ABSTRACT
In this chapter I will discuss three seminal texts produced by the Bakhtin Circle during the 1920s. I begin with Valentin N. Voloshinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, which I argue is of acute importance with respect to the project of conjoining the theory of ideology with a sophisticated philosophy of language. I then move on to Pavel N.Medvedev’s The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, which contains an extended critique of the school of Russian Formalism that was briefly influential in Soviet intellectual circles in the 1920s. I conclude with an examination of M.M. Bakhtin’s portrayal of the 19th-century Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky as the first ‘polyphonic’ novelist in his seminal transitional text Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics.
