Volume 33, Number 16 · October 23, 1986
The Voices of Mikhail Bakhtin
By Joseph Frank
Mikhail Bakhtin
by Katerina Clark, by Michael Holquist
Harvard University Press (Belknap Press), 398 pp., $25.00
Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle
by Tzvetan Todorov, translated by Wlad Godzich
University of Minnesota Press, 132 pp., $10.95 (paper)
Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics
by Mikhail Bakhtin, edited and translated by Caryl Emerson, introduction by Wayne C. Booth
University of Minnesota Press, 333 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Twenty years ago, the name of Mikhail Bakhtin would hardly have been known outside Russia except to Slavic scholars, and even then only to those with a special interest in Dostoevsky. At the present time, however, the works of Bakhtin are exercising a considerable influence among literary critics and cultural historians not only in his native land but in Europe and the United States as well. Bakhtin is the only Soviet Russian scholar one can think of whose writings have radiated so far and so extensively beyond their native borders; and the phenomenon is all the more surprising because Bakhtin, though hardly a conventional Marxist-Leninist, did all he could to avoid conflict with the Soviet state while maintaining his intellectual independence.
Review, 6389 words
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