ABSTRACT
In charting the impact of the Soviet critical environment on the Bakhtin school in the 1920s we have, with the exception of essential retrospective reference to 'The Problem of Content, Material, and Form', concentrated largely on work published by Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev. There are two immediate and quite specific difficulties associated with this aspect of Bakhtin's dialogic formation. Just as we have cast Bakhtin in the role of Raskol'nikov, characterized as a kind of dialogic lightning conductor, on the grand stage of Russian and European ideological culture at the beginning of the twentieth century, so he appears to cast himself in that role in a slightly more modest production, critical respose to Dostoevsky. Toward a Philosophy of the Act and 'Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity', consistent with their broad neo-Kantian orientation, are saturated with an overwhelming sense of the physical actuality of being.
