. Medvedev who joined the group later in Vitebsk. Included in this group were Valentin Volosinov and, eventually, P. The group consisted of intellectuals with varying interests, but all shared a love for the discussion of literary, religious, and political topics. It was at this time that the first “Bakhtin Circle” formed. Bakhtin completed his studies in 1918 and moved to a small city in western Russia, Nevel, Pskov Oblast, where he worked as a school teacher for two years. Zelinskij whose works contain the beginnings of concepts elaborated by Bakhtin. It is here that Bakhtin was greatly influenced by the classicist F. He later transferred to Petersburg University to join his brother Nikolaj. For this reason Bakhtin spent his early childhood years in Orel, Vilnius ( Lithuania) and then Odessa where, in 1913, he allegedly joined the historical and philological faculty at the local university. His father was the manager of a bank and worked in several cities. In the 1920s there was a "Bakhtin school" in Russia, in line with the so-called discourse analysis of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson.īakhtin was born in Orel, Russia, outside of Moscow, to an old family of the nobility. In the late 1980s, Bakhtin's work experienced a surge of popularity in the West, and he continues today to be regarded as one of the most important theorists of literature and culture.īakhtin’s primary works include, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, an unfinished portion of a philosophical essay Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Art, to which Bakhtin later added a chapter on the concept of carnival and published with the title Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics Rabelais and His World, which explores the openness of the Rabelaisian novel The Dialogic Imagination, whereby the four essays that comprise the work introduce the concepts of dialogism, heteroglossia, and chronotope and Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, a collection of essays in which Bakhtin concerns himself with method and culture. But it was only after Bakhtin’s death in 1975 that authors such as Julia Kristeva and Tzvetan Todorov brought Bakhtin to the attention of the Francophone world, and from there his popularity in the United States, the United Kingdom, and many other countries continued to grow. Early pieces such as Towards a Philosophy of the Act and Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity are indebted to the philosophical trends of the time – particularly the Marburg School Neo-Kantianism of Hermann Cohen, including Ernst Cassirer, Max Scheler and, to a lesser extent, Nicolai Hartmann. During the 1920s, Bakhtin's work tended to focus on ethics and aesthetics in general. His career is frequently described as being broken into periods, but there is some discrepancy as to how those periods should be divided. According to Bakhtin, examples of this struggle are best reflected in human language and best recorded in the novel, a subject to which Bakhtin devoted a significant amount of time (Holquist xv-xviii).Īs a literary theorist, Bakhtin is associated with the Russian Formalists, and his work is often compared with that of Yuri Lotman. As a philologist, he was concerned with language, arguing that a struggle between forces simultaneously working to separate and unite those things existing in both nature and culture was at the very center of existence. As a philosopher Bakhtin was concerned with ethics and the act. Despite the fact that Bakhtin’s career was fraught with difficulties and complications, impeding the publication of many of his manuscripts until after his death, Bakhtin is considered to be a significant thinker of the twentieth century.