Mikhail Bakhtin: biography of this Russian linguist

Mikhail Bakhtin's name is not well known.. In fact, he himself did not wish to become a famous person and always surrounded himself with a halo of mystery and anonymity, either by his own free will and desire or because the political situation in his native Russia did not allow him to do so. he allowed.

Despite this, the truth is that in his time he became a great reference and even created a group of intellectuals and artists who revolved around Bakhtin. In addition, after the fall of the Soviet Union, his work became better known and managed to become popular in the first world.

Of course, the figure of this philosopher of language, theorist and literary critic arouses great interest today, especially his theory of dialogism. In this article We will see a biography of Mikhail Bakhtin, with his life and his contributions to the study of language and literature.

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Brief biography of Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (also spelled Bakhtin or Bakhtine) was born on November 17, 1895 in Oryol, the former Russian Empire. He was a member of a declining aristocratic family. Due to the profession of his father, who was a bank manager, Bakhtin moved several times during his childhood, living in cities such as Vilnius and Odessa.

At the age of 9, he began to manifest the symptoms of osteomyelitis that would accompany him throughout his life. and, which, would cost him the amputation of a leg several decades later. This first experience with suffering, especially with the fact that his body was seriously affected, marked him for life and influenced his work.

Formation and post-revolution period

Bakhtin began his studies at the University of Odesa between 1913 and 1916, but later he transferred to the University of Saint Petersburg / Petrograd to study philosophy and letters until 1918.

After the Russian Revolution, Bakhtin had the opportunity to establish contact with great cultural figures of the time. He met with scholars, philosophers, thinkers and artists of various arts that, with the passage of time, would form what would be called "The Circle of Bakhtin".

Bakhtin's circle

This circle, as its name indicates, focused on the thought and work of Mikhail Bakhtin and united its members with an interest in German philosophy. This group organized public lectures, evening dialogues, and plays.

in the circle the social and cultural problems that Soviet society was suffering were addressed from a philosophical perspective. Although the Russian Revolution initially promised great liberation for the proletariat, over time the new regime degenerated into Stalin's dictatorship.

Bakhtin's work and those around him focused on social life in general, emphasizing how artistic creation occurred at that time as a form of expression of the concerns and concerns of the society. Special importance was taken on how the language reflected the conflicts between the new social classes that emerged as a result of the change of government.

According to the circle, linguistic production is, or at least should be, dialogic insofar as it is a social interaction. That is, in the same way that in a normal conversation between two people, who speak and listen to each other, the powers and the people should undertake a dialogic communication.

Traditionally, the most powerful classes, whether economically or politically, try to impose a single discourse, trying to define it as the exemplary, which also implies trying to impose a single vision. On the other hand, the less favored classes receive only a message given in the form of a monologue, an imperative. That is to say, they have neither voice nor vote as to how the government should be run or, in the most serious cases, they risk being “silent”.

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Stalin's time: exile and literary production

During the regime of Iósif Stalin, several maneuvers were carried out to end any critic of the government of what was already the well-established Soviet Union. Bakhtin's circle fell victim to this persecution, and several of its members were executed. Mikhail Bakhtin himself suffered these interventions, but to his "fortune" he was simply exiled to Kazakhstan.

Despite his prolific literary activity and his great knowledge, the fact of having been persecuted by the Stalinist government brought him great discredit him when he returned to public life in the decade of the forties.

During those years he worked in a thesis focused on laughter, which later became one of his most important works, rebels and their world. This work is one of Bakhtin's great contributions towards a type of literature with a more parodistic air.

Despite the bad reputation that he had acquired for being critical of the regime, he gradually recovered his prestige and years of intense literary production ensued while living in Moscow during the 1940s.

Last years

After living in Moscow, Mikhail Bakhtin moved to Saransk, another Russian city where he had the opportunity to work as a teacher in an Institute specializing in pedagogy in the region. From 1957 to 1961 he worked as head of the department of russian and world literature, until his health problems forced him to retire.

Bakhtin died on March 7, 1975 in Moscow, Russia, at the age of 79.

work and thought

Bakhtin's work is encompassed within Russian formalism. During the decade of the twenties his work focused mainly on ethics and aesthetics.

Among the great works of this Russian theorist, it is worth highlighting four works that are crucial to read in order to understand Bakhtin's complex theory:

1. Towards a philosophy of the act

Although this essay has not been fully recovered, it seems that in it Bakhtin explained his particular way of understanding how the human being understands the world that surrounds him and interprets it.

This work suggests what would later be characteristic of the ethical and moral vision of this Russian author. It defends what idea are those that explain the understanding of each human being that he is a unique being.

According to what has been recovered from the work, it is explained how people understand that we act both actively and passively in our own existence, whether physical or emotional.

He also stipulates that our perception of uniqueness exists only to the extent that we think about it and that, since we are irreplaceable beings, we must update this idea that we are unique.

These premises are complex, and as his literary career evolved, he became more precise about what it all meant.

2. Dostoevsky's poetics problems

In this work he exposes that, at an individual level, people are not completely definable on the outside. According to the idea behind this explanation, it is not possible to accurately describe a person if you are not that person, since you cannot feel aspects such as his emotionality.

According to Bakhtin, Dostoyevsky, in his works, tried to portray the characters in his works against as many writers did, avoiding treating them as if they were objects approachable from different perspectives.

Furthermore, it is thanks to the work of Dostoyevsky that Bakhtin proposes the concepts of polyphony and dialogism.

Polyphony, referred to in the literary field, is the fact of exposing several characters in a novel and that they are the responsible for explaining their internal world, without the need to resort to the narrator or the main character in case of have.

3. Rabelais and his world

It is a work in which he analyzes the social system of the Renaissance focusing on language. His objective was to see what was the balance between the language that was allowed at that time and the one that was not.

4. dialogic imagination

This work, which is posthumous, is about a set of essays by Bakhtin in which he deals with issues related to language. In it, concepts such as heteroglossia, dialogism and chronotope are introduced and detailed.

The term dialogic, especially related to Bakhtin's dialogism and which has become the most outstanding idea of ​​his long professional career, is somewhat complex to explain. It refers to the fact that the information handled by two people who are having a conversation is not something static.

People, in their communicative interactions, modify in conjunction with the meanings of the words they use, either because the receiver wants to give it a specific meaning or the receiver misinterprets it. Also, words can be used in an alternative way to the meaning they have been socially assumed to have.

Heteroglossia refers to the fact that there are different records between people. This is especially applicable to novels, in which the register of the characters and that of the narrator do not they have to coincide in aspects of use of colloquialisms, solemnity, use of the first and third person…

Finally, chronotope is how space and time references are made in language and discourse. That is, what are the terms and expressions used to describe and indicate places and times, whether in the novel or in an article about a real event.

Bibliographic references:

• Todorov, T. (2010). "Jakobson and Bakhtin", in The Totalitarian Experience. Barcelona, ​​Spain, Gutenberg Galaxy.
• Morson, G. S. and Emerson, C. (1990) Mikhail Bakhtin. Creation of Prosaics, Stanford, USA, Stanford University.
• Holocist, M. (1991) Bakhtin and his World, London-New York, UK-USA, Routledge