Who was Mikhail Bakhtin?
” Emerson’s own picture of Bakhtin gradually emerges: he is a man who “turns toward the world with … kindness and generosity of spirit”; he realizes (to paraphrase a fragmentary note of his own) that we do not know what world we live in, and he wants to show us. Ruth Coates, of the University of London, is a young Slavist who clearly demonstrates the resonance of Bakhtin’s work with broadly Christian concerns. For Coates, several basic themes inherent in Christianity—God and transcendence, fall and incarnation, love—appear throughout Bakhtin’s work, even when (in Stalin’s Soviet Union) he could not write directly about Christianity with out risking death. Coates shows how the explicitly Christian themes of Bakhtin’s early work undergo “a process of radical revision” but are never abandoned, and in fact are enriched and deepened in the later work. Perhaps the boldest of the three books is that of Alexandar Mihailovic, who teaches at Hofstra University. Mihailovic has painstakingly exami
