ABSTRACT
This chapter covers Bakhtin's ideas of myth and language and his concept of authoritative discourse. It considers most of the work on Bakhtin's affiliation to the Marburg neo-Kantians. Myth was the cultural creation of an embryonic society, and it was a collective, social form of culture. Religion, language, art and other cultural forms developed from myth, but in Bakhtin's account, myth retains a hold on culture and reappears in later cultural forms. Andy Byford characterized Russian intellectuals' approach to Western academia as regarding it as implicitly superior, remote, and somewhat abstract; and exposure to, and interest in, European ideas and scholarly texts were the norm for intellectuals. Bukharin's work offers a methodological model for the treatment of myth and religion in a discussion of the evolution of human culture and institutions, arguing strongly for the connection between cultural superstructure and economic conditions.
