Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin

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Mikhail Bakhtin 1920

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin ( Russian Михаил Михайлович Бахтин ; scientific transliteration Michail Michajlovič Bakhtin ; emphasis: Bakhtín; * 5th November July / 17th November  1895 greg. In Orjol ; † 7 March 1975 in Moscow ) was a Russian literary scholar and art theorist . Most of his works on text theory , dialogue , chronotopos and intertextuality , which were largely created in the 1920s and 1930s , had an impact on literary studies, philosophy and media studies only since his rediscovery in the 1960s. Today Bakhtin is considered one of the most important literary theorists of the 20th century.

Life

Mikhail Bakhtin grew up in Oryol, Vilna and Odessa . He studied with his older brother Nikolai Bakhtin (1894–1950) in Odessa and Saint Petersburg . From 1918 he worked as a teacher in Newel and moved to Vitebsk in 1920 , where he married Jelena Alexandrowna Okolowitsch (1901–1971) in 1921. From 1924 he lived in Leningrad .

In the 1920s Bakhtin belonged to a Leningrad circle of literary theorists (now known as Bakhtin Circle ). Many of the essays written by this group at that time, including those by Pavel Medvedev (1891–1938) and Valentin Voloshinov (1895–1936), are strongly influenced by Bakhtin's ideas. Bachtin's own works of this time were for the most part published only since the 1960s. This included his formalism essay The Problem of Content, Material and Form in Word Art Creation (1924) and his study Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity (1924–1927). His book Problems of Dostoyevsky's Art , published in 1929, caused a sensation . In it, Bakhtin developed the thesis, which is still popular in Western literary studies, that the fundamental structural principle of Dostoyevsky's great novels consists of polyphony and dialogicity .

At the end of 1929 Bakhtin was exiled by Stalin to Kustanai in Kazakhstan , where he worked as an accountant until the mid-1930s. From 1936 he lived (with interruptions) in exile in Saransk in Mordovia , where he worked as a teacher at the Pedagogical Institute until his retirement in 1961.

Despite the adverse circumstances of the 1930s, the time of his exile and the Stalinist terror was Bakhtin's most productive phase: He began his work on the theory of romance , which was described in the essays Das Wort im Roman (1934/1935), Formen der Zeit and the Chronotopos im Roman ( 1937/1938), From the prehistory of the novel (1940) and epic and novel. On the methodology of novel research (1941) resulted. He also wrote a book between 1936 and 1938 about the history of the educational novel and its importance for the development of realism . The manuscript, which had already been accepted by the publisher, burned in 1941 during the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and he allegedly used the preliminary studies that had remained with Bakhtin as cigarette paper during the war; however, some fragments remained and were later published.

In 1940 he submitted his famous Rabelais text as a dissertation to the Moscow Maxim Gorky Literature Institute . This only changed in 1965 as Rabelais and his world. Work published in Popular Culture as a Counterculture was the focus of academic controversy in the 1940s; In 1951, Bakhtin received the title of candidate for science (corresponds to a German doctorate). In the study, Bachtin developed the cultural-historical “concept of carnivalization”: the carnival season as an outlet in a society, as a tolerated breach of taboo and an important component in the culture of the Middle Ages, which was characterized by fixed behavioral patterns and conventions. The breaking of taboos, which encompasses all layers, contributes to the fact that the border between high and popular culture is temporarily removed.

The most important works by Bakhtin after 1945 include the essay Problems of Linguistic Genres , which he probably wrote around 1953/1954 as a reaction to the reorientation of Soviet linguistics after Stalin's publication, Marxism and Questions of Linguistics (1950), and The Problem of the Text (1959-1961).

In 1963 Bakhtin published the expanded and modified 2nd edition of his Dostoevsky book (now under the title Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics ). It was only after that time that his pioneering works were received more and more in France and the USA.

From May 1970, Bakhtin lived with his wife in a retirement home near Moscow, where he died in 1975.

Works

  • Проблемы творчества Достоевского . Leningrad 1929. The 2nd, extended edition was published in 1963 under the title Проблемы поэтики Достоевского .
    • German edition: Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Hanser, Munich 1971, ISBN 3-446-11402-5 .
  • Творчество Франсуа Рабле и народная культура средневековья и Ренессанса . Moscow 1965 (written 1940).
    • German edition: Rabelais and his world. Folk culture as a counterculture. Editor a. Foreword: Renate Lachmann . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1987, ISBN 3-518-04708-6 .
  • Вопросы литературы и эстетики . Moscow 1975. (Contains, among other things, the texts: The word in the novel , forms of time and the chronotopus in the novel and epic and novel. On the methodology of research into the novel .)
    • German, modified edition: Investigations into the poetics and theory of the novel. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin / Weimar 1986. Later as: Formen der Zeit im Roman. Studies on historical poetics. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 3-596-27418-4 . German new edition of forms of time and the Chronotopos in the novel under the title: Chronotopos . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-29479-6
  • К философии поступка . Moscow 1986. (Fragment of a longer planned text from 1919.)
    • English edition: Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Translation v. Vadim Liapunov. University of Texas Press, Austin 1993, ISBN 0-292-76534-7 .
    • German edition: To the philosophy of action. Translated from the Russian by Dorothea Trottenberg; with comments and a foreword by Sylvia Sasse . Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-88221-542-7 .
  • Эстетика словесного творчества . Moscow 1986. (Contains, among other things, author and hero in aesthetic activity , problems of language genres and the problem of text .)
    • German edition of the author and hero in aesthetic activity : Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-29478-9 . (Already published in German in 1979 in Art and Literature Issues 6 and 7)

Anthologies (German)

  • Literature and Carnival. On romance theory and laughter culture. Hanser, Munich 1969. (Contains the Rabelais text and the Dostoevsky text.)
  • The aesthetics of the word. Edited by Rainer Grübel. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1979, ISBN 3-518-10967-7 . (Contains, among other things, the problem of content, material and form in the word art of 1924.)

Anthologies (English)

  • The Dialogic Imagination. 1981. (Contains the four texts on Chronotopos and Heteroglossie: Epic and Novel ; From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse ; Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel ; Discourse in the Novel .)
  • Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. 1986. (Contains 6 essays: Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff ; The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism ; The Problem of Speech Genres ; The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis ; From Notes Made in 1970-71 ; Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences .)

literature

introduction

  • Katerina Clark; Michael Holquist: Mikhail Bakhtin. Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, Mass. [u. a.] 1984, ISBN 0-674-57416-8 .
  • Michael Holquist: Dialogism. Bakhtin and his world (2nd edition). Routledge, London / New York 2002, ISBN 0-415-28007-9 .
  • Sylvia Sasse: Michail Bachtin as an introduction. Junius, Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-88506-659-0 .

Other works

  • Robert Stam: Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore / London 1989, ISBN 0-8018-4509-2 .
  • Tzvetan Todorov : Mikhaïl Bakhtine, le principe dialogique. Ed. du Seuil, Paris 1981, ISBN 2-02-005830-8 .
  • Matthias Freise: Mikhail Bakhtin's philosophical aesthetics of literature. Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1993.
  • Wolfram Eilenberger : The development of man in words. A study on the cultural philosophy of Michail M. Bakhtin. Chronos, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-0340-0923-2 (= dissertation, Zurich 2008).
  • Maja Soboleva: The Philosophy of Mikhail Bakhtin. From existential ontology to dialogical reason. Georg Olms Verlag, Hildesheim 2010, ISBN 978-3-487-14297-5 .
  • Matthias Aumüller: Michail Bachtin. In: Matías Martínez , Michael Scheffel (ed.): Classics of modern literary theory. From Sigmund Freud to Judith Butler (= Beck'sche series. 1822). Beck, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-406-60829-2 , pp. 105-126.
  • Jean-Paul Bronckart, Cristian Bota: Bakhtine démasqué: Histoire d'un menteur, d'une escroquerie et d'un délire collectif . Droz, Geneva 2011, ISBN 978-2-600-00545-6 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ "Access to Nicholas Bakhtin is likely to be most easily found through his better-known brother Michail, with whom he shares many of his interests and with whose theories (first of all with the" philosophy of action ") he agrees so intimately that he often does not recognizing is to whom of the two belongs the intellectual priority ”. Felix Philipp Ingold , living man, legionnaire and scholar. The culture and life philosopher Nicholas Bachtin can be rediscovered in: NZZ , issue of May 11, 2013.

Web links

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personal data
SURNAME Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Бахтин, Михаил Михайлович (Russian); Bakhtin, Mikhail M .; Bakhtin, Mikhail (English transcription)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian philosopher, literary scholar and art theorist
DATE OF BIRTH November 17, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Oryol
DATE OF DEATH March 7, 1975
Place of death Moscow