ABSTRACT
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was born on November 16, 1895 (November 4, old style) in Orel, a medium-sized town south of Moscow.1 His father was a bank executive who came of an old but not particularly distinguished family of the minor nobility. As a child, Bakhtin was educated at home; his governess was a German woman of unusual gifts, and from an early age Bakhtin was bilingual in German and Russian. His life up to 1918, when he left Petersburg (or, as it then was, Petrograd) University, could not have been more in character for a man who was to become a student of heteroglossia (many-languagedness). Since his father’s job required frequent transfers, the adolescent Bakhtin spent his gymnasium years in Vilnius and Odessa, two cities that stood out even in the patchwork Russian empire as unusually heterogeneous in their mix of cultures and languages. Vilnius was part of the ancient Lithuanian kingdom that had been ceded to the Romanovs after the third partition of Poland in 1795; thus the “official language” was Russian, but the majority of citizens spoke Lithuanian or Polish. Vilnius was also the intellectual center of East European Jewry, the “Jerusalem of the North” famous for its Talmudic exegetes, so Yiddish and Hebrew were also in the air. Odessa, a busy port on the Black Sea, was another of East Europe’s large Jewish enclaves, and a city in whose streets mingled several different cultures, each with its own language.
