Mikhail Bakhtin and the Phenomenon of Grateful Apprenticeship. “Like a Teacher to Teachers”. Three Documents from the Archives of M.M. Bakhtin, Publication by Osovskiy, Oleg E., Dubrovskaya, Svetlana A.

Abstract

The article considers the phenomenon of grateful apprenticeship in the context of the biography and the reception of personality and ideas of M.M. Bakhtin. In recent decades, the thinker’s name and ideas have been associated with the “dialogical turn” that is taking place in Russian and foreign pedagogical theory. Bakhtin’s dialogism becomes the methodological basis for the so-called dialogi­cal pedagogy, which is successfully developing both in the West and in Russia. Based on archival materials, analysis of the relevant sections of Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin’s later texts and documents found in the scholar’s archive, the authors propose that the idea of responsibility, formed in the thinker’s early writings, becomes a principle of his pedagogical activity and the “peda­gogy of responsibility” implicit in it by the late 1950s and 1960s. The phenome­non of grateful discipleship is born in Bakhtin’s dialog with his mentors and stu­dents. This allows us to take a new look at the process of reception of the scholar’s personality and ideas in the late 1950s and early 1970s, and to assess the pedagogical potential of his concept of dialog. For the first time a number of documents from Bakhtin’s personal archive are introduced into the scientific turnover. In particular, the outline of a speech to the graduates of the Faculty of History and Philology of Mordovian University, drafts of his autobiography of 1946, a reply to the first letter of V.V. Kozhinov and others.