Mikhail Bakhtin: a Justification of Literature

Mikhail Bakhtin: A Justification of Literature

Sonya Petkova

Mikhail Bakhtin is one of the most influential literary critics of the 20th century. He was born in 1895 and lived in St. Petersburg at the time when the Russian Formalists were publishing their innovative theory on art and language. His own theory, however, is generally thought to transcend the work of the Formalists, and to anticipate structuralism and poststructuralism. His most famous study, “Discourse in the Novel,” written in the 30s-40s (but not published until 1967), presents the theory of dialogism in language and the claim that a work of art is not a self-sufficient whole. Bakhtin’s writing is often seen as the foundation of poststructuralism. This essay will focus on Bakhtin’s earlier work Problemy Poetiki Dostoevskogo (1929) and its notion of polyphony which is, I argue, the cornerstone of the theory of heteroglossia developed later in “Discourse in the Novel” (written in the1930-40s). Part I of the paper examines the idea of polyphony in Problemy; part II discuss- es heteroglossia in “Discourse in the Novel.” Part III delineates the continuation of Bakhtin’s thought in the work postsructuralist critics Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes. I also investigate, in part IV, a hardly examined aspect of Bakhtin’s work—his criticism of poetry. “Lectures on the History of Russian Literature” was published in the five-volume Sobrannie Sochinenii (Collected Works). These lectures, many of which on poetry, complicate Bakhtin’s theory of language and reveal his work as encompassing far more than previously thought. Moreover, they help us to realize that Bakhtin’s work not only preempts poststructuralism but disagrees with its tendency to merge artistic discourse with discourse in general.

I. The Polyphonic Novel: Problemy Poetiki Dostoevskogo (1929)

Bakhtin’s idea of heteroglossia in the novel emerges as early as his analysis of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novels, whose style he labels “polyphonic.” Problemy Poetiki Dostoevskogo (The Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics), published in 1929, presents a detailed analysis of the different aspects of Dostoyevsky’s stylistics. It is centered on the claim that Dostoyevsky’s novel is dialogical, as opposed to the traditional notion that the novel is a monologic whole driven by the author’s ideology. The term “polyphony” was coined by the critic Komarovich, who used it to draw an analogy between Dostoyevsky’s novel and the polyphony of a musical piece (Problemy 28).

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However, Komarovich considered polyphonic music as well as the novelistic genre to be monologic, to represent the unity of an individual act by a unitary will. Bakhtin overturns this philosophy and presents what will become the poststructuralist view on language. All voices in polyphony, he claims, are autonomous, brought together in the artistic event. Unlike poetry, the language of prose is heterogeneous, and multiple social voices come forcefully together in the discourse, even though some of these voices remain unacknowledged. Bakhtin sees Dostoyevsky’s prose as the prototype of the polyphonic novel (as well as of the novel characterized by heteroglossia, as described later in “Discourse in the Novel.”) Dostoyevsky, he says:

is the creator of the polyphonic novel. He invented a new novelistic genre. The new kind of character appearing in his work has a voice constructed in the same way as the authorial voice is constructed in an ordinary novel… The character’s speech of himself and of the world is as weighty as the traditional authorial discourse; it is not subordi- nated to the objective character of the hero, as one of his characteristics; at the same time it does not serve as an expression of the authorial voice. (Problemy 13)

The polyphonic novel subverts the notion of an omniscient narrator and characters subordinate to the main moralistic purpose of the novel. In the first chapter of Problemy, Bakhtin reviews in great detail the previous critical responses to Dostoyevsky’s work. They explained Dostoyevsky’s novels either as a reflection of the social reality of the time, or as deeply psychological works that mirror the inbuilt contradictions in Dostoyevsky’s own mind. Until Bakhtin, critics had been applying an analytical method that later, in “Discourse in the Novel,” Bakhtin calls “poetic.” Traditional criticism on prose, according to Bakhtin, used “poetic” modes of analysis, which revolved around the idea of unity of style and narrative voice and were insufficient to describe the polyphonic novel (“Discourse in the Novel”). It failed to acknowledge the different social forces that make the heterogeneous style of the novel. One assumption that critics made was that one or other of the characters conveyed the moral philosophy of the novel. Thus a critic assumed that the author’s philosophy and moralistic view were revealed through the character. The fact that there were contradictory characters and ideas in the novel none of which seemed to pre- vail morally, and different styles of speech none of which was predominant, critics explained with the conflict- ing ideas inside Dostoyevsky’s mind, his complex philosophical beliefs, his Orthodox Christian beliefs, and so forth. Grossman, for instance, praised Dostoyevsky’s great personality which was able to combine all the diverse elements in his novels (Problemy 22) All these critics adhered to what Bakhtin called “poetical principles of writing,” which posit that the artistic text is organized around one main narrator and one philosophy. While Bakhtin grants merit to some of the critics’ arguments – such as the nature of Capitalist society and its reflection in the structure of the novel – he claims that none of the critics before him was able to understand the main principle behind Dostoyevsky’s work, which he believed was a matter of style and formal structure rather than of ideology and psychology. He agreed that the world in Dostoyevsky’s novel might reflect the multi- leveled world of Christianity, for instance, in the world of Dante’s Inferno. However, he continued:

Even the image of the church remains simply an image which explains nothing about the pure structure of the novel. The artistic task executed in the novel is independent from this secondary ideological deflection [prelomlenie] by which it may have been accompanied in Dostoyevsky’s conscience. The concrete artistic links among the different levels of the novel, their combination into the unity of the work, must be explained and shown through the material of the novel itself.” (Problemy 35)

Dostoyevsky’s novels present many examples to illustrate the presence of multiple autonomous voices.

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In the first chapter of Crime and Punishment, amid his silent contemplations, the main character Raskolnikov enters a pub where a drunken man named Marmeladov approaches him and begins to tell his life story. As Marmeladov gives his drawn out monologue, the reader completely forgets about Raskolnikov. He confronts a narrative just as intense and detailed as Raskolnikov’s thoughts. Marmeladov’s speech, in its lengthy, detailed description of characters and events in his personal life, becomes the major narrative. Raskolnikov himself, dur- ing the time of the tirade, is excluded from the narrative. He has no connection to Katerina Ivanovna, Marmeladov’s wife, or to Sonya and their dramatic relationship. Marmeladov does not tell his story in order to hear Raskolnikov’s opinion and advice. From the beginning until the end it seems that he is telling the story to himself. This leads Bakhtin to the following conclusion: Dostoyevsky’s novel does not combine “a multiplicity of characters and destinies in the unified objective world of the author’s mind…but a multiplicity of equal minds, each in their private world, all combined without being coherent, in the unity of a given event.” (Problemy 7) An important assertion about the polyphonic novel is that the interrelations of the layers of diverse social language types are dialogic. The concept of “the dialogic imagination” was inspired by the role of dialogue in Dostoyevsky. The understanding of what Bakhtin means as “the dialogic imagination” in his later work is close- ly tied to his study of Dostoyevsky, in which Bakhtin opposes the “monologic” novel to the “dialogic” novel. The dialogic form reveals language in its “natural,” as opposed to its linguistic state. That means that in each character’s speech different social styles are fused as opposed to an all-pervading unitary style dictated by the author. “Dostoyevsky’s novel is dialogic,” he claims (Problemy 25). The dialogic form allows two characters to remain independent of each other, just as, in the example above, Raskolnikov is excluded from Marmeladov’s world. Discourse (slovo, a character’s speech) in Dostoyevsky’s work is dialogical. A character’s discourse always stands in a dialogic relationship to another’s discourse. For example, Bakhtin describes the character from Notes from the Underground as someone who constantly examines himself through other people’s eyes, and who also invents their words in his mind. Bakhtin argues:

The man from the underground more than anything else thinks about what others think and could think of him, he strives to envisage each stranger’s conscience, each stranger’s thought about him… he tries to predict any possible evaluation given to him by others, guess the meaning and tone of this evaluation and to meticulously formulate these possible stranger’s words about him, incorporating in his own speech the imaginary phrases of the stranger. (Problemy 49)

What we have then are not simply internal conversations with other people but the active adoption of their vocab- ularies. Thus a character’s speech is never only his own. Conversely, the other’s speech is also modified by the character’s own interpretation. We can see how in Bakhtin’s argument the speaker and the listener merge, which is an argument taken by the poststructuralists as an idea of major importance – and is a major principle in intertextuality. At the same time, this happens within an active individualistic conscience. The emphasis is on the dialogical structure of language, but also on the active human agent as defining meaning – which might be an emphasis that differentiates Bakhtin from the poststructuralist (Barthesian) idea of the text. The text, according to Barthes, is a fusion of other texts in which the author or the person who utters the speech plays little significance. This example reveals how each character lives in his own individual world, often ignoring active conver- sation. At the same time, the character’s discourse also includes actual phrases from another’s discourse – which is in the nature of the dialogic thinking, since characters in Dostoyevsky are very often engaged in internal dia- logues with other people. The following example is from Crime and Punishment, at the moment that Raskolnikov learns from his mother’s letter that his sister is going to get married:

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Pyotr Petrovitch is such a busy man that even his wedding has to be in post-haste, almost by express.’ No, Dounia, I see it all and I know what you want to say to me; and I know too what you were thinking about, when you walked up and down all night, and what your prayers were like before the Holy Mother of Kazan who stands in mother’s bed- room. Bitter is the ascent to Golgotha.… Hm … so it is finally settled; you have determined to marry a sensible busi- ness man, Avdotya Romanovna, one who has a fortune (has already made his fortune, that is so much more solid and impressive) a man who holds two government posts and who shares the ideas of our most rising generation, as mother writes, and who seems to be kind, as Dounia herself observes. (Ch. IV, Crime and Punishment)

II. Heterglossia in the Novel: “Discourse in the Novel”

Following Bakhtin’s work chronologically, we could argue that Bakhtin was thinking about the concept of heteroglossia in the novel much earlier than its formulation in “Discourse in the Novel.” In fact, it is based on the idea of the polyphonic novel. All the ideas of “Discourse” are present in Problemy Poetiki Dostoevskogo, but in a different terminology. Bakhtin had not come up yet with the new terminology. However, the theory at that time was already developed. The idea of the polyphonic novel develops in “Discourse in the Novel” into a theory of prose in general, and of discourse in general. In this later study, written in the 1930s and 40s, Bakhtin introduces the term heteroglossia (raznorechie) which substitutes “polyphony” and denotes heterogeneity of styles, dialogism and ambivalence in the dialogic discourse of the novel as opposed to the monologic discourse to which traditional linguistics subscribes. Heteroglossia denotes the inclusion of different social strata in the artistic discourse, such as the language of the court, journalistic language, everyday speech, etc. Discourse seems to belong to a single speaker while, in fact, it contains the language and attitudes of more people. Speech in novelistic discourse is not a two-way process of one speaker addressing a second speaker. As it is uttered, it enters into dialogic relationships with multiple heterogeneous words, its meaning fuses with theirs or clatters with them in a “tension-full environment” (“Discourse” 276). Bakhtin’s criticism of traditional methodology is that it is not relevant to prose. It attaches to prose certain assumptions that are only true for poetic style, voice, character. Bakhtin views novelistic stylistics as funda- mentally different from the monologic structure of epic forms and countered traditional criticism in its view that, similarly to poetry, the novel is monologic. In the first chapter of “Discourse in the Novel” he claims that:

Concrete questions of stylistics were either not treated at all or treated in passing and in an arbitrary way: the discourse of artistic prose was either understood as being poetic in the narrow sense, and had the categories of traditional stylistics (based on the study of tropes) uncritically applied to it, or else such questions were limited to empty, evaluative terms for the characterization of language, such as “expressiveness,” “imagery,” “force,” “clarity” and so on (“Discourse” 260).

He warns against linguistic analysis, which sees discourse merely in monologic context (“Discourse” 81) and fails to acknowledge polyphony. In Dostoyevsky’s characters Bakhtin finds the prototypes of the conscience in which discourse is dialogic. They do not exist separately from their speech (as senders of message, in Jakobson’s terminology) but are one with their speech, and, as Bakhtin describes them, are not presented as objective enti- ties but are presented through their speech (Problemy 50). Bakhtin criticizes linguistics, and Ferdinand de Saussure in particular (even though he was influenced by Saussure’s theory of language), for allowing stylistics to be reduced to individual styles, thus ignoring the vari- ous disparate styles that co-exist in novelistic discourse (“Discourse” 264). Heteroglossia in the novel (or

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polyphony in the study of Dostoyevsky) is characterized by a multiplicity of voices and a diversity of social speeches and styles. Bakhtin’s theoretical conclusions about Dostoyevsky’s novels evolve into a theory that uses the theories of Saussure and the Russian Formalists, but also departs from them. Saussure reduced language to a system which contradicts, according to Bakhtin, the ever disparate and contradictory forces of its natural state. The Formalists, Roman Jakobson in particular, engage mainly in the analysis of poetry, which is the monologic form of writing, according to Bakhtin, and thus receptive to linguistic analysis that would present it as a unitary system. Unity is characteristic of the poetic genres where the poet’s individuality necessarily determines a unique poetic world. The novel, however, is not made of the author’s stylized speech but of social heteroglossia (“Discourse in the Novel” 264). With Problemy, Bakhtin develops his important idea of the difference between language and the linguistic system of language. In “Discourse” he asserts that linguistics and traditional stylistics are centralizing forces, which try to bring unity to the natural state of heteroglossia in language. This is, moreover, a political process: “Linguistics, stylistics and the philosophy of language – as forces in the service of the great centralizing tendencies of European verbal-ideological life – have sought first and foremost for unity in diversity” (“Discourse” 274). These centralizing forces focus on the most stable aspects of discourse, ignoring others and reducing diversity to one form. The influence of this theory over the poststructuralist concept of “the other” in poststructuralist discourse is obvious. These forces concentrate attention on the phonetic aspects of language as the least change- able, most removed from the unsettled “socio-semantic spheres” of language. They ignore the verbal genres that contain “the decentralizing tendencies in the life of language” (274). Bakhtin created a typology of styles, heterogeneous unities, which combine in a work of art to form a unity of relatively autonomous elements. These different unities are what Bakhtin calls the direct, authorial narration, stylization of oral everyday narration (skaz), semi-literary and extra-artistic speech (see “Discourse” 262 for detailed explanation of these units). Thus the novel is polyphonic and dialogic. Bakhtin claimed that if one sees the unity of a work as a product of the unity of individual style (“individual dialect”) or individual speech (parole), as a Saussurean would, one presupposes the unity of language and of personhood. Such unity is need- ed in most genres in poetry. Poetry is much more monologic for Bakhtin, characterized by monologue and direct relation between the poetic and lyric “I” (“Discourse” 269). There is no place for monologism in the novel, however, for it is made of social and stylistic heteroglossia and through the dialogic relationships of individual voices in it (“Discourse” 264). The novel combines rhetorical (journalistic, moral, philosophical) genres with artistic genres (epic, dramatic). Thus it is never reducible to the centralized version given by a linguistic or philosophical analysis.

III. Poststructuralists on Bakhtin

A major stylistic feature in Problemy is the autonomy of the character’s voice from the author’s voice. In addi- tion, a character’s discourse does not merely reflect the character’s philosophy but has an autonomous role from him in the structure of the whole. The character is made of his speech, Bakhtin claims in the second chapter of Problemy, contrary to the traditional view that speech is only one of the characteristics of a person. The shift is from speaker to speech – we can see, therefore, how as early as Problemy Poetiki Dostoevskogo, Bakhtin’s thinking relates to poststructuralist thought. The distinction that the French poststructuralist Roland Barthes makes between text and work is related to the theory of heteroglossia. The text, according to him, is something “expe- rienced only in an activity of production.” It is not a physical object, but represents the meanings produced as the reader encounters and re-writes the work of art (“From Work to Text”). However, in contrast to a poststructural-

Stanford’s Student Journal of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Volume 1, Spring 2005 6 Petkova / Mikhail Bakhtin ist like Barthes, for whom meaning emerges in the process of the reader’s “re-writing” of the text, Bakhtin re- asserts both author and specific meaning within the text. A work of art, unlike the Barthesian text, does present given viewpoints, it has some stable meaning outside the reader’s subjectivity. “Dostoyevsky’s character,” Bakhtin also claims, “is an ideologue.” It is Dostoyevsky’s accomplishment as an author to create this specific type of character that allows him to compose the polyphonic novel. Author and the uniqueness of meaning are reasserted in Bakhtin’s system of thought and thus a distinction between him and the poststructuralists must be made because Bakhtin justifies literature as a unique type of discourse. When Bakhtin says that in Dostoyevsky the character is his speech, he does not mean that language is the more important component of the two. He claims: “The character interests Dostoyevsky as an idiosyncratic viewpoint on the word and on himself, as a thinking and evaluative human position toward himself and toward the surrounding reality. The important thing for Dostoyevsky is not what his character is in the world, but what the world is to the character and what he as a person is to himself” (Problemy 43). Barthes states something different: “The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable cen- ters of culture… the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings…” Graham Allen, who uses this quote in his book Intertextuality, 13, explains that according to Barthes’ idea “the author is placed in the role of a compiler or arranger of pre-existent possibilities within the language system.” Then there seems to be no difference between an author and any other speaker. Artistic discourse is seen as no different from an everyday discourse—anything said can be art, any art is a compilation of meanings without any moralistic function which Barthes sees as immanently oppressive (“Inaugural Lecture”). Bakhtin, as revealed in Problemy, does include the author’s moral as part of the work, even though he emphasizes in “Discourse” the combinative nature of authorial language. According to Barthes it seems that art can pro- duce nothing new. He implies that the author has no control over the moral of the story; and that there actually is no set moral. Bakhtin, on the other hand, emphasizes the Christian ethic that drives the end of Crime and Punishment with the motif of repentance. The character of Sonya embodies Christian self-sacrifice and she is the one who leads Raskolnikov to repentance and expiation, and thereby saves him. To say that Crime and Punishment has no pre-determined moral (even though Bakhtin does not over-emphasize it), would reduce its meaning. Bakhtin does not announce the death of the Author. He considers the author an important figure even as he observes that the author’s language is a compilation of speeches, and therefore is not entirely original. It does not, however, follow from this fact that the author is simply a compiler. The fact that authorial language presents a mixture of existing styles does not take away the artistic merit of novelistic discourse. Graham Allen rightly observes that Bakhtin’s “intertextuality” is different from Barthes’ in that Bakhtin saw the origin of meaning in human beings and not in language (Intertextuality, 28). The author retains his importance, determined by his personality, tradition and the specific social reality of the time. Julia Kristeva’s essay “Word, Dialogue and Novel” (1966) was one of the works that first presented Bakhtin to a Western audience. Kristeva introduced Bakhtin as one of the formalists; however, she separated him as the critic who both developed and tried to transcend the limitations of formalist and structuralist theories. In fact, her vision of Bakhtin’s theory is completely poststructuralist. She explains and expands on Bakhtin’s theory, creating terminology based on it such as the concept of intertextuality, which corresponds to heteroglossia but emphasizes the active interconnection between two and more different texts. Bakhtin’s relational conception of the word, its constant position in relation to another, is what matters most to Kristeva (The Kristeva Reader 36). Kristeva argues that there is an important distinction between what a Formalist would call dialogic, and Bakhtin’s notion of it. The traditional formalist would see the word as a fixed point; to Bakhtin “literary word”

Stanford’s Student Journal of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Volume 1, Spring 2005 7 Petkova / Mikhail Bakhtin is a “dialogue between several writings: that of the writer, addressee (or the character) and the contemporary or earlier cultural context.” (The Kristeva Reader 36) Thus the word becomes an intersection of textual surfaces. In her interpretation of Bakhtin, author, reader, society, etc., are all texts, and the author does nothing but re-write the text of society into the text of his novel. She explains dialogism as the two-way process of reading-writing. From Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia and the relational nature of the word, she derives her notion of intertextuality. Kristeva emphasizes the significance of the distinction between dialogic and monologic, and sets Bakhtin apart from Saussure and the Russian Formalists. She argues that the influence between these theorists is mutual. Based on Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia, she claims that Saussure’s definitions of the sign are no longer relevant, and neither is the very concept of a sign, which presupposes a certain hierarchical division between signi- fier and signified (The Kristeva Reader 40). She takes on Bakhtin’s idea that linguistics reflects Indo-European centrist philosophy and challenges the Saussurean notion of the sign with the subversive notion of the relativity of meaning in discourse. The monologic is associated with the epic – it is descriptive, and in a novel form it is “stifling” for the dialogical powers of language. Bakhtin’s own theory, however, goes beyond poststructuralism. The following two examples reveal that Bakhtin considered the personality of the author as an important source of meaning and that he was well aware of the social and historical background of an artwork. Bakhtin emphasizes the importance of Dostoyevsky’s career in creating the polyphonic genre as a journalist, as well as the social condition in Russia in the first years of capitalism (Problemy). The author is still very important in defining the stylistics, of a work, certainly the author of poetry. He remarks in Problemy that the world in Dostoyevky’s prose does reflect the author’s mind even if the stylistics of the novel itself is more important. Still, as he observes both in Problemy and “Discourse” there are two aspects in a work—the social element and the stylistic element. Even if the author of prose uses social heteroglossia that is not his own, his work reflects his time-specific views. We mentioned in the beginning that Bakhtin considered the analysis of stylistics to be of primary concern and that, even though the novel reflects a social and moral perspective, its structure cannot be understood by looking at the author’s ideology. At the same time he seems to contradict himself in emphasizing the idea that a novel is actively social—as it is made of and responds to social reality: “Every literary work is internally/ immanently sociological; each of the elements of its form is saturated with vivid social assessment” (Problemy 7). Therefore, formal analysis must assess each element of the artistic structure as a point of refraction of active social powers, as an artificial crystal. The formal method remains on the periphery of the form understanding since it exhausts itself with the form and does not consider its relation to the historical background of the work. Bakhtin subscribes to the view of Otto Kaus that the world in Dostoyevsky’s prose represents a “pure expression” of the capitalist spirit. He pro- poses the interesting theory that the worlds of different people, in their social and ideological differences, were once immersed in themselves, with their own justifications and meanings, without the material ground for them to interact on such a level as to permeate each other. “Capitalism destroyed the disconnection (isolation) of these worlds, shattered down the seclusion and the internal ideological self-sufficiency of these social spheres.” (Problemy 26) It violently brought together two individual worlds, of the proletarian and the capitalist, and forced them into a whole. Bakhtin also pointed out at Dostoyevsky’s journalistic career as a source of a new method of character description. The character in Dostoyevsky, he argued, has no past and his actions do not have a logical or moral explanation in his past. His speech critically addresses the contemporary world around him, in the same way a newspaper article catches the most relevant theme of the day; it deals with the present day and will be substitut- ed by a different article tomorrow. Only what matters today is what is significant. If ideas have remained in the

Stanford’s Student Journal of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Volume 1, Spring 2005 8 Petkova / Mikhail Bakhtin past or can happen in the future but have no importance today, they are trivial. Bakhtin claims that Dostoyevsky built the thinking of his characters according to this journalistic principle. His characters do not contemplate the past, unless it is relevant today. As a journalist Dostoyevsky was not interested in history but in the social problems of the contemporary moment, in arguing with the different voices of the day. This fact helps to see the novel as being about discourse and dialogue rather than a “monologic” description of character and psychology. The newspaper article as a genre also brings the divergent and contradictory voices into the novelistic genre and allows Dostoyevsky to create the polyphonic novel.

IV. Poetry in Bakhtin’s Philosophy: Lectures in the Course of Russian Literature

In “Discourse in the Novel” Bakhtin distinguishes between different types of novels, not all of which are polyphonic. He makes, however, an important distinction between prosaic and poetic genres. Scholars such as Graham Allen have traditionally seen Bakhtin as a scholar of the novel. However, Bakhtin’s “Lectures on the History of Russian Literature” contains analyses of a great number of prominent poets of the Russian Avant- garde. The “Lectures” include lecture notes taken a few years before the publishing of Problemy Poetiki Dostoevskogo. In “Discourse in the Novel,” Bakhtin does argue that poetry is predominantly monologic and the novel is dialogic; what is more, he argues that these are necessary conditions for each genre. An examination of “Lectures,” however, presents a much more nuanced analysis of literature and allows us to see more clearly how Bakhtin came to his general theory of language as dialogic. More importantly, it seems that Bakhtin discovered dialogic elements in poetry before he did so in novelistic discourse – for instance, he was examining the different speech styles in Bloc’s poetry while, at the same time, he was making a “traditional” ideological analysis of Dostoyevsky’s work (“Lectures”). The “Lectures” were given privately to students in Vitebsk sometime between 1922 and 1924 (in 1924 Bakntin moves back to Leningrad, today St. Petersburg). The notes were taken by R. M. Mirkina, in an informal setting. They are thus, as S. Bocharov, the editor of Sobranie Sochinenii comments, not an official text by Bakhtin, but rather, oral improvisations that follow a specific academic methodology relevant to the theme of the course and the student level. In any case, Bakhtin conspicuously ignored linguistic questions and concentrated predominantly on the study of genres. At the time of the “Lectures,” he was already acquainted with the thought of the Russian Formalists. Jakobson had formed the Moscow Linguistic Circle in 1915, and within a year the Saint Petersburg-based OPOlaZ, Society for the Study of Poetic Language, had been formed and was being attended by figures such as Shklovksy, Tynianov, and Eikhenbaum. Considering this fact, his early studies in literature suggest that Bakhtin was not merely a follower of the Formalist movement. At this earlier stage of his thinking, he did not fully devote his scholarly searches to an examination of the Saussurean theory and linguistic analysis. The “Lectures” demon- strate his deep interest in modern Russian poetry and prose in terms of genre and history, as well as style. He did not, at the same time, adopt an “ideological” approach: he would not classify a poem as “good” or “bad” or use similar “vague” terms which he criticized later in “Discourse in the Novel.” For instance, in his study of Anna Akhmatova, he remarks that a characteristic feature of her poetry is the realistic description of love, given in specific localized experiences and character, as opposed to the much more idealized and generalized love experience present in the German romantics or the Renaissance poets. Some critics considered this a feature of shallow poetry; others saw an achievement of deep specificity of the love emotion. Bakhtin himself concludes that this quality, rather than an asset or a weakness, represents the uniqueness of Akhmatova’s style (Sobranie Sochinenii 358). Thus, in the spirit of the Formalists, he tried to present a more objective analysis, focused, however, not on lin-

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guistics but on the stylistic aspects of the poem. In short, while the Formalists emphasized linguistic analysis of the form, Bakhtin was re-visiting questions of style in a more objective manner. Despite most scholars’ assumption that he disparaged poetry, since his studies of poetry and folkloric forms have not been available in English besides maybe Ladislav Matejka’s translation Readings in Russian Poetics, Bakhtin was very careful to distinguish epic from modern poetry. He was deeply knowledgeable of the poetic trends at the beginning of the century, and in history from the classics onwards. Most importantly, he had a sense of the history of Russian poetry and was able to trace the influences of one poet on another. Studying Alexander Blok’s “The Twelve,” Bakhtin concluded that its genre was not “pure” epic. This careful examination would lead him to his later conclusion in “Discourse in the Novel” that most poetic genres are based on monologic elements; however, their analysis presents only a fraction of the stylistics of a poem, because only purely epic forms are completely monologic. This distinction allows the assumption that poetry also has dialogic elements and that Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia is relevant to artistic discourse in general. The ideas that appear in Bakhtin’s study of Dostoyevsky, and are presented in his best-known work, “Discourse in the Novel,” are immanent in his studies of the language and stylistics of poetry. Through his obser- vations of poems, Bakhtin creates a typology of different stylistic types of speech: the language of everyday speech (which he later calls skaz), the oral folkloric forms, and finally, artificially composed speech. Later he adopts this typology in his Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, to classify prose discourse (Part II of Problemy). This suggests that he found the dialogic elements in poetry before he defined them in prose. He observed in his lectures that different styles can combine and vary in a poet’s work. Thus a poet’s diction carries the traits of what Bakhtin will later call “polyphonic” text and language. “Characteristic to the lexicology of Akhmatova,” Bakhtin comments, “is the combination of two styles.” The “high” consists consists in the pathos and emotional vigor of the language, whereas the “low” style includes the mundane elements described in her poems. He similarly classifies certain types of intonation – everyday intonation, or melodic song-like intonation. Bakhtin concludes that Akhmatova’s style represents the combination of everyday and folkloric speech. Bakhtin compares lyric poetry to the epic genre, which is based on narrative and is characteristic of classic poetry. He also distinguishes novelistic elements in modern poetry: “If the author coincides with the character, he dissolves in the narrative; if the lyric ‘I’ (the one who tells the narrative) is individualized; he then acts like an actual person, he abandons the narrative and speaks about himself.” (“Lecture Notes,” A. Blok) At the same time that he made some innovative, formalist-inspired insights into poetic language and structure, Bakhtin still analyzed the novel through traditional critical analysis. The Lectures in Russian history include analyses of a number of eminent Russian novelists, with Dostoyevsky among them. In these earlier years, Bakhtin defines Crime and Punishment as a “purely philosophical-psychological” novel (273). Hard to believe, but this is the same description that he will harshly criticize only a few years later in Problemy Poetiki Dostoevskogo. Adopting a traditional way of speaking in his lectures, Bakhtin examined the psychology of the different characters and compared their different moral and philosophical views. He asserted that the novel’s main problem is the concept of crime, which had interested Dostoyevsky’s for many years and it presented, Bakhtin argued, the novelist’s renewed position on this moralistic issue. Attempts to define structure and style in this earlier analysis are missing. It seems that at the time of teaching the course in Russian history, Bakhtin was much closer to his polyphonic theory in his analyses of poetry rather than of prose. Even in Dostoyevsky he does not seem to have seen the dialogic elements. Bakhtin had a detailed knowledge of ancient Greek poetry and he constantly looked back to classic tragedies and epics in order to make comparisons with and to classify modern poems. It is possible, then, that his revolutionary theory of the novel began from determining the difference between classic epics and

Stanford’s Student Journal of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Volume 1, Spring 2005 10 Petkova / Mikhail Bakhtin modern poetry, which lacks “pure” epic structure (analysis on Blok’s “Twelve”) and stylistically brings together diverse elements. The poem “Twelve,” written in January 1918, bears all the structural elements of modernist poetry. It is based on multiplicity of voices. The poem is also dialogic and, as Bakhtin would say, contains different layers of language. It begins with an anonymous folkloric narrator and interweaves the voices of different men, as well as song refrains and different stories, so that it is hard to follow a coherent plot, even though critics traditionally label the poem as “about the revolution.” There is in the poem the rhythm and language of folkloric songs, as well as vulgar expressions and lyrical speech. In a word, it fits the dialogic theory of the novel. Bakhtin does not mention these elements as polyphonic; yet, his more formalist analysis of poetry and his distinction between lyric and epic poetry may have directed his attention to issues of diversity in style, formal structure, and the relationship between the author’s and the character’s voice. In Blok’s poem “Twelve,” Bakhtin focused solely on questions of theme and genre. A theoretician like Jakobson would have subjected this poem to a detailed structural and linguistic analysis because of its diverse and heterogeneous structure. Concentrating on theme rather structural elements such as meter allows Bakhtin to trace the Romantic and Realist aspects of the poem. He thus noticed the heterogeneity of genres in Blok’s poem, and understood that concentrating on the poem’s “modernism” would not help explain it. For instance, he considered Blok a Romantic in his choice of the twelve soldiers of the Red army because they resemble, he argued, the twelve apostles who can do nothing and are thus given the power to carry out the revolution. They are “the complete black that creates the complete white” (352). The poem is also realistic in its imagery, giving it an epic quality; however, the final image of Christ (rather than a realistic face such as Lenin) brings the poem beyond the epic, beyond the historically faithful. The Lecture Notes in the History of Russian Literature suggest that Bakhtin did not have a set theory on language – he was developing it as he approached works of art. He did not come up with the idea of the polyphonic quality of prose language and then apply it to Dostoyevsky. He began with his careful studies of the Russian poets and writers, discovered the diversity of style in some poets and the polyphonic quality of Dostoyevsky’s works and later created the more general theory of language that he presents in “Discourse in the Novel.” As we have shown, Bakhtin considered carefully Dostoyevsky’s previous critics; he took the very word “polyphony” from one of them (who, though applying it, retained the view of the monologic style). Bakhtin also viewed poetry as monologic. But, as we observed, he actually found dialogic elements in poetry. Why the does Bakhtin refrain from including poetry in the dialogic language even after he acknowledgeds the existence of different styles in poetry? In poetry, there are relations between words that are not likely to be seen in a relationship in every day or novelistic language, hence the distinction between poetic and other dis- courses. The language of poetry, according to Bakhtin, is essentially the author’s own invention. The poet, in Bakhtin’s view, is the sole determinant of the poetic stylistics. At the same time, as we already observed, a poem has some dialogic elements, and the reader’s interpretation is relevant. In his first chapter of “Discourse in the Novel” Bakhtin argues that the stylistics of the novel is incomparable to that of poetry, which was why “poetic” analysis could explain it: “The profound difference between novelistic and purely epic modes of expression is ignored. Differences between the novel and the epic are usually perceived on the level of composition and the- matics alone.” The tension between poetry and prose in Bakhtin’s philosophy suggests that the poetic text is different from the prose text (in the Barthesian sense). This means that the persona of the author in poetry is much more important than the writer of prose. At the same time, since internal dialogism—the interrelation of words— is a characteristic of language in general, the poetic text is also a text to a certain extent. Bakhtin observes:

But—we repeat—in the majority of poetic genres, the unity of the language system and the unity (and uniqueness) of

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the poet’s individuality as reflected in his language and speech, which is directly realized in this unity, are indispen- sable prerequisites of poetic style. The novel, however, not only does not require these conditions but (as we have said) even makes of the internal stratification of language, of its social heteroglossia and the variety of individual voices in it, the prerequisite for authentic novelistic prose. (“Discourse in the Novel” 264)

V. Conclusion: Bakhtin, a Critic of Culture and Tradition

Bakhtin finds history and tradition important. The studies of poetry allow, and at the same time complicate, his general theory of language. Kristeva asserts that Bakhtin sees writing as reading and the text containing and replying to another text (The Kristeva Reader 39). However, Bakhtin emphasized the individualistic nature of poetic writing. He also, both in Problemy and in “Lectures,” stressed the need to see a work of art first in its uniqueness, before putting it in the background of other works. He paid attention to the question of interpretation and the notion of the reader as writer (“Discourse in the Novel”), but he also emphasized the work of art as a work by a certain writer in a certain time with a certain polyphonic combination of languages and styles. In a footnote in Problemy he asserts: “This doesn’t mean, of course, that Dostoyevsky is isolated in the history of the novel and that the polyphonic novel created by him did not have predecessors.” However, he continues, first Dostoyevsky must be seen in his uniqueness, in what is Dostoyevsky-ian in Dostoyevsky, in order to assess his work and its position in literary history correctly (Problemy 13). As we already mentioned, Bakhtin’s work includes much more nuanced statements as well, since he found dialogic elements in the poetry examined in “Lectures,” and included poetic stylistics as part of the heteroglossia in the novel. It seems that the poststructuralist theory of the text considers language and discourse in more general terms while Bakhtin was sensitive to differences in genres and styles, and was aware of the author’s personality in a literary text. He was in favor of systematically approaching a work of art while a poststructuralist like Barthes viewed each system as oppressive and narrowing. Bakhtin’s analyses emphasize the importance of the author and the position of an individual work in literary history. The importance of the reader is asserted in “Discourse in the Novel;” however, in his books on specific authors and works, Bakhtin examined the social background of each work, the persona of its author, and its relation to literary tradition. The reader was not given full credit of meaning. Bakhtin presents his theory of heteroglossia without overlooking the existence of any pre- determined moral and meaning in a work of art and without diminishing the importance of social and historical context.

Works Cited

Allen, Graham. Intertextuality. London: Routledge, 2000.

Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Bakhtin, M.M. Problemy Poetiki Dostoevskogo. Izd. 3-e. Moskva: Khudojestvennaia Literatura, 1972.

Bakhtin, M.M. Sobranie Sochinenii, T.2 (Collected Works, V.2). Ed. S. Bocharov, L. Melihova. Moskva: Russkie Slovari, 2000.

Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana Press, 1977.

Barthes, Roland. “Inaugural Lecture,” http://math.albany.edu:8000/~rn774/fall96/barthes.html. 06 Dec, 2004.

Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. http://search.eb.com.

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Holquist, Michael. Dialogism: Bakhtin and His Word. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2002.

Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/.

Kristeva, Julia. The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. Basil Blackwell, 1986.

Todorov, T. Mikhail Bakhtine: Le Principe Dialogique. Paris: Editions Du Seuil, 1981.

Stanford’s Student Journal of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Volume 1, Spring 2005