The Material in Artistic Form: Bakhtin in Conjunction with Russian and Hungarian Theorists of the Early 20th Century

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to summarize Bakhtin’s thoughts on the form of a work of art, based on his early study, entitled Content, Material and Form in Verbal Art, published only in 1975. Our „first step” in this study will be the critical analysis of Bakhtin’s evaluation of the Formal Method, in particular the considerations of the Russian Formalists on the form in art. The subsequent focus is on one of Bakhtin’s major statements connected with the problem of form and its consequences: “…aesthetic activity is directed toward a given material, it gives a form to that material alone: an aesthetically valid form is the form of a given material …”. (Art and Answerability, 262). Ultimately, it is curious that other Russian and European philosophers and thinkers, who are contemporaries of Bakhtin from the 1920s to the 1970s, such as Zhirmunsky, Tynianov, Mandelstam and Bergson, explicate artistic form in very similar fashion. We shall also point out some parallelisms with contemporaneous Hungarian thinkers, such as Attila József, Lajos Fülep and Sándor Sík.