Mikhail Bakhtin 1895 – 1975

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher of language, literary theorist, and philosophical anthropologist whose work, much of it written in obscurity and exile, transformed twentieth-century literary theory after its rediscovery in the 1960s. Working through long decades of provincial isolation under Stalin, he produced studies of Dostoevsky, Rabelais, and the novel that articulated a philosophy of dialogue in which truth is born between persons rather than within them. His concepts of polyphony, carnival, the chronotope, and heteroglossia reshaped literary scholarship and exerted a wide influence on philosophy, communication studies, and education.