Introduction

One of Mikhail Bakhtin’s basic principles is that communicative acts only have meaning, only take on their specific force and weight, in particular situations or contexts; his is an account of the utterance, of the actual communicative interaction in its real situation. Nothing demonstrates this principle more clearly than the fate of Bakhtin’s own utterances, many of which could have no life, no specific force and weight, in his own lifetime, because they could not be published in the Soviet Union; and when they were published and translated in the West, they issued into specific situations which lent them the force of other expectations and agendas. There is no betrayal here, no departure from a fixed original meaning, for the life of any word is as a succession of utterances, in each of which its meanings are enriched, contested, or annexed. The words of Bakhtin himself are no exception. Yet there is an interesting corrolary to this emphasis on the ‘situatedness’ of all utterances, which is that they must issue forth from one historically unique and particular place to another, indeed from one person to another, necessarily caught up in the complexities and inequities of social life. In this first chapter I aim to give you a sense of the situation out of which Bakhtin, and Voloshinov and Medvedev, speak. These are extraordinary and courageous voices that speak out of the aftermath of the Russian Revolution about language and literature, and about ethics and history; and they speak to us in the West, now spectators of another Russian Revolution which might yet, among its more minor consequences, upset our notions of some key Bakhtinian themes. In short, dialogue with another-at the heart of Bakhtin’s thinking —does not invite us to cancel what historically separates us but rather to understand that other’s historical specificity as fully as possible.