B

BAKHTIN Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (Örel 1895-Moscow 1975), a Russian philosopher. He met Pavel N. Medvedev (1891-1938) and Valentin N. Vološinov (1884/5-1936) in Vitebsk in 1920 and established relations of friendship and collaboration with them. Together they formed the ‘Bakhtin Circle’ with the participation of the musicologist I. I. Sollertinskij, the biologist I. I. Kanaev, the writers K. K. Vaginov and D. I. Kharms, the Indologist M. I. Tubianskij and the poet N. A. Kljuev. Even if only on an ideal level, Bakhtin’s brother Nikolaj (1894-1950) may also be considered as a member of the ‘Circle’ (cf. Ponzio, ‘Presentazione. Un autore dalla parte dell’eroe’, in N. Bakhtin 1998: 7-13). (Having left Russia in 1918 Nikolaj eventually settled in England, where at the University of Birmingham he founded the Department of Linguistics in 1946. He died there four years later.)

During the 1920s Bakhtin’s work interconnected so closely with that of his collaborators that it is difficult to distinguish between them. This would seem to confirm his thesis of the ‘semiother’ character of ‘one’s own word’, in spite of the critics who insist on establishing ownership and authorship. Bakhtin played a significant role in writing Vološinov’s two books Freudianism: A Critical Sketch (1927) and Marxism and the Philosophy of

Language (1929) as well as The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1985 [1928]), signed by P. N. Medvedev. He also contributed to various articles published by the same ‘authors’ between 1925 and 1930, as well as to Kanaev’s article ‘Contemporary Vitalism’ (1926). And even when the ‘Circle’ broke down under Stalinist oppression, with Medvedev’s assassination and Vološinov’s death, the ‘voices’ of its various members were still heard in uninterrupted dialogue with Bakhtin who persevered in his research until his death in 1975.