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Brief Lives

M.M. Bakhtin (1895-1975)

Vladimir Makovtsev asks: M.M. Bakhtin, philosopher or philologist?

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975) was a Russian philosopher, philologist, literary and cultural critic. He originated many new concepts, among which the most famous are ‘dialogism’, ‘carnival’, ‘chronotope’, and ‘the laughter of man’. But there is no consensus on whether he is a philosopher or a literary scholar, since he never wrote texts that dealt with ontology, epistemology, metaphysics, or other classical philosophical topics. During his lifetime, Bakhtin was known primarily as the author of two books, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929) and The Works of François Rabelais and the Popular Culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (1965). For these books he was later nominated for the Lenin Prize, the highest state prize of the USSR.

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