Mikhail Bakhtin: The Word in the World

Βιβλιοκριτική από τον Terry Eagleton

Bakhtin, too, was a fifth columnist. He was born in the provincial Russian town of Orel in 1895, the son of an untitled nobleman turned banker, and studied classics at Petersburg University. His years as a student coincided with the First World War and the Russian Revolution. Bakhtin, the Bolsheviks, Futurists and Formalists emerged more or less at the same explosive historical moment; and though he was a devout Russian Orthodox Christian rather than a Marxist, Bakhtin lived through a period of heady cultural synthesis in which a marriage of Communism and Christ didn’t seem out of the question. If he was not exactly a historical materialist, his thinking was both historical and materialist. The intensely communal bent of the Russian Church, along with its spirituality of the senses, played its part in this alliance. So did its quasi-materialist belief in the sacredness of the bodily. It was a faith which hymned the humanity of Christ and the complex richness of everyday life. Behind Bakhtin’s fascination with the materiality of the word, as Pechey’s title suggests, lies an incarnational theology. The Word-made-flesh is the figure in the carpet of his work.

μέσω Ρομπερτ Αμστερνταμ

Νομίζω όμως ότι η ουσία βρίσκεται σε μια αράδα.

Deprived of cigarette papers in the Second World War, he deprived posterity of some priceless insights by tearing up one of his own manuscripts to roll his tobacco.