The Russians Reclaim Bakhtin (as of Winter 1992)

Abstract

The last two in the Soviet-now ex-Soviet-Union have been so extraordinary that tracking any of its exploding parts is risky business. I will address here only one small corner of its literary culture, namely: how the Russians are reclaiming, and in the process redefining, one of their best-selling men of letters, Mikhail Bakhtin. was known, of course, to Russian literary scholars throughout the Stalinist period. But the last fifteen posthumous years brought celebrity status at a whole other order of magnitude. The Bakhtin boom, which was set off in the West in the 1970s by the Rabelais book and in the '80s by the essays on the theory of the novel, was more or less duplicated in the Soviet Union. The Russians, to be sure, had a somewhat easier time of it. They did not have to deal with the vagaries of translation, nor with the highly peculiar, site-specific ideologies that played midwife to Bakhtin's entry into Western thought-for example, the fact that Julia Kristeva popularized Bakhtin's book on Dostoevsky during her high structuralist phase, or that British Marxists have found so congenial several utopian aspects of Bakhtinian carnival. These quirks of reception, which have given his familiar radical face in the West, were not, for obvious reasons, very compelling to a post-Stalinist generation trying to live down the worst excesses of its own country's collective revolutionary mystique. We have only begun to appreciate the full force of that paradox: the Communist or ex-Communist East emulating what is conservative in the West, and radicals in the West lapping up what has been thoroughly discredited in the East. any event, Bakhtin's evocative categories of dialogue, doublevoicedness, the carnivalesque image-so reassuringly formal and taxonomic, yet at the same time open-ended and appealingly linked to the problem of consciousness-caught on faddishly both in Russia and abroad. Today, Russian Bakhtinists are as weary of the cult as we are. They, too, want to peel away ideological accretions and facile applications. As the matter was put by the editor of a 1989 Soviet collection of papers on Bakhtin: In our country, for all the mass use of Bakhtin's name in practically every printed text and manuscript . .. we more often encounter mere play with the terms 'chronotope,' 'outsideness,' insideness,' than we do serious methodological application of them (Eremeev, Rezervy 5). What might such a methodology entail? When the Revival began in the Soviet Union two decades ago, the task to be accomplished under his name was quite different from what it is today. Here as in other realms, the biggest change occurred during the glasnost years. As Gorbachev's New Thinking gained ground, peaked, contracted, outgrew its timid reformist origins and then cast off its creator