Bakhtin's Legacy and the History of Science and Culture: an Interview with Anatoli Akhutin and Vladimir Bibler

Abstract

Bakhtin’s Legacy and the History of Science and Culture: An Interview with Anatolii Akhutin and Vladimir Bibler Daniel Alexandrov and Anton Struchkov1 Daniel Alexandrov: Let me begin with the following introductory remark. You, Vladimir Solomonovich [Bibler], have been schooled as a historian. However, it is philosophy, not history, that has turned out to be your vocation and creative destiny. You, Anatolii Valerianovich [Akhutin], were educated in chemistry. Then you devoted much time to the history of science, especially to its philosophical aspect. Thus, your professional interests also concentrate, first and foremost, upon philosophy in the classical sense. Neither of you specializes in the history of science per se, still less in Bakhtinian scholarship. Your own cultural and historico-scientific studies proceed from the logic of your philosophy and belong to the latter’s context. Accordingly, the work of Bakhtin is significant for you not as a neutral “object of research,” but as an occurrence of philosophically congenial thought. For a long time such “philosophical congeniality” has been-and it continues to be—the “adhesive” that binds together the members of your group specializing in diverse fields: historians, culturologists, philologists, psychologists, teachers. The logical foundations of that philosophy, which you name “the logic of the dialogue of logics” or “the dialogic ontology of culture,” are explicated in detail mainly in your own works, Vladimir Solomonovich. [End Page 335] But one may also conceive of all the group’s work over many years, including highly specialized studies, as the detailing and thematic trial of its common conception. Therefore, before we turn to the main topic of our conversation, I would like to ask you, Anatolii Valerianovich, for a brief account of the history of your circle. Anatolii Akhutin: We do indeed shoulder a rather long history-nearly thirty years. Notwithstanding that our present-day (official) status—that of an independent creative group entitled “Dialogue of Cultures”—has been conferred on us quite recently, the history of our circle actually begins with seminars that go back (as a noticeable social phenomenon) to the so-called thaw in the days of Khrushchev. In this respect, we share the common destiny of a number of trends formed in those days that maintained the vitality of philosophical thought under the conditions of its methodical suppression. After the Czechoslovakian events of 1968, all these seminars dispersed and retreated into...private kitchens, or smoking-rooms of certain institutions (such as, for example, the State Lenin Library), or even into back-streets. 2 The seminar conducted by V. S. Bibler also shifted to conditions of domestic, almost underground, existence. At that time, its membership was somewhat different than now. Thus, Lina B. Tumanova was among us, a remarkable philosopher whose works still remain unpublished. (An active member of the movement for the defence of human rights, she was arrested by the Committee for State Security [KGB] in 1984; afterwards, however, when it became known that she was incurably ill, they set her free several months before her death.) The distinguished culturologist Leonid M. Batkin (well-known today as a political scientist) has actively participated in our seminar for many years. A student of Descartes’s philosophy, Yakov A. Lyatker (now in the USA), has also been the seminar’s longtime member (and its “chronicler”). Two disciples of Mikhail B. Turovskii, Vladimir V. Silvestrov (died in 1990) and Leonid S. Chernyak (now in the USA), have been in close collaboration with us. In other words, as usual in Russian history, “already some are not, and others are far off....” Parenthetically, this history of “back-street circles” and “kitchen seminars,” i.e., the real history of philosophical thought in the post-Stalin USSR—a rich and by no means insipid story that harbors [End Page 336] many surprising discoveries—has not been written as yet and is not likely to be written in the foreseeable future. We “insiders” are unlikely to do this, for our time is devoted to other commitments or simply devoured by the humdrum of life here. On the other hand, the perverted logic of Soviet life is too cunning for an objective view from without. The point is not so much the lack of relevant documents...