[FIRST PARAGRAPH]
When the history of Bakhtin studies is finally written, one particularly ironic aspect that
will stand out is that an accurate understanding of the development of dialogic ideas has
required us to liberate ourselves from a series of monologic myths. Such thinking, to paraphrase
Bakhtin himself, 'impoverished' our understanding, 'disorganised and bled' an accurate
image of the dynamics of intellectual formation, by 'mixing it up' with 'fantastic'
and 'estranged' notions and 'rounding it out' into a 'mythological whole' (Bakhtin 1979
[l 936-81: 224; 1986 [l 936-81: 43) Four particularly persistent varieties may be briefly
summarised as follows: 1) Bakhtin was a thoroughly original thinker who thought up all
his ideas crA mhilo, 2) Bakhtin surrounded himself with mediocrities and there was a unidirectional
flow of ideas from him to, say, Voloshinov and Medvedev, 3) Bakhtin was
an 'unofficial' thinker who chose to remain outside the dominant trends within Soviet
scholarship and was fundamentally unaffected by that scholarship, 4) where Bakhtin was
compelled to engage with Soviet scholarship the result was either rebuttal or inner subversion
rather than serious engagement. I will refrain from identifying specific works in which
these myths are present since they permeated the majority of research in the field until
relatively recently and they have receded only gradually. Furthermore, the myths have not
uniformly disintegrated, but have retreated unevenly in the face of a varying amount and
quality of research in specific areas
