ABSTRACT
Bakhtin and Russian Formalism: the phrase signals a familiar literary-theoretical topos of some thirty years ago,1 elaborated (as often as not) under the no longer tenable presupposition that ‘Bakhtin’ and ‘Medvedev’ were interchangeable proper names – that the stridently polemical tone of the latter’s critique of Viktor Shklovsky and his colleagues was also in some sense Bakhtin’s – and in the absence of a (full) English translation of Bakhtin’s own earlier critique dating from 1924. We now know on the first score that we were dupes of an opportunistic fiction forged by Soviet semioticians anxious to legitimate their project by claiming kinship with a supposedly ‘Marxist’ Bakhtin; and the incomplete translation that very few anglophones will in any case have read, buried as it was in an obscure journal of Hispanic studies, has now been replaced by a full English version.2 Besides this, readers of English who have no Russian now have the benefit of a translation of Pavel Medvedev’s revised version of The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship to complete the story of the Bakhtin-inspired encounter with Russia’s twentieth-century critical avant-garde.3 This revision of 1934 is notably shorn of all positive proposals: any alternative to formalism ran the risk of not squaring satisfactorily with the (by then) official and monopolistic aesthetic of socialist realism. Purely
polemical, safe in the adversarial negativity of its formulations, purged of the offensive neo-Kantian heresy for which the 1928 text had been roundly denounced, Formalism and the Formalists is still more strident in tone – that is, still less like anything that could ever have been written by Bakhtin himself.
