Bakhtin, Mikhail (1895–1975)

Barry Stocker

Mikhail Bakhtin made a remarkable contribution to social and cultural theory under the most difficult of circumstances: at first under Stalin and then under the relatively relaxed but still highly constrained circumstances of the Soviet Union after Stalin's death. Though Bakhtin's thought is compatible with Marxism broadly speaking and has been enthusiastically been adopted by many soft Marxists, particularly in literary studies, Bakhtin's thought is not expressed in a demonstratively Marxist manner and is certainly not an expression of Marxism-Leninism or Stalinism of any kind. The strange conditions of Bakhtin's career have left something of a puzzle about what exactly he did write. There are some great works on literature, language, and culture that are clearly by Bakhtin, along with some other notable work in these fields, published under the name of Bakthin's associates V. N. Volosinov and P. N. Medvedev, which may have been at least partly written by ...

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