31 Facts About Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Bakhtin was born in Oryol, Russia, to an old family of the nobility.

Mikhail Bakhtin's father was the manager of a bank and worked in several cities.

Mikhail Bakhtin then moved to a small city in western Russia, Nevel, where he worked as a schoolteacher for two years.

Later, in 1923, Mikhail Bakhtin was diagnosed with osteomyelitis, a bone disease that ultimately led to amputation of a leg in 1938.

In 1924, Mikhail Bakhtin moved to Leningrad, where he assumed a position at the Historical Institute and provided consulting services for the State Publishing House.

The leaders received sentences of up to ten years in labor camps of Solovki, though after an appeal to consider the state of his health, Mikhail Bakhtin's sentence was commuted to exile to Kazakhstan, where he and his wife spent six years in Kustanai.

In 1936, they moved to Saransk, where Mikhail Bakhtin taught at the Mordovian Pedagogical Institute.

In 1937, Mikhail Bakhtin moved to Kimry, a town located one hundred kilometers from Moscow.

In 1940, and until the end of World War II, Mikhail Bakhtin lived in Moscow, where he submitted a dissertation on Francois Rabelais to the Gorky Institute of World Literature to obtain a postgraduate title, although the dissertation could not be defended until the war ended.

Ultimately, Mikhail Bakhtin was denied a higher doctoral degree and granted a lesser degree, by the State Accrediting Bureau.

Later, Mikhail Bakhtin was invited back to Saransk, where he took on the position of chair of the General Literature Department at the Mordovian Pedagogical Institute.

When, in 1957, the Institute changed from a teachers' college to a university, Mikhail Bakhtin became head of the Department of Russian and World Literature.

The I-for-myself is an unreliable source of identity; Mikhail Bakhtin argues that it is the I-for-the-other through which human beings develop a sense of identity.

Identity, as Mikhail Bakhtin describes it here, does not belong merely to the individual.

Mikhail Bakhtin is critical of what he calls the monologic tradition in Western thought that seeks to finalize humanity, and individual humans, in this way.

The "carnival sense of the world", a way of thinking and experiencing that Mikhail Bakhtin identifies in ancient and medieval carnival traditions, has been transposed into a literary tradition that reaches its peak in Dostoevsky's novels.

The controversial ideas discussed within the work caused much disagreement, and it was consequently decided that Mikhail Bakhtin be denied his higher doctorate.

In Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin intentionally refers to the distinction between official festivities and folk festivities.

Mikhail Bakhtin explains the generation of meaning through the "primacy of context over text", the hybrid nature of language and the relation between utterances.

The publishing house to which Mikhail Bakhtin had submitted the full manuscript was blown up during the German invasion and Mikhail Bakhtin was in possession of only the prospectus.

However, due to a shortage of paper, Mikhail Bakhtin began using this remaining section to roll cigarettes.

In dealing with genres, Mikhail Bakhtin indicates that they have been studied only within the realm of rhetoric and literature, but each discipline draws largely on genres that exist outside both rhetoric and literature.

Mikhail Bakhtin makes the distinction between primary genres and secondary genres, whereby primary genres legislate those words, phrases, and expressions that are acceptable in everyday life, and secondary genres are characterized by various types of text such as legal, scientific, etc.

The final essay, "Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences", originates from notes Mikhail Bakhtin wrote during the mid-seventies and is the last piece of writing Mikhail Bakhtin produced before he died.

Mikhail Bakhtin had a difficult life and career, and few of his works were published in an authoritative form during his lifetime.

Mikhail Bakhtin is known for a series of concepts that have been used and adapted in a number of disciplines: dialogism, the carnivalesque, the chronotope, heteroglossia and "outsidedness".

Mikhail Bakhtin began to be discovered by scholars in 1963, but it was only after his death in 1975 that authors such as Julia Kristeva and Tzvetan Todorov brought Mikhail Bakhtin to the attention of the Francophone world, and from there his popularity in the United States, the United Kingdom, and many other countries continued to grow.

Mikhail Bakhtin is known today for his interest in a wide variety of subjects, ideas, vocabularies, and periods, as well as his use of authorial disguises, and for his influence on the growth of Western scholarship on the novel as a premiere literary genre.

Mikhail Bakhtin's works have been useful in anthropology, especially theories of ritual.

Mikhail Bakhtin's work instills in the reader an awareness of tone and expression that arises from the careful formation of verbal phrasing.

Some even suggest that Mikhail Bakhtin introduces a new meaning to rhetoric because of his tendency to reject the separation of language and ideology.