Bakhtin’s Historical Turn and Its Soviet Antecedents

Abstract

Based on previous work, the article provides a new understanding of Bakhtin’s ideas on the stratification and historical development of language, drawing on unpublished archival materials of the Institute for the Comparative History of the Literatures and Languages of the West and East (ILIaZV). It focuses on Bakhtin’s work from the late 1930s, when he shifts his attention from language to the historical development of specific images, semantic clusters, and plot structures. Bakhtin still maintained close connections with the work carried out at ILIaZV, but drew upon the work of different scholars, Aleksandr Veselovskii (1838–1906) and Izrail´ Frank-Kamenetskii (1880–1937), who become important influences on Bakhtin, especially on his idea of carnival as syncretic pageantry as a structuring feature of literature and on his analysis of plot structures and metaphors. The article provides insight into the assumptions behind Bakhtin’s notions of the chronotope and carnival and the prospect of re-grounding these notions, so that they become useful tools for future research.