“I gladly give my author’s consent…”: M.M. Bakhtin and the Structuralists in the Intellectual Space of the 1960s and Early 1970s

Abstract

The article reconstructs one of the episodes of M.M. Bakhtin’s scientific bio­graphy, connected with the reception of the thinker’s personality and ideas by domestic and Western structuralism. As the authors point out, traditionally Bakhtin’s position on structuralism in the 1960s and early 1970s is interpreted as a continuation of his anti-formalist attitudes of the second half of the 1920s and early 1930s. The result was the image of Bakhtin as a staunch opponent and critic of structuralism, seeing the latter as a continuation of “material aes­thetics”. The archival documents presented in the article, especially fragments of Bakhtin’s correspondence with R. Barthes, L. Goldman, V.V. Ivanov, Yu. Lot­man, and V. Kozhinov, the Bakhtin marginalia on the pages of his personal li­brary journals, and books presented to Bakhtin by structuralist authors, provide grounds for a new perspective on this episode in Russian and European intellec­tual history. Despite the ambiguity of his attitude toward structuralism, Bakhtin perceived it with a sufficient degree of objectivity, which was expressed in his “Reply to the Question of the Editors of Novyi Mir” and in his working notes of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Bakhtin’s agreement to translate his article “Word in a Novel” in the French journal Langages in response to R. Barth’s
proposal, his personal communication with Ivanov, Lotman, and others give the authors grounds to make a number of clarifications in Bakhtin’s scientific
biography.