The first hundred years of Mikhail Bakhtin

Abstract

Caryl Emerson. The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. xvi, 293 pp. Index. $29.95, cloth. $16.95, paper. Those familiar with contemporary trends in literary criticism, philosophy, or cultural studies will already recognize the name of Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), the Soviet intellectual whose monographs on Fedor Dostoevskii and on Francois Rabelais would become classics of twentieth-century Soviet intellectual history by the end of the century. In this monograph on Bakhtin, Caryl Emerson, a prominent translator of Bakhtin into English and co-author with Gary Saul Morson of Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, shares her extensive knowledge of the reception history of Bakhtin's writings in an effort to provide an understanding of the original contexts in which he created his texts (p. 8). Her explication of the evolution of Bakhtin studies relies on her own investigation of primary sources, summaries of published analyses of Bakhtin's writings, and descriptions of various conference proceedings dedicated to this eminent Russian myslitel'. In the first part of her book, Emerson presents an erudite history of the reception of Bakhtin's aesthetics and ethics in his homeland by orienting his ideas within the context of major movements of Soviet intellectual history. First, Emerson discusses how the post-Stalinist revival of literary criticism, a revival associated with the Tartu Structuralists who cultivated the study of semiotics, encouraged attempts to reconcile Bakhtin's aesthetics with semiotics. Emerson further accounts for this emphasis on Bakhtin's literary criticism by pointing out that for approximately thirty. years, Soviet theorists were familiar only with Bakhtin's published studies on Dostoevskii and Rabelais, since Bakhtin's earlier writings relating to his ethics became wellknown only after his death. As she advances to the flourishing of Bakhtin studies in post-Soviet Russia of the 1990s, Emerson finds that the emphasis on textual studies of Bakhtin's literary criticism (read Bakhtinistika by A.T. Ivanov) is replaced with a substantial interest in both his biography and his metaphysics (read Bakhtinologiia by Ivanov). Emerson effectively evaluates various remembrances of the myslitel' by differentiating between recollections detailed by the older generation who recount Bakhtin's earlier biography and the hagiographic accounts of Bakhtin's later years related by the junior scholars who, having revived his legacy in the I 960s, subsequently treated their mentor with extreme reverence. In the second part of the monograph, Emerson concentrates on what she characterizes as three problematic areas of Bakhtin's writings: polyphony (otherwise read as the dialogism and heteroglossia of the novel), carnival, and the 'outsideness' of all ethical and aesthetic positions (p. …