Mikhail Bakhtin is difficult to situate in the annals of twentieth-century literary theory. The keynotes of Bakhtin’s life appear to have been intellectual work, dire illness, and oppression at the hands of the Soviet Union. From the 1960s, however, Bakhtin’s near-anonymity as an academic teaching at the University of Saransk in Mordovia was gradually superseded by the rewards of growing local, national, and international acclaim. Bakhtin was first introduced to a Western readership in the mid-1960s by Roman Jakobson, Tzvetan Todorov, and Julia Kristeva, the latter two both being Russian-speaking Bulgarian émigrés living in Paris and moving in structuralist academic circles. Much of the frustration experienced by Bakhtin’s most sophisticated advocates arises from the jarring mismatch between Bakhtin’s own ‘distrust of final answers’ and his appropriation in support of precisely such systematic schools of thought.