Bakhtin’s Evolving Relationship with 19th Century Russian and Christian Philosophies on Unity and Individualism

Abstract

When studying and analyzing the works and ideas of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, most scholars usually do it on a pure literature sense. Indeed, Bakhtin is known as one of the leading figures in the 20th-century literary critic scholarship, he introduced some unique ways of literary analysis, such as dialogism, heteroglossia, and carnivalesque. He was also a deep researcher of the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky. As a rule, many scholars associate Bakhtin’s approach with the development of the Soviet literary-analytical method in socialist-Marxist art. Recently, however, more and more researchers have begun to take into account the influence of Bakhtin’s philosophical views on his literary studies. As a result, it was found that Bakhtin’s dialogism, heteroglossia, and carnival theory reveal a sense of social community, which might be considered as a response to the ideology of socialism. While criticizing this conclusion, the author of the article shows that the sense of collectivity, or unity, is not a specific element of socialist theory, since it has always been characteristic of Russian philosophy, including its pre-Soviet period. For example, the concepts “sobornost” introduced by Alexey Kho­myakov and “vseedinstvo” elaborated by Vladimir Solovyov greatly influenced Russian thought in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the sources of these ideas must be sought in Christianity. Bakhtin in the early period also actively participated in religious life, so it is most likely that his idea of unity goes back to these religious activities. The purpose of the article is to analyze to what extent religious-philosophical ideas exerted influence on Bakhtin’s work and how he applied them in his literary analysis (from abstract to practical), elaborating his unique religious-philosophical-literary theory.