Bergsonism in Russia: The case of Bakhtin

Abstract

“Bergsonism in Russia: The Case of Bakhtin” examines an important question of Russian intellectual history and Bakhtin studies, namely Bergson's impact on Bakhtin, and traces similarities and differences between the two thinkers' views. Bergson's influence on the cultural and intellectual climate in Europe was profound. For a new generation of thinkers, he was a symbol of opposition to traditional philosophy, determinism, and mechanistic science. All major works by Bergson were translated into Russian by 1914 and widely read and discussed in intellectual and artistic circles. The Formalists, Osip Mandelstam, Nikolai Gumilev, Alexandr Voronskii, to name but a few Russian intellectuals, were interested in his philosophy, and so was Mikhail Bakhtin.

Although Bergson's influence on Bakhtin has been briefly mentioned in Michael Holquist's works on Bakhtin, no substantial research has appeared on this subject. This study establishes Bergson as a formative source of Bakhtin's thinking and provides a comparative analysis of their patterns of thought. Specifically, it discusses Bakhtin's and Bergson's theories of the self, their views on time and space, and their approaches to ethics. This paper not only traces Bakhtin's and Bergson's patterns of thought and Bakhtin's polemics against Bergson, it also places Bakhtin within a wider group of twentieth-century thinkers who attempted to create new approaches to knowledge.