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Editing history: on the publication of Bakhtin’s Sobranie sočinenij, 1996–2012

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Abstract

From the very beginning, it has been difficult to extract a smooth narrative from the complex plot of Bakhtin’s life and work. Early attempts to do this proposed an unconvincing distinction between a private philosophical Bakhtin and the man who wrote compelling and innovative work on the philosophy of language, the stylistics of the novel, and the culture of carnival. The 7-volume Sobranie sočinenij (1996–2012) both frustrates and supports this simplifying narrative. The texts it presents, many radically different from earlier published versions, suggest that Bakhtin’s commitment to the stylistics of the novel was permanent and enduring and that its sociological colouring was more than strategic. The notes and commentary, however, seek to corral the energy of the material, by persistently interpreting Bakhtin’s works as separable into philosophical kernels and sociological/stylistic shells.

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Notes

  1. See, for example, Todorov’s description of Bakhtin’s writing in 1953–1975 as ‘a return to the great theoretical and methodological themes of the beginning’ (Todorov 1984, p. 12).

  2. So, for example, Krystyna Pomorska claimed that Bakhtin's 1929 book on Dostoevsky ‘clearly belongs to the second phase in the development of the Russian Formalist school, the structuralist phase' (Pomorska 1968, p. viii), a sentiment echoed in Titunik (1986) and Erlich (1969).

  3. In this respect, the position taken by Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson was revealing. They refused to separate the texts of Medvedev and Vološinov into layers, and therefore also refused to endorse claims for Bakhtin’s authorship. See Morson and Emerson (1990, pp. 101–119).

  4. An excellent analysis of the relationship between Ivanov’s, Pumpjanskij’s, and Bakhtin’s texts on Dostoevsky is Kliger (2011).

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  1. Department of English Language and Literature, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1, Canada

    Ken Hirschkop

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Hirschkop, K. Editing history: on the publication of Bakhtin’s Sobranie sočinenij, 1996–2012. Stud East Eur Thought 67, 129–144 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-015-9235-4

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