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Mikhail bakhtin carnivalesque

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Mikhail Bakhtin's Bio

More on Mikhail Bakhtin

All the deets on your favorite critic's personal life.

Basic Information

NameMikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin
Tagline"Sticks and stones won't break my bones, but words? They're never neutral."
NicknameCarny, Clown Lover, The Body, The Liberator, Man of the People
SexMale Body—complete with reproductive organs and the ability to eat, drink, and defecate
Home townI was born in Oryol in Southern Russia (good luck finding that one on a map!). But my dad's job (state bank official) required moving around, so I found myself in other cities, like Orel, Vilnius, and Odessa. As a child, I lived the sweet life. Yeah, I'm pretty fancy.When I grew, up I wanted to live off the grid, so I usually took up residence in more remote places.

Work & Education

OccupationGiven a choice, I would have hung out with intellectuals and discussed the role of social reality in art and language all day. But you gotta bring home the bacon, right? Because I had all manner of illnesses (i.e., osteomyelitis—inflammation and destr
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Other relevant keywords: Culture, Culturology, Communication, Ethics, Great Time, Grotesque, Kant, Laughter, Pluralism, Unity, Word

 

Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975)

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, Russian philosopher of language and phenomenologist of culture, has three lives. The first is his obscure lived biography as a student of the classics, autodidact, invalid, political exile, and eventually professor of literature and aesthetics at a provincial teachers’ college in Saransk, southeast of Moscow. Today, he is best known for his work on the theory, history, and language of novels (especially Dostoevsky and Rabelais), for his image of carnival and the grotesque, and for a way of being in the world that he called “dialogic.” But Bakhtin did not consider himself a literary scholar or cultural critic. He was, he said, a philosopher—or better yet, a thinker (myslitel’). True, the themes he thought about found brilliant illustration in the fictive worlds created by great writers, as well as in the sociolinguistic life of everyday communication.

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Mikhail Bakhtin
by
Chaise LaDousa
  • LAST REVIEWED: 11 January 2018
  • LAST MODIFIED: 11 January 2018
  • DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199766567-0186

  • Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The dialogic imagination: Four essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press.

    Develops the importance of orientation and relatedness in the study of discourse. Introduces the concepts of heteroglossia and chronotope.

  • Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984a. Problems of Dostoevsky’s poetics. Edited and Translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

    A major work in which Bakhtin develops the notion of voice in Dostoevsky’s writing. A later publication of the work (including the one cited herein) includes commentary about the carnivalesque.

  • Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984b. Rabelais and his world. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press.

    The work submitted as Bakhtin’s dissertation. Examines Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel for the “openness” of the works

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