Bakhtin in His Own Voice: Interview by Victor Duvakin: Translation and Notes by Slav N. Gratchev

On March 15, 2013, Radio Svoboda (Radio Liberty) broadcast a recording of selections from a series of interviews with Mikhail Bakhtin conducted in 1973 by philologist and dissident Victor Duvakin (Komardenkov 1972, 18).1 At this key moment in the Soviet era, Professor Duvakin, who had been dismissed from his position at Moscow State University, decided to create a phono-history of the epoch (Timofeev-Resovsky 1995, 384). Among the three hundred people whom Duvakin interviewed was Mikhail Bakhtin (Bocharova and Radzishevsky1996, 123), the seventy-eight-year-old retired professor of literature who was known familiarly by many as “chudak.”2 Bakhtin had continued to write about Dostoevsky, the theory of the novel, and “the great time” (большого времени) of the historicity of meaning. After a number of weeks spent with Bakhtin (seeBakhtin 2002, 12), Duvakin left us an enormous archive of “Bakhtin in his own voice”—eighteen hours’ worth of conversations with the philosopher, of which the broadcast portions are translated here. In these interviews Bakhtin discusses literature and poets, and talks very personally as if he is lecturing at the university to his students. He mentions some of the most important figures of [End Page 592] the literary movement in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century—figures like Fyodor Sologub, Valery Bryusov, Maxim Gorky Vladimir Mayakovsky Velimir Khebnikov, and Alexander Blok. The interview has never been translated into English and, consequently has been inaccessible to English-speaking audiences interested in the life and works of Mikhail Bakhtin. This annotated translation attempts to fill the gap and to bring Bakhtin to the Western audience in “his own voice” (Gratchev and Gyulamiryan 2014, 2). Brief notes are included to identify important Russian literary figures and historical events in order to help Western readers contextualize Bakhtin’s observations.

\u3cem\u3eDon Quixote\u3c/em\u3e in Russia in the 1920s-1930s: The Problem of Perception and Interpretation

This study logically continues my previous examination of the perception of Don Quixote in Russia throughout the early twentieth century and how this perception changed over time. In this new article, which will be the third in a sequence of five, I will again use a number of materials inaccessible to English-speaking scholars to demonstrate how the perception of Don Quixote by Russian intelligentsia shifted from being skeptical to complete admiration and even glorification of the hero. Don Quixote was increasingly compared with Prometheus, the most powerful and most romanticized personage of Greek methodology. Indeed, “. . . начав юмористический роман, осмеивающий увлечение современников рыцарскими похождениями, Сервантес и не думал, что потешный рыцарь печального образа постепенно вырастет в гигантскую фигуру страдальца-идеалиста” (“. . . when starting a humorous novel satirizing contemporary fascination with knightly adventures, Cervantes could not have guessed that the amusing Knight of the Sad Countenance would gradually grow into a great figure of the suffering idealist”; my trans; Solomin 91). The situation changed, though, and changed rapidly, during the 1920s to the 1930s. This decade was marked by a fascination with new forms, ideas, movements, and experimentations. The country finally overcame devastation and hunger, class battles were finally behind it, and the Russian intelligentsia readily stepped forward to help the country revive the cultural life that had been almost entirely lost since 1917. Obviously, the new type of hero was coming to the forefront of the cultural discourse: the practitioner who, without fear, would be ready to sacrifice his life for the common good. And if such a hero could not be created in haste, he could easily be found in the classics. Don Quixote was chosen to become a symbol of the new Soviet man

Review of The Gift of Active Empathy: Scheler, Bakhtin, and Dostoevsky, by Alina Wyman

There are certain writers that literary scholars of all times will study again and again, and there are certain literary works that are too important to be examined only once. Reading Dostoevsky is always an “excruciatingly visceral experience” not only for us, the readers, but also for scholars like Max Scheler and Mikhail Bakhtin (p. 230). Alina Wyman’s book makes a major contribution to this experience. Wyman’s argument is both original and elegantly simple: for Bakhtin and Scheler the concept of loving empathy is fundamental in both their respective models of being and in the particular structure of their careers. The investigation of this fundamental emotional phenomenon remains relevant to both thinkers’ inquiries throughout their philosophical careers. There are, of course, some fundamental differences; if for Scheler the loving empathy “unifies the world,” for Bakhtin the answerable empathy is “a way into the unity of Being” (p. 6). This is, in a nutshell, the argument Wyman so elegantly develops throughout her interesting book

Don Quixote in Russia in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: The Problem of Perception and Interpretation

This study examines the problem of the perception of Don Quixote in Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By using materials inaccessible to English-speaking scholars, I want to demonstrate that this process of appropriation was a long and a complex one, and there were specific reasons for that. The first modern novel, upon arrival in Russia, received minimal attention and was perceived as a simple, comical book; then, gradually, it started to gain significance. The majority of the materials that are used throughout this text are only available in Russian, are kept in the scientific libraries of Saint Petersburg and Moscow, and have never been translated into English. To facilitate reading this article, within the text I use the English translations that I generated myself, but, to preserve the authenticity of the text and give interested readers the opportunity to see or read the information in Russian, I included the original text in the endnotes

Introduction. The Polyphonic World of Cervantes and Dostoevsky

The communication and interrelation between Spanish and Russian literature have lasted for several centuries. At times, the connections grew weaker and at other times stronger, but they never disappeared completely. Throughout this period, which extends roughly from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, there were single instances when the relationship between Spanish and Russian literature was becoming very intense, and we can admit that these interactions were very productive for both sides. The careful study of motives, forms, and all possible aspects of such communication, even if reviewed only in part, can be both revealing and productive for Spanish literary history as well as for Russian. A historic overview of Spanish-Russian literary relations will give us abundant and interesting material for more concrete literary analysis and for theoretical generalization and conclusions. These materials will show us significant similarities in the process of historical development of two countries that, in spite of being so far apart territorially and culturally, have much in common. In fact, the Spanish-Muslim cultural interrelations in the Middle Ages are in many ways reminiscent of the Mongol Yoke that spread over Russia and lasted for almost three centuries. An understanding of these events then may help us explain later processes that took place in Russia and Spain once Arab and Mongol dominations came to an end, in particular regarding the role of the so-called exotic color in the arts, in the transformation of literary genres, etc

Prince Myshkin as a Tragic Interpretation of Don Quixote

Surprisingly, although virtually no one doubts Dostoevsky’s profound and direct indebtedness to Cervantes, and the Quixote–Myshkin identity is obvious, no one has ever mentioned or analyzed how Myshkin, the character more dialogically elaborate and versatile, turned out to be more limited in literary expressivity than his more “monological” counterpart. The focus on this essay is the question of what weakened the realness of Dostoevsky’s favorite hero, and what negatively affected his literary answerability

Don Quixote in Russia in the Early Twentieth Century: The Problem of Perception and Interpretation

This study logically continues my previous examination of the perception of Don Quixote in Russia throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and how this perception changed over time. In this new article, I will again use a number of materials inaccessible to English-speaking scholars to demonstrate how the perception of Don Quixote by Russian intelligentsia shifted from humorous to complete admiration and even idealization of the hero. Don Quixote was more and more frequently compared with Prometheus, the most powerful and most romanticized personage of Greek methodology. Indeed, “начав юмористический роман, осмеивающий увлечение современников рыцарскими похождениями, Сервантес и не думал, что потешный рыцарь печального образа постепенно вырастет в гигантскую фигуру страдальца-идеалиста” (“by starting a humorous novel satirizing contemporary fascination with knightly adventures, Cervantes could not even guess that the amusing Knight of the Sad Countenance would gradually grow into a great figure of the suffering idealist”; my trans; Solomin 91). This study will not attempt to exhaust all questions related to this matter. Instead it tries to open some new routes that will perhaps lead us toward new generalizations and productive conclusions. At the very least, this study aims to arouse a scholarly interest in some key topics related to Cervantes’ reception in Russia in the early twentieth century, his re-discovery and gradual transformation or, more to the point, re-accentuation of the image of Don Quixote during the Silver Age of Russian literary Renaissance

Introduction. In Don Quixote: The Re-accentuation of the World’s Greatest Literary Hero

This book is a unique scholarly attempt to examine Don Quixote from multiple angles to see how the re-accentuation of the world’s greatest literary hero takes place in film, theatre, and literature. To accomplish this task, nineteen scholars from the United States, Canada, Spain, and Great Britain have come together, and each of them has brought his/her unique perspective to the subject. For the first time, Don Quixote is discussed from the point of re-accentuation, that is, having in mind one of the key Bakhtinian concepts that will serve as a theoretical framework. A primary objective was therefore to articulate, relying on the concept of re-accentuation, that the history of the novel has benefited enormously from the re-accentuation of Don Quixote helping us to shape countless iconic novels from the eighteenth century, and to see how Cervantes’s title character has been reinterpreted to suit the needs of a variety of cultures across time and space

Introduction. Dialogues with Shklovsky: The Duvakin Interviews 1967-1968.

Dialogues with Shklovsky: The Duvakin Interviews 1967–1968 reflects the spirit of times—when the most dramatic events of the twentieth century were happening in Russia and the USSR. The first English translation of the 1967–1968 interviews with the founder of the Formalist School of literary theory, Viktor Shklovsky, this volume offers a slice of Russian micro-history that relies on the living voice of that history. Through the transcription of a six-hour phono-document, the readers will hear the voice of a real participant in events that for the longest time in the USSR were forbidden to be discussed or written about

Mikhail Bakhtin’s Heritage in Literature, Arts, and Psychology. Introduction

This volume celebrates hundred years of Bakhtin’s heritage: in September 13 of 1919 in the literary journal Den Iskusstva (The Day of the Art) was published the first work of Mikhail Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, the work that became his literary manifesto. This book aims to examine the heritage of Mikhail Bakhtin in a variety of disciplines. To achieve this end, we drew upon colleagues from eight different countries across the world--United States, Canada, Spain, Great Britain, France, Russia, Chile, and Japan--in order to bring the widest variety of points of view on the subject. But we also wanted this book to be more than just another collection of essays of literary criticism. For this reason we invited contributions by scholars from different disciplines- -including theater, translation, and psychology--that is, those who have dealt with Bakhtin’s heritage and saw its practical application in their fields. Therefore, some of these chapters are not written in a typical humanist academic scholarly style. And that is as it should be