Vol 4, No 2 (2022)

The M.M. Bakhtin Center at the National Research Ogarev Mordovia State University organized the scientific seminar “Mikhail Bakhtin: Approaches to Biography” which took place on September 22–24, 2022. Reports by leading Bakhtin scholars (culturologists, philosophers, philologists), as well as young researchers, were presented at the discussion platforms and at the round table. In discussions participated Saransk Bakhtin scholars and scientists from research centers and universities in Russia (Belgorod, Moscow, Novosibirsk, Orel, St. Petersburg) and other countries: Belarus (Vitebsk), Brazil (Sao Paulo), Israel (Be’er Sheva), Spain (Barcelona), Italy (Macerata), Iran (Tehran), China (Beijing, Shijiazhuang (Hebei province)). The article gives an overview of the reports made at the seminar, identifies the most important and urgent problems of creating a scientific biography of the thinker.

This article is an attempt to solve three interrelated tasks. Firstly, to show up the circumstances and reasons why the concept and notion of dialogue and dialogism, in Bakhtin and elsewhere, have lost their initial meaning and actuality after the end of the New Times, i. e. in the 21st century. Secondly, this very situation in the socio-cultural and scientific (scholarly) spheres seems to give us an opportunity to pose anew the old question of the so-called Bakhtin studies, namely: “Where did Bakhtin come from?” Thirdly, the recent move in the Bakhtin studies in the direction of the philosophical origins of his thinking allows us, it seems, to approach Bakhtin’s early texts (between 1919 and 1924) not only as a project in itself, but as a dynamic strategic idea of his work or authority. Moreover, this starting point, seems to give an access to the so-called neue Denken (“new thinking”) in the work of Bakhtin’s Western contemporaries (primarily and mostly in Germany). For, with his early transformation of the Western traditional philosophy of the New Times, with his programmatic concepts of “participative thinking” and “participative autonomy”, Bakhtin, in fact, participated (quite nationally and individually) in the similar transformation of traditional philosophy into a creation of the new paradigm of the “first philosophy”.

In the context of the revolutionary reorganization of society at the turn of the 1910s and 1920s, when M.M. Bakhtin lived in Nevel’ and in Vitebsk, new social statuses became essential. The important thing is whether at that time Bakhtin claimed such statuses. Did he claim leadership in an informal group of intellectuals? Definitely, from the position of historical distance, based on his own assessments, we can conclude that he claimed. These assessments were a tribute to the new place that the scientist was given in the humanities of the 20th century by followers who made considerable efforts to return his name and merits. Bakhtin accepted the new rules of the game and joined it. In this regard, his own evidence (and, as we have seen, he was prone to hoaxes and myth-making) must be subjected to an objective assessment. To what extent was his place in the groups of intellectuals leading in Nevel’, in Vitebsk and Leningrad. To what extent does this recognition of this leadership reflect the true state of affairs? The academic biography of a scientist should give a comprehensive answer to this and other questions. Obviously, the problem of the Bakhtin Circle is directly related to the problem of authorship. In a sense, this is a way of explaining the phenomenon of the early maturity of Bakhtin's scientific ideas. This article is the result of the author's many years of work on the problem of Bakhtin's circle, which began in the 1990s and continues to the present day.

The article discusses various aspects of relations between M.M. Bakhtin and professor at the Mordovia State University I.D. Voronin : scientific dialogues, joint scientific and organizational work at the Department of Russian and Foreign Literature, Bakhtin’s communication with the members of the Voronin family. The author talks about Bakhtin’s role in her life and about her meetings with M.V. Yudina.

The article reconstructs the history of one letter addressed to M.M. Bakhtin, which had been preserved in his personal archive. It was written by a part-time student of the A.I. Polezhaev Mordovia State Pedagogical Institute (now the N.P. Ogarev Mordovia State University) N.N. Andreeva (Kuzovenkova) in February 1949. The letter was published in magazine “Strannik” (2021, No. 2). The article provides information about the author of the letter and about her family. The material of the study is oral memoirs of N.N. Andreeva (Kuzovenkova) about M.M. Bakhtin recorded by the authors of the article in the late 1980s.

M.M. Bakhtin, while describing the carnival culture in his book about François Rabelais, uses the term “medieval laughter” and points out its characteristics. One of the main characteristics of this laughter, according to Bakhtin, is that it destroys the boundaries and restrictions of social hierarchy and, as a result, defeats the fear of it. In the prose version of “Merlin” by Robert de Boron, written in the beginning of the XIII century, it is possible to notice laughter in the dialogs between the king Uther Pendragon and the sourcerer Merlin. Considering the fact that this romance is based on events previously described in the latin chronicle by Geoffrey of Monmouth (“Historia Regum Britanniae”, 1138) and its free translation to “romance” language by Wace (“Roman de Brut”, 1155) and the fact that this laughter is unusual for medieval literature, we can suppose its connection to the carnival culture. In this work we will look at the context, in which laughter appears in “Merlin”, and try to figure out the role of carnival motives in “historical” narrative.