Mikhaïl Bakhtine

Mikhaïl Bakhtine (1895 with Orel, Russia - 1975 with Moscow, Russia) is a historian and Russian theorist of the Littérature. Bakhtine was also interested in the Psychanalyse, the Esthétique and the ethical , and was a precursor of the Sociolinguistique.
It is however for its work on the literature and more specifically on the Romance than it is the best known one today. Interested by work of the formal Russian, it underlines the limits of their methods. It in particular developed the concepts of Dialogisme and Polyphonie in the literary field.

Biography

Bakhtine is resulting from a family of the impoverished Noblesse. He studies the letters at the University of Saint-Pétersbourg, then becomes Professor with Vitebsk. In this city with the animated cultural life, it binds with criticisms Nicolas Volochinov and Pavel Medvedev.

It turns over then to Saint-Pétersbourg (become Leningrad) and becomes collaborator of the Institut of History of Art, a high place of the Russian formalism. It publishes its first literary studies. His/her friends Volochinov and Medvedev publish two studies in a spirit very close to his. One thus could think that Bakhtine itself would have used the names of his/her friends to thwart the pressures and the censure, but this forever completely confirmed assumption.

The period of relative intellectual freedom of the years 1920 brutally ends with the arrival of Stalin to the capacity. In 1930, Bakhtine is constrained to leave Leningrad. Because of health issues, it however will be off-set, not in Siberia, but with the Kazakhstan.

He manages nevertheless to amount to Moscow and continuous publishing, in a relative anonymity. A chronic Ostéomyélite obliges it to undergo a Amputation leg. In 1961, he becomes director of the section of Russian and foreign literature at the University of Saransk in Mordovie, not far from Moscow. Its work is then redécouverte with enthusiasm, in particular in France thanks to Tzvetan Todorov and Julia Kristeva. He dies in 1975 in Moscow.

Principal contributions

  • critical of the formalism
  • dialogism and romantic polyphony
  • concept of Chronotope
  • philosophy of the To laugh, means of embracing the totality of the existence, concept of Carnavalesque

Works

  • 1927 : Freudisme
  • 1928: formal method in literary history
  • 1929: Problems of poetic of Dostoïevski
  • 1965: the work of François Rabelais and popular culture with the Middle Ages and under the Rebirth

Posthumous publications:

  • 1978 : Esthetic and theory of the novel , Gallimard
  • 1984: Esthetic of verbal creation , Gallimard
  • Towards a philosophy of the act (not translated), 1986.

See too

  • Dialogisme and polyphony, course of the University of Geneva.

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