"There is neither a first nor a last word," wrote Mikhail Bakhtin. "Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its homecoming festival." Suppressed for decades under Stalinism, long inaccessible to Western readers, the work of this powerful Christian thinker invites us to a carnival where the pretensions of all grand system-builders are deconstructed.

On the first page of Dostoevsky's great novel "Crime and Punishment" we find ourselves thrown into the mental world of an unnamed young man. Though the narration is in the third person, it seems at times to slip without comment into the young man's own voice:

It was not landladies he feared, no matter what this one happened to be plotting against him.

To find himself stuck on the stairs, though, and forced to listen to the whole range of her nonsense and offensive rubbish for which he had absolutely no concern; forced to listen to her pesterings for payment, her threats, her appeals; and he himself all the while prevaricating, making excuses, lying. … No. Better somehow to slink down the stairs like a cat and slip away unseen.

Is the landlady plotting against this young man? Does she speak mere nonsense? The narrator does not say. And likewise, when we hear the young man asking himself, "Can I really do that?" the narrator refrains from informing us what that is. We soon learn that the young man's name is Raskolnikov. We learn it, not because the narrator tells us, but because the young man identifies himself to a pawnbroker (a pawnbroker he will soon murder); now the narrator can pick up the name and use it himself. Raskolnikov wanders into a saloon, where he meets a strange, agitated man who introduces himself as Titular Councilor Marmeladov. And off goes this Marmeladov on a long, drunken monologue filled with references to people we don't (yet) know, culminating in a disorderly but blissful eschatalogical vision in which Marmeladov comes before the great Judge at the end of the world, admitting that he is but a drunkard and a swine, and he is received all the same. "O Lord!" he cries out in the saloon. "Thy kingdom come!"

Why are we asked to listen to such rambling for so long? What are we supposed to think about Marmeladov, about Raskolnikov? Later on we will hear, at equal or greater length, from others: from a prostitute named Sonia, from a strangely and hideously depraved man named Svidrigailov, from a mysterious official associated with the police and known to us only by his first name and patronymic, Porfiry Petrovich. Why won't the narrator explain any of these people to us, or tell us what we should think of them? And above all, where is Dostoevsky in all this cacophony? He is the author of this book; why does he hide himself behind these faces, these voices?

The man who could answer these questions more fully than anyone else--and who understood that their import went far beyond mere literary criticism; that, properly understood, such questions come near to being the first questions of philosophy and theology--that man was born 100 years ago in the Russian city of Orel (on Nov. 16, 1895, to be exact).

Three-quarters of a century later, in a retirement home near Moscow, he could have paused for reflection on his long and eventful life: on the years in internal exile; on surviving the Stalinist purges; on how the only manuscript of one great book had been destroyed, during World War II, by a bomb, and another, written just afterward, had been rejected as a doctoral thesis; on the young scholars who, during the Khrushchev thaw, had found that he was still alive and working in an obscure provincial college and began to celebrate his greatness; on being rediscovered and becoming a sage to whom people made pilgrimages. But instead, he kept working and in one of his last notebooks explained with exemplary brevity the key to his long life of careful and brilliant thought, the essential lesson he had learned from reading Dostoevsky:

"I hear voices everywhere, and dialogic relations among them."

1. This man's name was Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, and he is, I believe beyond question, the greatest scholar and theorist of literature this century has produced. His "Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics" is generally recognized to be among the handful of indispensable books in the vast secondary literature on Dostoevsky. "Rabelais and His World," the rejected doctoral thesis, finally published in 1965, is among the most important books on Rabelais. And "The Dialogic Imagination" is perhaps the century's seminal work in the theory of the novel. (It is likely that we would also think of Bakhtin as the greatest scholar of the Bildungsroman--or novel of education--had the German bomb not done away with it. Bakhtin himself did away with the drafts and notes for the book, tearing them into small pieces and using them for cigarette papers when wartime rationing left him with nothing to wrap his tobacco in.)

Bakhtin is also one of the great philosophers of our age, though he did not do philosophy as it is typically understood in American universities. And the body of his work, taken together, provides an enormous resource for Christian thinking on a vast range of subjects--a resource that I hope will be recognized and used now that the question of Bakhtin's own Christian faith has been settled. (In the early 1980s, when his work first became widely accessible and, in short order, fashionable in the West, and he began to be cited with a frequency rivaling the triumvirate of Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan, Bakhtin was not recognized as a distinctively Christian thinker. As we shall see, some Western readers still find it difficult to acknowledge the fact of his faith.)

Bakhtin thought of himself primarily as a philosopher and described his work as the articulation of a "philosophical anthropology": an account, one might say, of what it means to be a human being in the social world. Only in light of this lasting commitment can the incredible diversity of Bakhtin's work be understood as something other than incoherence. I have already mentioned his major works on literature--works that display immense learning in social and cultural history--but in addition to them, there were many philosophical essays, treatises on aesthetics, a book on Freudianism, another on the school of literary critics and linguists known as the Russian Formalists, yet another entitled "Marxism and the Philosophy of Language."

These last three appeared between 1927 and 1930, and though all of them were published under the names of Bakhtin's friends--for reasons that probably involved Bakhtin's lack of involvement in party-approved activities and institutions--it is now well-established that Bakhtin wrote most if not all of each of these three works. The Dostoevsky book, which, significantly, Bakhtin did put his name on, was published in 1929 (though it may have been written some years earlier). This phenomenally fertile period for the still-young scholar came to a sudden end in January of 1929 when he was arrested and charged with participating in various illegal religious activities involving the Russian Orthodox Church and with "corrupting the young."

At this time, Bakhtin was in fragile health, suffering from, among other things, serious kidney troubles and osteomyelitis (the latter problem would result, a decade later, in the amputation of his right leg). When he was convicted and sentenced to ten years on the Solovetsky Islands, a prison colony in the far north that was widely regarded as a death camp and where he would have had virtually no chance of surviving, his friends appealed to every authority they knew for clemency. In the end, his sentence was commuted to internal exile in Kazakhstan. There he found work, stayed out of the government's line of sight--unlike many of his friends, who were being murdered in the Stalinist purges of intellectuals in the late thirties--and wrote (though he did not publish) his great works on the novel and his revolutionary study of Rabelais's links with medieval and Renaissance folk culture.

For most of the rest of his life, Bakhtin stayed in the provinces, teaching at obscure quasi-universities and writing whenever he could. He knew that his exile had actually been a blessing in that it kept him beyond the long arms of Stalin's thugs. If he could not publish, he could think and write and teach and enjoy life with his beloved wife, Elena Alexandrovna. One wonders whether what he thought and wrote in those days would have been possible without his encounter with Stalinism, to which it was in many respects a powerful response.

2. Bakhtin's thought is enormously complex and his writing always hard to read largely because he made a conscious and lifelong practice of avoiding the Western tradition of critical analysis, in which the object of study is broken up into its component parts to see what it is made up of and how it works. Bakhtin wanted to understand the things he investigated in their full living wholeness: even a sentence will always be misunderstood when seen as just a sentence. It is not enough to analyze the sentence, no matter how carefully. We must ask who said it, to whom it was said, where it was said, when it was said, and in what context (or, to be more accurate, contexts) it was said.

Every sentence is a human utterance, a human act, never a merely linguistic phenomenon. It makes no sense to think of language as though it could be separated from the people who use it--and are in turn shaped by it: the languages we know both enable us to think and set limits on what we can think. Every sentence arises within psychological, geographical, historical, and sociological contexts, as well as within narrowly linguistic ones. If we exclude some or all of these factors from consideration, even of one puny sentence, we make our jobs easier, but only at the price of forgoing genuine understanding.

Bakhtin's characteristic way of putting this is to say that not only language but human consciousness itself is always and inevitably dialogical. We come into this world responding to the world's promptings, the information it presents to us, the pleasures and pains it deals out to us. When we learn to speak and to understand words, we do so only and always in response to the words of others. Every word we meditate or utter for the rest of our lives will be, in some way and to some degree, an answer to the words of others.

This is why Bakhtin loved Dostoevsky and why, in one of his first mature works, he praised Dostoevsky as "the creator of … a fundamentally new novelistic genre, … the polyphonic novel." It was Dostoevsky's polyphony that I tried to describe at the beginning of this essay, his bringing together of many different voices into a sometimes harmonious, sometimes cacophonous ensemble. The voices speak, while we are invited to listen; neither Dostoevsky nor his narrator will force a response upon us--unlike, say, Tolstoy, who often tells us precisely what we should think about his characters: "Ivan Ilyich's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible."

Dostoevsky would never say such a thing, but not because he didn't care what we think; he is no less active than Tolstoy, but his activity is that of the conductor, not of the soloist. As Bakhtin said of Dostoevsky's predecessor in dialogism, Aleksandr Pushkin, "the author participates in the novel (he is omnipresent in it)" but "cannot be found at any one of the novel's language-levels: he is to be found at the center of organization where all levels intersect." Pushkin, and to an even greater degree Dostoevsky, does not appear in the orchestra of voices, and yet he is responsible for every word those voices utter. He is in one sense fully in control, and yet in another sense he sacrifices some of that control to his characters.

Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review

(continued in Part 2)

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