Voloshin's 'Holy Russia'

I am no longer quite the Russophile that I once was, but I still think a bit about Mother Russia every once in a while. I believe it was while I was turning over in my mind the words ‘all Rus’ from the commemoration of Patriarch Kiril in the liturgy this morning that I thought of one of my favourite poems from my Russophile days. In his wonderful anthology, The Heritage of Russian Verse, Sir Dimitri Obolensky included two pieces by a minor poet named Maximilian Voloshin (1877-1932). The second is entitled ‘Святая Русь’, or ‘Holy Russia’. Here is Obolensky’s ‘plain prose translation’ arranged into lines roughly reflecting the Russian verses, with a few interesting words from the Russian in brackets: 

Was it not for you that Suzdal' and Moscow
gathered the land apanage by apanage,
collected gold in a tightly packed bag,
stored up a dowry in their coffers,
and reared you as a bride
in a narrow [расписном], frescoed tower-room [терему]? 

Was it not for you that the Carpenter-Tsar [Плотник-Царь]
built by the sources of rivers a spacious house,
with windows looking out on to the five seas of the earth?
With your beauty and warlike strength
were you not the most desirable of brides
for the sons of foreign princes? 

But from childhood you had a liking
for wooden hermitages [скитов] deep in the forests,
for trackless lands of nomads in the steppes,
for free open spaces, for ascetics’ chains,
for pretenders, felons, and unfrocked monks,
for the whistling of Nightingale the Robber [Соловьиный посвист], and for prisons. [1] 

You did not want to belong to the Tsar,
and this is the way things turned out:
the enemy whispered: ‘Scatter and squander,
give away your treasure to the rich,
your power to slaves, your strength to your enemies,
to villeins your honour, to traitors your keys.’ 

You lent your ear to the evil counsel,
you gave yourself to the robber and to the felon,
you set fire to your suburbs and crops,
you laid waste your ancient dwelling-place,
and you went out humiliated and a beggar,
and the slave of the meanest slave. 

Shall I dare cast a stone at you?
Shall I condemn your wild and passionate flame?
Shall I not bow down [поклонюсь] before you with my face in the mud,
blessing the trace of your bare foot,
you homeless, wanton, drunken
Russia—fool in Christ [во Христе юродивая Русь]! [2] 

I never bothered to learn anything about Voloshin beyond Obolensky’s brief note that he was ‘a Symbolist...chiefly remarkable for his poems inspired by the Revolution which he hated and feared, but accepted as part of Russia’s spiritual destiny.’ [3] However, for the sake of this post I decided to consult Evelyn Bristol’s chapter on the years 1895-1925 for The Cambridge History of Russian Literature. Here is what I found: 

The minor poet Maximilian Voloshin (real name: Kirienko-Voloshin, 1877-1932) grew up in the Crimea and was later expelled from Moscow University for political activity. After spending several months in Siberia he went to Paris to continue his education, and there fell under the influence of José-Maria de Heredia for his own work. After travelling extensively in Mediterranean countries, he published a collection of poetry in Russia in 1910. Though his poems are often responses to such particular geographical locations as Paris, the Mediterranean, or the Crimea, they are characteristically intimate reflections on broad cultural themes, incorporating frequent allusions to myths, history, and biblical events. he could create memorable scens of the bleak coastal heights of the Crimea, and he knew the value of small but telling details. His overall philosophy was pessimistic from the start, however. 

After experiencing the First World War, the revolution of 1917 and the ensuing civil war, Voloshin wrote anti-militaristic works of which the most popular was Deaf-Mute Demons (Demony glukhonemye, 1919), which dealt with the violence and atrocities then afflicting contemporary Russia. He moved permanently to the Crimea, to Koktebel, where his house became a refuge for friends of all political and literary stripes and his poetry was infused with Christian mysticism and a new sense of mission. After 1923, however, he could no longer publish. [4] 

[1] Obolensky has a footnote on ‘Nightingale the Robber’ which reads, ‘A fantastic creature of Russian heroic poetry, half bird, half man.’ 

[2] Sir Dimitri Obolensky, ed., The Heritage of Russian Verse (Bloomington, IN: Indiana U, 1976), pp. 257-8. 

[3] Ibid., p. xxii. 

[4] Evelyn Bristol, ‘Turn of a century: modernism, 1895-1925’, The Cambridge History of Russian Literature, rev. ed., ed. Charles A. Moser (Cambridge: Cambridge U, 1995), p. 425. 

The Nihilism of Victor Shklovsky: Bakhtin & Defamiliarisation

A few weeks ago the grad student I’m tutoring for her thesis on Tolstoy came across a 2004 issue of Philosophy & Literature which contained an article that greatly interested me—‘Verbal Medium & Narrative Art in Homer & the Bible’, by Robert S. Kawashima of NYU. Already on the second page, Kawashima makes a reference that has become very familiar to me while reading critical work on Tolstoy when he mentions ‘Victor Shklovsky’s definition of art as “defamiliarization”’. [1] Matthew Reed has written about this concept in his posts on War & Peace (here, here, and here), even linking to a pdf of Shklovsky in the second post, and Shklovsky’s ‘defamiliarisation’ is an oft-utilised tool in critical analysis of Tolstoy. Most critics, however, seem to treat it merely as one device among many and to speak as though this is how Shklovsky treated it as well. Liza Knapp, for instance, in her contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy, makes a remark about ‘the Formalist Shklovsky, who viewed ostranenie [defamiliarisation] merely as a device’. [2]

I first heard of Russian Formalism back in college when I started studying Bakhtin, but I never really gave it much attention, either in its own right or as a foil for some of Bakhtin’s ideas. Thus, having grown accustomed to passing references to Shklovsky and defamiliarization in the context of Tolstoy criticism, I at first thought nothing of Knapp’s comment about defamiliarisation being ‘merely’ a ‘device’ for Shklovsky. But Kawashima presents quite a bit more of the context for this idea. The latter writes:

Shklovsky, in his programmatic essay, ‘Art as Technique’, proposes a definition of art based, not on any given specific ‘device’, but on an underlying technique he calls ‘defamiliarization’: ‘The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.’ In fact, art not only defamiliarizes concrete objects of perception, but artistic form itself: ‘By violating the form, [Sterne] forces us to attend to it; and, for him, this awareness of the form through its violation constitutes the content of the novel.’ He thus defines literature self-referentially as the manipulation of literary form, so that form itself becomes the object of renewed aesthetic perception. Over against Shklovsky’s theory of art stands [Walter] Benjamin’s account of the storyteller’s craft. This craft is based not on innovation, but on the conservation of tradition. The greatness of a story lies not in its originality, but in its seamless derivation ‘from the speech of the many nameless storytellers’, from ‘that slow piling one on top of the other of thin, transparent layers which constitutes the most appropriate picture of the way in which the perfect narrative is revealed through the layers of a variety of retellings.’ [3]

A bit further on, Kawashima continues his account of Shklovsky’s thought:

Shklovsky’s understanding of genuine experience is premised on a certain peculiarly modern ideal, namely, a life full of the promise of unending change. In his view, habit, and we might add, tradition, is non-experience, analogous indeed to oblivion—‘such [habitual] lives are as if they had never been.’ [4]

I won’t go into the details of Shklovsky’s rôle in Kawashima’s article, except to say that the latter makes the odd argument that the Bible lines up more with Shklovsky and Homer with Benjamin. For me the important thing was that this overturned any complacency I had about the use of Shklovsky in Tolstoy criticism—clearly, while defamiliarisation might be a handy analytical device, it was far, far more than that for the Formalists themselves. It was something very close in spirit to Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’, and indeed, in the chapter on Tolstoy in Bloom’s The Western Canon, the Yale critic writes:

I have argued throughout this book that originality, in the sense of strangeness, is a quality that, more than any other, makes a work canonical. Tolstoy’s strangeness is itself strange, because it so paradoxically seems not strange at all at first. You always hear Tolstoy’s voice acting as the narrator, and that voice is direct, rational, confident, and benign. Victor Shklovsky, a major modern Russian critic, noted that ‘the most common strategy in Tolstoy is one of refusing to recognize an object, of describing it as if it were seen for the first time.’ [5]

Now troubled by what I was learning of the Formalist position, I recalled that Bakhtin and his circle had been their outspoken critics, and I turned next to discover what those critics had had to say. I began with Clark’s and Holquist’s biography, Mikhail Bakhtin, Chapter 8, ‘The Formalists’. Clark & Holquist find the most important Bakhtinian responses to Formalism in a 1924 article by Bakhtin entitled ‘The Problem of Content, Material & Form in Verbal Artistic Creation’ and a 1928 book published by Pavel Medvedev entitled The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, while Voloshinov/Bakhtin’s [6] Marxism & the Philosophy of Language and Bakhtin’s book on Dostoevsky ‘would lay out the linguistic basis for a historical poetics to counter that of the formalists’. [7] In the interests of keeping this post manageable and of focusing on the now ‘familiar’ idea of ‘defamiliarisation’, I will try to limit my exposition of Clark & Holquist and the works they mention to passages that relate directly to defamiliarisation.

First, concerning the ‘Problem of Content’ article, Clark & Holquist note that Bakhtin shared the criticism from the right ‘that the Formalists’ ingenious interpretations of particular works [such as Tolstoy’s] lacked a theoretical base in a full-blown aesthetics’, as well as that from the left ‘that the Formalists ignored social and political factors in their work’. [8] Clark & Holquist write:

Bakhtin here introduces an important concept, the aesthetic object, which according to him is the real subject of criticism. The aesthetic object is not completely coincidental with the external, material form but is nevertheless inseparable from it. . . . The aesthetic object is present as a totality of the values conveyed by the material form when combined with the other values, such as political or religious, that come into play in any specific act of perceiving the object. [9]

Thus, I find two—extremely difficult—passages in ‘Problem’ that touch on defamiliarisation. The first does not name the idea, but shows how an example of it is explained in terms of the ‘aesthetic object’, in this case, Pushkin’s use of the Church Slavonic form grad instead of gorod (‘city’) in his poem, ‘Remembrance’: [10]

The artist (and the contemplator) has to do, moreover, precisely with ‘the city’ as expressed by the Church Slavonic form of the word (grad): the connotation of the Church Slavonic form relates to the ethical-aesthetic value of the city, giving great significance to that value, and it becomes the characterization of a concrete value and as such enters into the aesthetic object, i.e., it is not the linguistic form that enters into the aesthetic object but its axiological significance (psychological aesthetics would say ‘the emotional-volitional moment corresponding to that form’). [11]

The second, more difficult, passage eventually names the concept of defamiliarisation. Bakhtin is explaining his understanding of ‘the primary function of form in relation to content—that of isolation or detachment’ for artistic embodiment of some particular aspect of something or of some moment in time. [12] Then he writes:

The so-called defamiliarization [ostranenie] of the Formalists is fundamentally the function of isolation that is not very clearly expressed methodologically and is incorrectly referred in most cases to the material [i.e., the diction]: what is defamiliarized is the word by way of destroying its habitual place in a semantic series. Sometimes, however, defamiliarization is related to the object as well, but is understood in a crudely psychologistic way—as the removal of the object, the value, and the event from the necessary cognitive and ethical series. [13]

I must admit, although I believe I’ve understood it, this passage was a struggle. Imagine, then, my relief when I turned to the selections from Medvedev/Bakhtin’s Formal Method and found the much less abstract ‘The Nihilistic Slant of Formalism’. Here are the highlights:

The formalists do not so much find something new in the word as expose and do away with the old.

The basic formalist concepts of this period—transrational language [zaum], ‘making it strange’ [ostranenie], device, material—are completely infused with this tendency.

. . .

The negative aspect of ‘making it strange’ [ostranenie] is just as strong as that of transrational language. Its original definition, far from emphasizing the enrichment of the word with new and positive constructive meaning, simply emphasizes the negation of the old meaning. The novelty and strangeness of the word and the object it designates originates here, in the loss of its previous meaning . . . .

In early formalism the concept of ‘deautomatization of the word’ was closely connected with ‘making it strange’. [14]

The negative tone is also dominant in this concept: deautomatization is primarily understood as abstraction from semantic context.

. . .

Thus the formalists attained their ‘discoveries’ in a rather unique way: by subtracting various essential aspects from the word and other elements of the artistic work. The new constructive meaning appears as the result of these purely negative acts of subtraction and elimination.

It goes without saying that the word without meaning looks new, looks different than the meaningful word. Certainly the idea with no pretentions to truth looks different than the normal idea which strives toward cognition.

But, of course, such subtraction cannot gain anything positive, new, or profitable.

This negative, nihilistic slant of formalism shows the tendency common to all nihilism to add nothing to reality, but, on the contrary, to diminish, impoverish, and emasculate it, and by doing so attain a new and original impression of reality. [15]

In their discussion of Formal Method, Clark & Holquist focus on Medvedev/Bakhtin’s objections to the Formalist distinction between ‘poetic’ and ‘practical language’, the latter being marked by transparency and the former by strangeness. They point out that Formal Method ‘is highly critical of the unspoken assumptions behind the separation of language into poetic and practical divisions, especially as defined by the Formalists’, and is especially concerned with the illogic of using defamiliarisation not only ‘as a means for getting at the essence of literature’ but ‘as the engine of literary evolution as well’. [16] Among other arguments, Formal Method ‘charges that the Formalists failed to evolve a convincing account of literary dynamics because there was no place in their scheme for anything new in poetry itself’, since poetry had to wait on practical language to develop something new so that the poets could defamiliarise it. At this point, Clark & Holquist quote a line from Shklovsky that Formal Method cites at much greater length: [17] ‘[Poetic speech] is purposely created to deautomatize perception . . . thus, we arrive at the definition of poetry as speech that is braked (zatormozennyj, distorted.’ Thus, in their words, ‘poetry depends for its effects on nonpoetic language, much as a parasite depends on its host. . . . Surely there is more to the complexity of poetic language than sheer “difference from”.’ [18]

Clark & Holquist relate this critique to Bakhtin’s larger theory of language when they write:

Bakhtin sees literary language as part of and as subject to the same conditions as other divisions of natural language, unlike the Formalists, who saw poetic speech as different in its fundamentals from other forms of language. Since Bakhtin perceives literature as part of the normal processes of language, he sees literary evolution as occurring very slowly, for the history of linguistic changes is always very conservative and drawn out. . . . The Formalist idea that the old generation’s forms soon become habitual and need to be deformed in order that art may once again be perceived in the next generation is seen by Bakhtin as betraying a desire to negate the past. History becomes reduced to a constant present or a permanent contemporaneity. [19]

Finally, Clark & Holquist situate Bakhtin’s critique of Formalist defamiliarisation to the very dialogic nature of Bakhtin’s thought:

[Bakhtin] always sought for connections between different people, texts, ideologies, and languages, not for cut-offs between their differences. This dialogic understanding of how different idea systems relate to each other underlies Bakhtin’s critique of the Formalist theory of deautomatization. That theory was based on the principle of either/or, mutual exclusion rather than communication between different texts. [20]

After mulling all of this over, I am now surprised that so many critics—especially, as I say, Tolstoy critics—are able to cite Shklovsky so cavalierly. I myself am resolved never to mention Shklovsky, Formalism, or defamiliarisation without at once adding a vigourous caveat.


[1] Robert S. Kawashima, ‘Verbal Medium & Narrative Art in Homer & the Bible’, Philosophy & Literature 28.1 (April 2004), p. 104.

[2] Liza Knapp, ‘The Development of Style and Theme in Tolstoy’, The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy, ed. Donna Tussing Orwin (Cambridge: Cambridge U, 2002), p. 164.

[3] Kawashima, pp. 104-5.

[4] Ibid., p. 106.

[5] Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books & School of the Ages (NY: Riverhead, 1995), p. 313.

[6] A brief note on this naming convention is in order. In the 1970s a close follower stated that Bakhtin was the real author of a number of works of the 1920s which had been published under the names of his friends Voloshinov and Medvedev. I won’t go into all of the details, but suffice to say that there is reason to believe there may be some truth to this, but the matter is very complex and likely cannot be resolved conclusively. When citing these works, Tzetan Todorov proposed a convention to express the openness of the question: using the name under which they were published followed by a slash and Bakhtin’s name. I like this a great deal, and intend to use it myself. Clark and Holquist, however, consistently refer to Bakhtin alone as the author of these works.

I find the convention especially important in the case of Medvedev, who was arrested in 1938 and shot by the Soviet authorities for not being sufficiently Communist in his writings. As Todorov writes, ‘In such a context I would be most loath to deny him the even partial authorship of works for which he died’ (Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, tr. Wlad Godzich [Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1994], p. 10).

[7] Katerina Clark & Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U, 1984), p. 194.

[8] Ibid., pp. 188, 189.

[9] Ibid., p. 189.

[10] See Sir Dimitri Obolensky, ed. & tr., The Heritage of Russian Verse (Bloomington, IN: Indiana U, 1976), p. 98.

[11] Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Supplement: The Problem of Content, Material, & Form in Verbal Art’, tr. Kenneth Bostrom, Art & Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, ed. Michael Holquist & Vadim Liapunov (Austin, TX: U of Texas, 1995), p. 299.

[12] Ibid., p. 306.

[13] Ibid., p. 307.

[14] Despite the acknowledgement of a connection, I’m a bit puzzled by the distinction here. Clark & Holquist actually translate ostranenie as ‘deautomatization’, claiming that it is ‘sometimes translated as “making it strange”’ (p. 191).

[15] From Mikhail Bakhtin & Pavel Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, tr. A.J. Wehrle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1978); in Pam Morris, ed., The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov (London: Arnold, 1994), pp. 138-9.

[16] Clark & Holquist, p. 191.

[17] Bakhtin/Medvedev, p. 147.

[18] Clark & Holquist, p. 193.

[19] Ibid., p. 194.

[20] Ibid., p. 196. This last point is particularly dear to my heart. Although I myself am all for acknowledging important differences between ‘different idea systems’—see my controversial post on St Justin’s critique of ecumenism here, or, on the literary side, this one on Tolstoy and Homer—I like Bakhtin am more commonly preoccupied with looking for connections between things.

Met. Anthony on Tolstoy, Logismoi News

Thanks to a kind reader, last night I received a pdf of the article I referred to in the last post—‘The Elder at Iasnaia Poliana: Lev Tolstoi & the Orthodox Starets Tradition’ by Pål Kolstø. Although I haven’t yet had time to read it (I am, however, currently reading Kolstø’s similar article on Tolstoy’s relationship to the strannik tradition in Russian spirituality), I did note the following interesting footnote right there on page 2:

After Tolstoi’s death in November 1910, the highly respected Russian theologian and church dignitary [Metropolitan] Antonii Khrapovitskii [of Kiev, later First Hierarch of the Russian Church Abroad] gave a talk on the topic ‘How Influence from Orthodoxy Is Reflected in Count L.N. Tolstoi’s Later Works’. The spiritual relationship between Orthodoxy and Tolstoi’s thinking went deep, Antonii asserted—much deeper, in fact, than Tolstoi himself had realized. Antonii (Khrapovitskii), ‘V chem prodolzhalo otrazhat’sia vliianie pravoslaviia na posledniia proizvedeniia gr. L.N. Tolstogo’, in Zhizneopisanie i tvoreniia blazhenneishego Antoniia, mitropolita Kievskogo i Galitskogo, 17 vols. (Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1978), 14:247-68. Antonii had known Tolstoi personally and wrote no less than seven articles and small booklets about various aspects of Tolstoianism. For further details, see Pål Kolstø, ‘The Demonized Double: The Image of Lev Tolstoi in Russian Orthodox Polemics’, Slavic Review 65, 2 (2006): 304-24. [1]

This last is of course another article I’d like to see, readers! [Addendum: the article has just arrived, courtesy of Samn! of Notes on Arab Orthodoxy fame.]

In other news, I’m afraid I must announce that this post will likely be my last for the next week and a half. My best friend and fellow parishioner, Christopher, and I leave this morning for Memphis, TN, followed tomorrow by Wayne, WV, and Saturday by Long Island, NY. I will be spending two nights—Sunday and Monday—in Manhattan, and returning to Oklahoma City for only one day before departing for Durham, NC, for the annual Association of Christian Classical Schools conference for the rest of the week. I know of at least two or three readers/fellow bloggers I will be seeing during my travels, but I’d still love to hear from any others who might like to get together somewhere along the way. Feel free to e-mail me—probably the sooner, the better. In the meantime, I would ask all to pray for our safe journey.


[1]Pål Kolstø, ‘The Elder at Iasnaia Poliana: Lev Tolstoi & the Orthodox Starets Tradition’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian & Eurasian History, Vol. 9, #3, Summer 2008 (New Series), p. 534, n. 6.

War & Peace 2: Tolstoy & Homer

In a post earlier this month announcing his intention to reread War & Peace in the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation, Matthew Reed quotes from and links to a post he had written a few years ago on a previous blog comparing Tolstoy’s novel with Homer’s Iliad. I’m glad to see this, because this is the very subject I had chosen for this post. Indeed, Matthew notes ‘I believe someone famous compared the two books before me so this is nothing new’, and in fact the comparisons seem to have begun with Tolstoy himself. Harold Bloom insists, ‘When Tolstoy compares himself to Homer we are persuaded, as no other post-Homeric writer could persuade us. Whether as prophet or as moralist, Tolstoy remains both an epic figure and a creator of epic.’ [1] Such comparisons continue, according to Richard Pevear, with a book I’d very much like to get my hands on—Rachel Bespaloff’s On the Iliad, a ‘comparison of Homer and Tolstoy’. Pevear quotes Bespaloff’s words, ‘Tolstoy’s universe, like Homer’s, is what our own is from moment to moment. We don’t step into it; we are there.’ [2]

But while I believe there certainly is something to the points of commonality that Matthew notes in his old post, it seems to me that the fact that we are dealing with two lengthy and unflinching looks at the horror of war can mask what I believe are some important differences. They are differences which do not seem so important to many modern readers, but which are necessitated by the distance between circa 9th-c. BC Greece and 19th-c. AD Russia. I’d like to consider these difference in two closely related areas: first, in terms of distinctly generic characteristics, and second, in terms of the specific portrayal of the common epic theme of war, which links the two together whilst simultaneously highlighting their distance from each other. I should point out, however, that these observations are based solely on my reading of the first volume, as well as my reading of a few critics on the subject of Tolstoy. Some of them are general enough to be safely stated at the outset, while others are not. We shall see whether they are borne out as the novel progresses.

Bloom refers to Tolstoy as ‘both an epic figure and a creator of epic’, and most of us feel we know and accept what he means by this. But our familiarity with this use of the term ‘epic’ can cause us to forget that it is a very broad and, I believe, recent one. Consider, by contrast, the seminal definition of ‘epic’ in Aristotle’s Poetics:

But as for the imitative art that is narrative [in manner] and employs metrical language [as its medium], it is evident that, just as in tragedies, its plots should be dramatic in structure—that is, should involve a single action, whole and complete in itself, having a beginning, a middle, and an end, so that like one whole living creature it may produce its appropriate pleasure—and that its structure should not resemble histories, which necessarily present not a single action but a single period of time with all that happened therein to one or more persons, no matter how little relation one event may have had with another. [3]

Of the features named here, I find that the Iliad and War & Peace have only the narrative manner in common. Tolstoy certainly doesn’t use metrical language. Indeed, Prince Mirsky has observed, ‘His style is deliberately prosaic—purged to chemical purity of all “poetry” and rhetoric—sternly puritanical prose.’ [4] As for singleness of action, Richard Freeborn observes in his contribution to The Cambridge History of Russian Literature, ‘The greatness of War & Peace lies in the very multiplicity of its many locales, characters and viewpoints’, [5] and Prince Mirsky notes the ‘vast proportions, the numerous personages, [and] the frequent changes of scene’. [6]

It is also worth noting that the epic metre—the heroic hexametre—is entirely discrete. Aristotle writes, ‘Indeed, it would seem out of keeping if anyone were to compose a narrative imitation in some other meter or in a combination of meters, since in comparison with the other verse forms the heroic [hexametre] is the most deliberate and weighty.’ [7] Now, this might seem to be a moot point, since, as I’ve emphasised, Tolstoy doesn’t use metre at all, and doesn’t even quote poetry the way Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov frequently does, for instance. [8] But the equivalent in Tolstoy of the mixing of the ancient genres, so foreign to epic, is the mixing of ‘genres’ in its more modern sense. War & Peace is hardly a straightforward narrative. As Prince Mirsky notes, Tolstoy ‘carried further than anyone (except Aksakov) the deliberate neglect of narrative interest and the deliberate avoidance of artificial construction.’ [9] Pevear refers to ‘the sudden leaps from fiction to history, from narration to philosophizing’, [10] but even this does not quite go far enough. For the ‘realism’ of prose leaves all of the various examples of what Mikhail Bakhtin calls ‘primary speech genres’ on the level of their own style, rather than sublimating them in the monologism of a novelistic equivalent of the heroic hexametre. [11] Though all is controlled by Tolstoy (and indeed, Bakhtin insists that he is more monologic than Dostoevsky), to a great degree we still find that the charactres have their own voices, expressed in dialogue, letters, commands, ejaculations, etc., and even the narrator shifts from simply telling us or describing to us the action of the narrative to expounding a philosophy of history. Though we do not find different metres, the variety of prose ‘genres’ is perhaps even more striking.

Of course, there are other characteristics of the epic of which Aristotle is not quite consciously aware, because he takes them for granted. In the brief paper I posted here, I summarised some of Bakhtin’s comparisons of the epic with the novel: the epic is monoglot (that is, scarcely even aware of other languages or voices than its own, much less reflecting or incorporating them), its subject matter is of an elevated and uniformly serious type, its meaning is straight-forward and non-ironic. Tolstoy’s novel is permeated with French and sometimes German, even when the prose itself is actually written in Russian, he is prone to deal with earthy and comic situations, and his work is replete with irony, ambivalence, and implication.

In fact, while I am initially tempted to say that War & Peace, like the epic poetry of old, is an example of ‘the literature of ruling social groups’, [12] it certainly does not belong to the ‘ruling social group’ of its day in the same way as the epics. What Prince Mirsky calls Tolstoy’s ‘satirical representation of society and of diplomacy’ [13] could have no place in The Iliad. In Bakhtin’s view, satire is an example of a ‘parodic-travestying literature’, which ‘introduces the permanent corrective of laughter, of a critique on the one-sided seriousness of the lofty direct word, the corrective of reality that is always richer, more fundamental amd most importantly too contradictory and heteroglot to be fit into a high and straightforward genre.’ [14] Indeed, such forms are linked with the very pre-history of the novel itself—

These parodic-travestying forms . . . destroyed the homogenizing power of myth over language; they freed consciousness from the power of the direct word, destroyed the thick walls that had imprisoned consciousness within its own discourse, within its own language. A distance arose between language and reality that was to prove an indispensable condition for authentically realistic forms of discourse. [15]

But these generic differences may perhaps seem too obvious. Of course Tolstoy’s novel is not an epic poem, one may say! Tolstoy himself denies that it fits any genre at all: ‘It is not a novel, still less an epic poem, still less a historical chronicle. War & Peace is what the author wanted and was able to express, in the form in which it is expressed.’ [16] But let’s consider at least one point of definite contact with epic as it is usually conceived—its preoccupation with war. Superficially, this is one of the novel’s most characteristically ‘epic’ features. The Iliad is the consummate poem of war, and the Aeneid begins with the famous words Arma virumque cano, which Robert Fitzgerald has gone so far as to render, ‘I sing of warfare and a man at war.’ [17]

But while war in the Iliad is inevitably terrible, there is never any surprise that this should be so. It is worth quoting C.S. Lewis at length:

It is all the more terrible because the poet takes it all for granted, makes no complaint. It comes out casually, in similes.

As when the smoke ascends to the sky from a city afar
Set in an isle, which foes have compassed round in war,
And all day long they struggle as hateful Ares bids.
(Il. XVIII, 207.)

Or again,

As when a woman upon the body falls
Of her husband, killed in battle before the city walls. . . .
She sees him down and listens how he gasps his life away,
And clings to the body, crying, amid the foes; but they
Beating her back and shoulders with butts of spears amain
Pull her away to slavery to learn of toil and pain.
(Od. VIII, 523.)

. . . This is a mere simile—the sort of thing that happens every day. . . . For Homer it is all in the day’s work. . . .

. . . In Homer, [epic] greatness lies in the human and personal tragedy built up against this background of meaningless flux. It is all the more tragic because there hangs over the heroic world a certain futility. ‘And here I sit in Troy,’ says Achilles to Priam, ‘afflicting you and your children.’ Not ‘protecting Greece’, not even ‘winning glory’, not called by any vocation to afflict Priam, but just doing it because that is the way things come about. . . . Here there is just the suffering. Perhaps this was in Goethe’s mind when he said, ‘The lesson of the Iliad is that on this earth we must enact Hell.’ Only the style—the unwearying, unmoved, angelic speech of Homer—makes it endurable. Without that the Iliad would be a poem beside which the grimmest modern realism is child’s play. [18]

Thus, we can see that War & Peace is not even among ‘the grimmest modern realism’. As Prince Mirsky notes, ‘The philosophy of the novel is . . . profoundly optimistic . . . The optimistic nature of the philosophy is reflected in the idyllic tone of the narrative. In spite of the horror—by no means veiled—of war, . . . the general message of War & Peace is one of beauty and satisfaction that the world should be so beautiful.’ [19] It is for this reason that Tolstoy’s charactres are so surprised by the horror of war—it fits ill with the beauty of the world, which must exist in ‘spite’ of it. Think of Part 2 of Volume I of War when, superficially wounded, Nikolai Rostov thinks to himself of the approaching French, ‘Who are they? Why are they running? Can it be they’re running to me? Can it be? And why? To kill me? Me, whom everybody loves so?’ [20] Then, recall by contrast the resignation of young Patroclus in Il. XVI, ll. 988-97, struggling for breath when Hector has speared him through the bowels:

‘. . .
A gift of the son of Cronus, Zeus—Apollo too—
they brought me down with all their deathless ease,
they are the ones who tore the armor off my back.
Even if twenty Hectors had charged against me—
they’d all have died here, laid low by my spear.
No, deadly fate in league with Apollo killed me.
From the ranks of men, Euphorbus. You came third,
and all you could do was finish off my life . . .
One more thing—take it to heart, I urge you—
you too, you won’t live long yourself, I swear.
. . .’ [21]

Another difference lies in Tolstoy’s use of war as what Freeborn calls a ‘catalyst’ for the moral transformation of his charactres. [22] While Freeborn finds that in Tolstoy’s depiction of war ‘no guiding hand, let alone any providence, seems capable of bringing order out of chaos’, in the same paragraph he observes that ‘on those of his characters who experience it intimately’ the effect of war ‘is morally transforming’. We see when Nikolai Rostov is wounded and, in Freeborn’s words, ‘suddenly realizes . . . that he is no longer a little boy protected by the love and loyalty of his family.’ [23] In fact, according to Bakhtin, the whole notion of a hero changing is profoundly alien to epic, and was already identified in the 18th c. as one of the unique characteristics of the novelistic hero: ‘the hero should not be portrayed as an already completed and unchanging person but as one who is evolving and developing, a person who learns from life’. [24] It is ironic that it is precisely the ‘epic’ preoccupation with war that constitutes a catalyst for the charactres’ moral transformation.

There are, of course, other possible avenues for exploration when we place these two great works side by side. Just as Homer’s epic taught the ancient Greeks the nature of and means of acquiring arete, Freeborn sees Tolstoy as teaching a kind of—perhaps uniquely modern—heroism, ‘the “active virtue” animating the best men in Russian society’. [25] There is also the question of similarity or dissimilarity between what Bakhtin calls the ‘epic past’ in Homer, and the evocation of ‘the historical scene’ in Tolstoy. [26] But this is already a long post, and my family is anxiously awaiting use of the computer. I’d love to hear any comments on these points, as well as the various points I have discussed.

Finally, Andrea Elizabeth has notified me that she already has a few War & Peace posts as well. They can be found here.


[1] Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books & School of the Ages (NY: Riverhead, 1995), p. 312.

[2] Qtd. in Richard Pevear, ‘Introduction’, War & Peace, by Leo Tolstoy, tr. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky (NY: Vintage, 2008), p. xiv.

[3] Aristotle, Poetics, tr. James Hutton (NY: Norton, 1982), pp. 71-2.

[4] Prince Dmitri Svyatopolk Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature: From its Beginnings to 1900, ed. Francis J. Whitfield (NY: Vintage, 1958), p. 264.

[5] Richard Freeborn, ‘The nineteenth century: the age of realism, 1855-80’, The Cambridge History of Russian Literature, rev. ed., ed. Charles A. Moser (Cambridge: Cambridge U, 1995), p. 303.

[6] Mirsky, p. 272.

[7] Aristotle, p. 73.

[8] In fact, this insistence on rarely mixing poetry with his prose might actually be considered a feature that brings Tolstoy’s work closer to the spirit of the ancient genre and makes it less novelistic in the sense we shall be discussing.

[9] Mirsky, p. 264.

[10] Pevear, p. x.

[11] This is not to say that Tolstoy’s work does not contain a deeper monologism. As Bakhtin writes, in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. & tr. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1994):

Such characters as Andrei Bolkonsky, Pierre Bezukhov, Levin, and Nekhlyudov have their own well-developed fields of vision, sometimes almost coinciding with the author’s (that is, the author sometimes sees the world as if through their eyes), their voices sometimes almost merge with the author’s voice. But not a single one ends up on the same plane with the author’s word and the author’s truth, and with none of them does the author enter into dialogic relations. All of them, with their fields of vision, with their quests and their controversies, are inscribed into the monolithically monologic whole of the novel that finalizes them all and that is never, in Tolsto, the kind of ‘great dialogue’ that we find in Dostoevsky. All the clamps and finalizing moments of this monologic whole lie in the zone of authorial ‘surplus’, a zone that is fundamentally inaccessible to the consciousnesses of the characters. (p. 72)

[12] Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas, 1998), p. 4.

[13] Mirsky, p. 271.

[14] Bakhtin, Dialogic, p. 55.

[15] Ibid., p. 60.

[16] Qtd. in Pevear, p. xi. In fact, Tolstoy’s denial that his work is a novel presumes the 18th-c. (and earlier) model of the novel. ‘But,’ Bakhtin insists, ‘it is characteristic of the novel that it never enters into this whole [of literature conceived as a totality of genres], it does not participate in any harmony of the genres. In these eras [the Greek classical period, the Golden Age of Roman literature, the neoclassical period] the novel has an unofficial existence, outside “high” literature’ (Dialogic, p. 4). In other words, its lack of well-defined generic qualities is precisely what places War & Peace within the novelistic ‘genre’ as Bakhtin conceives it.

[17] Virgil, The Aeneid, tr. Robert Fitzgerald (NY: Random House, 1983), p. 3.

[18] C.S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (NY: Oxford U, 1965), pp. 30-1.

[19] Mirsky, pp. 272-3.

[20] Tolstoy, p. 189. The scene is an interesting parallel to Maxim Gorky’s words about Tolstoy himself:

All his life he feared and hated death, all his life there throbbed in his soul the ‘Arsamasian terror’—must he die? The whole world, all the earth looks towards him [Me, whom everybody loves so?]; from China, India, America, from everywhere living throbbing threads stretch out to him; his souls is for all and forever. Why should not nature make an exception to her law, give to one man physical immortality? (qtd. in Bloom, p. 311)

[21] Homer, The Iliad, tr. Robert Fagles (NY: Penguin, 1998), p. 440.

[22] Freeborn, p. 302.

[23] Ibid., p. 301.

[24] Bakhtin, Dialogic, p. 10.

[25] Freeborn, p. 299.

[26] Ibid., p. 299.

War & a Fur Piece

I look forward to another comment or two on my first post on Tolstoy’s War & Peace, and as mentioned another has been planned. But I also wanted to point out that Matthew Reed of a fur piece has written a very interesting post of his own (and has promised more) on the expression which Pevear & Volokhonsky have rendered ‘clerical persons’ in V. I, Part 1.xx. I urge all, especially those with a good knowledge of Russian, to read it and comment here.

War & Peace 1: Princess Marya Bolkonsky on Spiritual Reading

Our target date for the completion of Volume 1 of Tolstoy’s War & Peace has now come and gone (see this post), and I hope that other readers besides myself are also making some headway in this weighty tome. Although I have a matter of greater pertinence to the central themes of Tolstoy’s magnum opus to post on later, I wanted to go ahead and excerpt a brief passage that struck me early on. Princess Marya Nikolaevna Bolkonsky has received a copy of Karl von Eckartshausen’s ‘occult treatise’ (in the translators’ words), A Key to the Mysteries of Nature, from her friend Julie Karagin, with the recommendation, ‘Read the mystical book I am sending you and that is causing a furor here [in St Petersburg society]. Though there are things in this book that are hard to grasp with weak human understanding, it is an admirable book, the reading of which calms and elevates the soul.’ [1] The more sensible Princess Marya replies:

A thousand thanks, dear friend, for the work you have sent me, and which is causing such a furor there. However, since you tell me that amidst several good things there are others that weak human understanding cannot grasp, it would seem to me rather useless to occupy myself with unintelligible reading matter; which by that very fact cannot be of any fruit. I have never been able to understand the passion certain persons have for muddling their wits by fastening upon mystical books, which only awaken doubts in their minds, excite their imagination, and give them an exaggerated character totally contrary to Christian simplicity. Let us read the Apostles and Gospel. Let us not seek to penetrate what they contain of the mysterious, for how should we dare aspire, miserable sinners that we are, to initiate ourselves into the terrible and sacred secrets of Providence, so long as we wear this fleshly husk, which raises an impenetrable veil between us and the eternal? Let us limit ourselves, then, to studying the sublim principles that our divine Savior has left us for our conduct here below; let us seek to conform ourselves to them and to follow them, let us persuade ourselves that the less flight we give to our weak human spirit, the more pleasing it is to God, who rejects all science that does not come from him; that the less we seek to delve into what he has been pleased to conceal from our knowledge, the sooner he will grant us the discovery of it through his divine spirit. [2]

The excitement over the book in St Petersburg society reminds me of the whole unfortunate Masonic spirit of that time as described by Fr Georges Florovsky in Ways of Russian Theology—that is, truly Masonic, rather than ‘Masonic’ by association or otherwise tenuous connection.

For its part, Princess Marya’s wise response calls to mind two things. First of all, St Barsanuphius of Gaza wrote to a brother who had asked (in Letter 547) whether it is okay for him to read works of dogmatic theology: ‘I would not like you to meditate on these because they raise the intellect upward; I would prefer you to meditate on the words of the Old Men because these humble the intellect downward.’ [3] Second, in his ‘Prologue’ to the Evergetinos, St Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain wrote:

The whole of the moral philosophy of the Gospels summons all men to itself. There are those who concern themselves in this or that way with certain other types of philosophy; and of these persons, some spend all of their days studying, say, mathematics or physics, while others concentrate on metaphysics and more general subjects. Yet they entirely neglect moral philosophy, even though it is both the paramount and most necessary of all types of philosophy. These men study the harmony and order of the heavens, and earth, and all other matters. But because they do not know, as they ought, that the investigation of ourselves is distinctly superior to that of alien matters and, moreover, because they do not know tha tknowledge on its own—that is, being bereft of practical application—has no substance and does not differ from fantasy, as the holy Maximos notes, precious few of these men address the question of how to bring themselves into harmony with the beauty of moral life, or how to learn true virtues through experience. Now, I ask you: What is the good of materialistic philosophy, when the soul has a philosophy of its own, yet is crudely beset by passions? I, for one, see no good. Surely we must apply ourselves to moral philosophy, or risk being found wanting in relation to our higher aspect.

Such as these former things much concern the majority of people. The God-fearing Fathers, however, determined that their most holy system was superior, sensing with the more percipient eyes of the mind how truly beneficial is this moral type of philosophy and how readily they might advance to the other kinds of philosophy if they should first become facile in the system in question. [4]

Of course these Saints are speaking of books and areas of study which are not necessarily false or harmful per se, and yet they still warn the faithful about preoccupation with them. Although I am not familiar with the work of this Karl von Eckartshausen, I am rather dubious of its consistency with Orthodox Christianity!

I look forward to seeing posts from other bloggers who may have joined in the War effort. I am not following blogs as closely these days as I once did, and would enjoy receiving an e-mail or a comment notifying me in case of any new posts. I will gladly link to them in order to facilitate further discussion.


[1] Leo Tolstoy, War & Peace, tr. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky (NY: Vintage, 2008), p. 93.

[2] Ibid., pp. 94-5.

[3] Ss Barsanuphius & John, Letters, Vol. 2, tr. Fr John Chryssavgis, Vol. 114 of The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation (Washington, DC: The Catholic U of America, 2007), p. 132.

[4] St Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, ‘Prologue’, The Evergetinos: A Complete Text, Book I, ed. & tr. Archbishop Chrysostomos, Hieromonk Patapios, et al. (Etna, CA: Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 2008), pp. xxxii-xxxiii.

War & Peace Summer Reading Schedule

Owen White of Ochlophobist fame has just prepared a reading schedule for and, based on a brief conversation we had, suggestions for how to proceed with online discussion of Leo Tolstoy’s War & Peace, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Anyone is welcome to join us and to contribute to the discussion through e-mails, blog posts, and/or comments.

W&P reading begins May 5

We are using the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation.

The reading schedule is as follows:

Volume One: May 5 – May 25

Volume Two: May 26 – June 8

Volume Three: June 9 – June 29

Volume Four: June 30 – July 20

Epilogue & Appendix: July 21 – August 18

Thus each segment is given a few weeks. There is not much to read in the Epilogue & Appendix, but still a three week time slot granted, which should give slackers who get behind some extra time to finish the book.

Bloggers should feel free to post on anything having to do with any portion of the book at any time they see fit, though the above schedule should be kept in mind insofar as keeping up with discussion, generally speaking. Bloggers who wish to participate should let Aaron at Logismoi and/or Owen the Ochlophobist know so that we can publicize all of the bloggers involved in the reading and keep track of their posts, to help facilitate a broader discussion.

For those too daunted by Tolstoy (most of us are, I believe, at least a little daunted!), or more interested in Orthodox theology than novels, I also recommend participating in Felix Culpa’s group reading of The Moral Idea of the Main Dogmas of the Faith by Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky), founding chief hierarch of the Russian Church Abroad. One can see the details and schedule here. I myself will be rereading this book concurrently with Tolstoy. It is interesting to note that it is in part directed explicitly against Tolstoy’s heterodox religious ideas.

Finally, for the truly insane reader, there is talk of an online discussion group to read German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit this summer as well. More details on this as they become available.

Pevear's Intro to Dostoevsky's Demons

I have written before (here) about the Orthodox translators of Russian literature, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, whose rendition of War & Peace a few of us Ortho-bloggers are beginning to read. I believe I have also commented on the extraordinary introductions Pevear has written for the translations, my admiration for which I was just reminded of when I finished reading that for War & Peace this evening. Here, however, are two passages from one of my favourites, Pevear’s introduction to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons (sometimes known as The Possessed):

Dostoevsky called the novel Demons, we would suggest, precisely because demons in it do not appear, and the reader might otherwise overlook them. The demons are visible only in distortions of the human image, the human countenance, and their force is mesaurable only by the degree of the distortion. What this means for an understanding of demonic possession in the novel may be elucidated by a passage from The Brothers Karamazov. Alyosha and Ivan Karamazov are talking about the murder of their father. Alyosha suddenly turns to his brother and says: ‘It was not you who killed father . . . You’ve accused yourself and confessed to yourself that you and you alone are the murderer. But it was not you who killed him, you are mistaken, the murderer was not you, do you hear, it was not you! God has sent me to tell you that.’ In fact, Ivan was their father’s murderer, if only in an ‘intellectual’ sense. But Alyosha is talking about something else. He seems to mean that the evil in Ivan is not him, is not identical with him, is not his esseence. Ivan is in danger of taking it for his essence, of ‘damning’ himself and losing himself entirely. He is on the verge of madness. Alyosha’s message is truly meant to save him. The world of Demons—the provincial town with its society, its administration, its older and younger generations, its club members and revolutionaries—is in a condition similar to Ivan’s. The title is perhaps Dostoevsky’s message to us that ‘it is not them’. [1]

Pevear identifies the demons of the novel with the various ideas that ‘possess’ its charactres, including the ideas similar to Dostoevsky’s own which possess the charactre of Shatov. Then Pevear asks:

Is it not an exaggeration, even a sort of mystification, to give the status of ‘demons’ to mere ideas? But, in the first place, there are no mere ideas in Dostoevsky, there are what Mikhail Bakhtin, in his Problems in Dostoevsky’s Poetics, calls ‘voice-ideas’, ‘voice-viewpoints’, ‘idea-images’, ‘idea-forces’, ‘idea-heroes’. There is no neutral, impersonal truth. ‘It is not the idea itself that is the “hero of Dostoevsky’s works” . . . but rather the person born of that idea’. Bakhtin pretends to a scientific analysis and therefore avoids evaluation of the ‘ideological content’ of Dostoevsky’s works, but implicit at least in his analysis is the possibility of an evil or alien idea coming to inhabit a person, misleading him, perverting him ontologically, driving him to crime or insanity. Dostoevsky portrays this phenomenon time and again. . . .

The person born of the idea may be distorted and even destroyed by it. But to make such a judgment, one must have some way of measuring the distortion, some image of the undistorted person. And, again, if Dostoevsky is to be true to his poetics, this cannot be an abstract idea of principle. Bakhtin acknowledges the existence of this ‘measure’ in a passage that is rather obliquely worded, but is crucial for an understanding of his own concept of ‘polyphony’, not to mention Dostoevsky’s novel: [2]

Pevear then quotes the following passage from Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics:

. . . what unfolds before Dostoevsky is not a world of objects, illuminated and ordered by his monologic thought, but a world of consciousnesses mutually illuminating one another . . . Among them Dostoevsky seeks the highest and most authoritative orientation, and he perceives it not as his own true thought, but as another authentic human being and his discourse. The image of the ideal human being or the image of Christ represents for him the resolution of ideological quests. This image or this highest voice must crown the world of voices, must organize and subdue it. Precisely the image of a human being and his voice, a voice not the author’s own, was the ultimate artistic criterion for Dostoevsky: not fidelity to his own convictions and not fidelity to convictions themselves taken abstractly, but precisely a fidelity to the authoritative image of a human being. [3]

Then Pevear concludes:

The openness of Dostoevsky’s novels is an openness to this image; his polyphony has no other aim than the silent indication of its presence. Ideas that deface or distort this ‘authoritative image of a human being’ in a person are indeed acting like demons, and are them. [4]

Finally, although Pevear does not mention her, the Bulgarian-born French post-structuralist Julia Kristeva helps us contextualise the ‘polyphony’ to which Bakhtin and Pevear refer:

[Dostoevsky’s] dialogism, his polyphony undoubtedly spring from multiple sources. It would be a mistake to neglect that of Orthodox faith whose Trinitarian conception . . . inspires the writer’s ‘dialogism’ as well as his praise of suffering at the same time as forgiving. [5]

[1] Richard Pevear, ‘Foreword’, Demons, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, tr. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky (NY: Vintage, 1994), pp. xiv-xv.

[2] Ibid., pp. xvii-xviii.

[3] Qtd. in ibid., pp. xviii-xix. Sorry, I don't have my copy of Bakhtin at the moment or I would give the page number in the source.

[4] Ibid., p. xix.

[5] Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression & Melancholia, tr. Leon S. Roudiez (NY: Columbia U, 1989), p. 214.

Gerasims & Lions: Tolstoy & the Prologue

A recent comment by the Ochlophobist on this post at Ora et Labora suggested the idea of a few of us Orthodox bloggers concurrently reading the new rendition of War & Peace by my favourite translators, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. (Incidentally, I would like to invite any interested readers to join us. The plan is to begin reading the book the first week of May. We’ll work on ideas for how to go about facilitating discussion soon.)

As a first step in actually carrying out the plan, I went last week to Oklahoma City’s only locally owned new bookstore, Full Circle, to purchase the volume. Well, sitting right next to it was a hardcover volume in a beautiful dust-jacket of the same translators’ rendition of The Death of Ivan Ilyich & Other [late] Stories. Naturally, I could not resist the temptation, and particularly since I was due to reread ‘Death of Ivan Ilyich’ in time for my tutoring session last Friday.

Which brings me to the main subject of this post. In the middle of my tutorial on Friday, I was discussing a passage of ‘Ivan Ilyich’ with my pupil that makes reference to Ivan Ilyich’s servant, Gerasim. Ivan is, of course, in terrible pain from an ultimately fatal illness, and Gerasim seems to be the only person who understands and wants to help alleviate his pain. Ivan often asks him to sit where he can place his feet on Gerasim’s shoulders, which affords him a little relief. Ultimately, it is his exposure to Gerasim that convinces Ivan that he has lived his life all wrong:

His moral sufferings consisted in the fact that, looking at Gerasim's sleepy, good-natured, high-cheekboned face that night, it had suddenly occurred to him: And what if my whole life, my conscious life, has indeed been ‘not right’? [1]

While discussing this passage, I realised incidentally that my pupil might not be aware of Russian naming conventions, and I began to explain that in the Orthodox Church, the first names are always those of Saints. I even noted in a general way that occasionally, Russian writers will deliberately choose for their charactres the names of Saints that have some relevance or symbolic significance. Then it dawned on me—we had a perfect example right before us!

According to his own testimony, ‘the Martyrology and the Prologues’ were for a time Tolstoy’s ‘favorite reading’ which ‘revealed to me the meaning of life’. [2] The main ‘St Gerasim’ on the Church’s calendar is St Gerasimus of the Jordan, whom Tolstoy would have read about in these sources, and the most famous story about St Gerasimus concerns his compassion to a certain lion. Here is the brief account in the Prologue from Ochrid:

He once saw a great lion which was roaring with pain, having a thorn in its paw. Gerasim came near to it, crossed himself and pulled the thorn out. The lion was so tame that it followed the elder to the monastery and remained there until the latter’s death. When the elder died, the lion also succumbed to illness after him and died. [3]

It seems to me that there is a clear parallel between Gerasim’s act of mercy in alleviating the suffering of Ivan Ilyich, and that of St Gerasimus in alleviating the suffering of the lion. Furthermore, while the biographical details of Ivan Ilyich’s life are very different from those of his creator, his consciousness of death and existential angst over his mortality remind one of Tolstoy’s Confession. It may have been a further inducement to choose the name ‘Gerasim’ for the servant since Tolstoy’s own Christian name means ‘lion’. [4]

I have posted the account of St Gerasimus and the lion in full from the primary source—St John Moschus’s Spiritual Meadow—in this post of last year for the Saint. Western pilgrims of course confused the name ‘Gerasimos’ with ‘Ieronymos’, who had also lived in Palestine for a time, and thus in the West the lion is associated with St Jerome. [5]


[1] Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich & Other Stories, tr. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky (NY: Knopf, 2009), p. 88.

[2] Leo Tolstoy, Confession, tr. David Patterson (NY: Norton, 1996), p. 83.

[3] St Nicholas (Velimirovi), The Prologue from Ochrid, Vol. 1, tr. Mother Maria (Birmingham: Lazarica, 1986), p. 245.

[4] I suppose one could also make a case for some sort of connection between the lion’s wailing on the death of St Gerasimus and Ivan’s wailing before his own death, but it would take some real working out.

[5] See Derwas Chitty, The Desert a City (Crestwood, NY: SVS, 1995), p. 90.

Mikhail Bakhtin: The Thinker

Continued from this post.

Bakhtin’s thinking is by no means systematic, and it is difficult to know where to begin an overview. But there are certain themes and emphases with which he was clearly preoccupied and which recur throughout his work. If I remember correctly, the article through which I was first introduced to Bakhtin—by Alan Jacobs in Books & Culture—presented these themes in part through a focus on some of Bakhtin’s unique terminology. Similarly, when I bought my first translated edition of some of Bakhtin’s work—The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist—I discovered, and spent a good deal of time studying, the glossary in the back. Holquist introduces it by saying, ‘Bakhtin’s technical vocabulary presents certain difficulties; while he does not use jargon, he does invest everyday words with special content. . . . [H]ere we collect and summarize the terms most central to his theory.’ [1] I will not post all of those given by Holquist, but only those that I personally found most interesting. I will also add to those I take from Holquist two further themes with which Bakhtin is commonly associated.

Authoritative discourse [avtoritetnoe slovo]
This is privileged language that approaches us from without; it is distanced, taboo, and permits no play with its framing context (Sacred Writ, for example). We recite it. It has great power over us, but only while in power; if ever dethroned it immediately
becomes a dead thing, a relic. Opposed to it is internally-persuasive discourse [vnutrenne-ubeditel’noe slovo], which is more akin to retelling a text in one’s own words, with one’s own accents, gestures, modifications. Human coming-to-consciousness, in Bakhtin’s view, is a constant struggle between these two types of discourse: an attempt to assimilate more into one’s own system, and the simultaneous freeing of one’s own discourse from the authoritative word, or from pervious earlier persuasive words that have ceased to mean. [2]

Canonization [kanonizacija]
canonic quality [kanoničnost]
The tendency in every form to harden its generic skeleton and elevate the existing norms to a model that resists change. At the end of ‘Discourse in the Novel’ [pp. 417ff.] Bakhtin discusses a special difficulty in novel theory, how to read properly the rapid transforming process of canonization and of re-accentuation. Canonization is that process that blurs heteroglossia, that is, that facilitates a naïve, single-voiced reading. It is no accident that the novel—that heteroglot genre—has no canon; it is, however, like all artistic genres subject to the pressures of canonization, which on a primitive level is merely the compulsion to repeat. [3]

Chronotope [xronotop]
Literally, ‘time-space’. A unit of analysis for studying texts according to the ration and nature of the temporal and spatial categories represented. The distinctiveness of this concept as opposed to most other uses of time and space in literary analysis lies in the fact that neither category is privileged; they are utterly interdependent. The chronotope is an optic for reading texts as x-rays of the forces at work in the culture system from which they spring. [4]

Completed—finished, closed-off, finalized [zaveršen]
and its noun zaveršennost’ [completedness, finalization]
its antonym nezaveršennost’ [inconclusiveness, openendedness]
This implies not just completed, but capable of definitive finalization. Dialogue, for example, can be zaveršen (as in a dynamic dialogue)—it can be laid out in all its speaking parts, framed by an opening and a close. A dialogized word, on the other hand, can never be zaveršeno: the resonance of oscillation of possible meanings within it is not only not resolved, but must increase in complexity as it continues to live. Epic time is zaveršeno; novel-time, the present oriented toward the future, is always nezaveršeno. [5]

Dialogism [dialogizm]
Dialogism is the characteristic epistemological mode of a world dominated by heteroglossia. Everything means, is understood, as a part of a greater whole—there is a constant interaction between meanings, all of which have the potential of conditioning others. Which will affect the other, how it will do so and in what degree is what is actually settled at the moment of utterance. This dialogic imperative, mandated by the pre-existence of the language world relative to any of its current inhabitants, insures that there can be no actual monologue. One may, like a primitive tribe that knows only its own limits, be deluded into thinking there is one language, or one may, as grammarians, certain political figures and normative framers of ‘literary languages’ do, seek in a sophisticated way to achieve a unitary language. In both cases the unitariness is relative to the overpowering force of heteroglossia, and thus dialogism. [6]

Dialogue [dialog]
dialogizing [dialogujuščij]
dialogized [dialogizovannij]
Dialogue and its various processes are central to Bakhtin’s theory, and it is precisely as verbal process (participial modifiers) that their force is most accurately sensed. A word, discourse, language or culture undergoes ‘dialogization’ when it becomes relativized, de-privileged, aware of competing definitions for the same things. Undialogized language is authoritative or absolute.

Dialogue may be external (between two different people) or internal (between an earlier and a later self). . . . [7]

Discourse, word [slovo]
The Russian word slovo covers much more territory than its English equivalent, signifying both an individual word and a method of using words [cf. the Greek logos] that presumes a type of authority. Thus the title of our final essay, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, might also have been rendered ‘The Word in the Novel’. We have opted for the broader term, because what interests Bakhtin is the sort of talk novelistic environments make possible, and how this type of talking threatens other more closed systems. Bakhtin at times uses discourse as it is sometimes used in the West—as a way to refer to the subdivisions determined by social and ideological differences within a single language (i.e. the discourse of American plumbers vs. that of American academics). But it is more often than not his more diffuse way of insisting on the primacy of speech, utterance, all in praesentia aspects of language. [8]

Heteroglossia [raznorečie, raznorečivost’]
The basic condition governing the operation of meaning in any utterance. It is that which insures the primacy of context over text. At any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of conditions—social, historical, meteorological, physiological—that will insure that a word uttered in that place and at that time will have a meaning different than it would have under any other conditions; all utterances are heteroglot in that they are functions of a matrix of forces practically impossible to recoup, and therefore impossible to resolve. Heteroglossia is as close a conceptualization as is possible of that locus where centripetal and centrifugal forces collide; as such, it is that which a systematic linguistics must always suppress. [9]

Polyglossia [mnogojazyčie]
The simultaneous presence of two or more national languages interacting within a single cultural system (Bakhtin’s two historical models are ancient Rome [Greek and Latin] and the Renaissance [Latin and the vernacular languages]). [10]

Voice [golos, -glas]
This is the speaking personality, the speaking consciousness. A voice always has a will or desire behind it, its own timbre and overtones. Single-voiced discourse [edinogolosnoe slovo] is the dream of poets; double-voiced discourse [dvugolosnoe slovo] the realm of the novel. At several points Bakhtin illustrates the difference between these categories by moving language-units from one plane to the other—for example, shifting a trope from the plane of poetry to the plane of prose [pp. 327ff.]: both poetic and prose tropes are ambiguous [in Russian, dvusmyslennyj, literally ‘double-meaninged’] but a poetic trope, while meaning more than one thing, is always only single-voiced. Prose tropes by contrast always contain more than one voice, and are therefore dialogized. [11]

Two further themes might be added to these. First, in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin introduces the notion of ‘polyphony’ in discourse—‘A plurality of independent and unmerged voices [heteroglossia] and consciousnesses’. He associates this unique realisation of the potential of the novel, and indeed, of the very nature of language and discourse, with Dostoevsky above all, observing that ‘a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novels’. [12] In Joe Barnhart’s words, Bakhtin ‘viewed Fyodor Dostoevsky as the exemplar of the polyphonic novel’. [13] It is an approach that, as Rowan Williams has rightly noted, has caused critical work on Dostoevsky to become ‘in general far more sophisticated’. [14]

Second, in his study of Rabelais, Bakhtin introduced the theme of carnival. In the words of Clark & Holquist, ‘Carnival is a minimally ritualized antiritual, a festive celebration of the other, the gaps and holes in all the mappings of the world laid out in systematic theologies, legal codes, normative poetics, and class hierarchies. . . . [It is] a kind of existential heteroglossia.’ [15] According to Bakhtin:

During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom. It has a universal spirit; it is a special condition of the entire world, of the world’s revival and renewal, in which all take part. . . . [16]

. . .

Thus carnival is the people’s second life, organized on the basis of laughter. It is a festive life. . . . [17]

Orthodox will be interested to know that there have been a number of books published which treat Bakhtin’s thought from an explicitly religious perspective. In The Illuminating Icon, Fr Anthony Ugolnik approaches him as ‘an example of a Christian working through a secular idiom’, [18] and notes, ‘In the literary and philosophical tradition of Russian lay theology, Bakhtin managed to transmit many Eastern Christian presumptions into his Soviet environment.’ [19] Alexandar Mihailovic’s Corporeal Words: Mikhail Bakhtin’s Theology of Discourse analyses the relationship between Bakhtin’s thought and the terminology of the Œcumenical Councils, concluding, ‘In his christological chronotope of corporeal words Bakhtin attempts to integrate ethical and political thought with theology, which had been marginalized into a peripheral culture, one foreign to a country declared by its political leaders to be the examplar of “Developed” socialism.’ [20] Ruth Coates’s Christianity in Bakhtin: God & the Exiled Author looks at ‘Bakhtin’s demonstrable philosophical engagement with such central Christian concepts as creation, fall, and incarnation’, [21] self-consciously insisting on something like a ‘mere Christianity’ rather than finding anything distinctively Orthodox about him. [22] But then, in the article ‘Bakhtin & Hesychasm’, which I have already mentioned (here and here), Coates does begin to look at Bakhtin’s relation to certain Orthodox distinctives—particularly the essence/energies distinction, hesychastic prayer, and the rôle of the body in Orthodox anthropology. Leonard Stanton uses an idea introduced in Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, the ‘penetrated word’, closely related to ‘internally-persuasive discourse’, as a way to interpret the function of apophthegmata in the Lives of the Optina Elders. [23] Finally, Walter Reed’s Dialogues of the Word: The Bible as Literature According to Bakhtin uses Bakhtin’s thought as a hermeneutic appratus for a literary-critical reading of Scripture, focusing particularly on Job and Revelation. [24] But these are of course only the studies with which I am familiar and of which I possess copies.

In my opinion, many of the themes defined or referred to above have obvious connections with Orthodoxy, while others require a bit more unpacking to be seen in relation to an Orthodox worldview. One which I believe is particularly elusive is carnival. In context, Bakhtin’s extolling of carnival is often explicitly anticlerical and irreverent (much like Rabelais himself). So it might be instructive to consider at some length what Fr Ugolnik has done with this theme:

The most productive insights are often the most unexpected. Western visitors who encounter the Russian Orthodox liturgy perceive it according to a romanticized body of expectations: beautiful and solemn, [25] it seems expressive of a profound seriousness and melancholy. Yet to be steeped in liturgy as a medium for the Word is to see as well its playful restlessness, its constant shifts in frame of reference. Bakhtin . . . developed the notion of ‘carnival’, a concept now widely used in anthropology and literature. ‘Carnival’ is that dialogic form by which rigid, tyrannical hierarchies become mirrored, distorted, and overthrown. And liturgy can indeed be seen as ‘carnival’. Liturgy is, in effect, a celebration of the gospel whereby we partake in a divine carnival, a divine irony whereby we overthrow the kingdom of this world.

. . .

‘We are fools for Christ’s sake’ (1 Cor. 4:10). Tyranny cannot bear to be mocked; the folly of the gospel, then, will enrage the powerful but delight the poor in spirit. Bakhtin’s sensitivity to ‘carnival’ springs from his own Christian tradition. Russian Orthodoxy is replete with icons and services celebrating a certain kind of saint, the ‘holy fool’, the fool for Christ’s sake. The crazed, beautiful domes of St Basil’s on Red Square celebrate, in their riot of color and form, just such a sainted clown. Early Russian czars, by tradition, included in their retinue a fool who mocked the pretense of the worldly prince. Similarly, Russian literature is filled with the same kind of character, a character who in his or her ‘folly’ forces an encounter between reality and pretense.

. . . The holy fool refuses to accept the structures by which the world forms judgments. He reminds the people of God that the structures by which the princes of this world prevail are less than ‘transitory’—they are signs of liberation in God, showing us in the narrowness and cramped insistence of worldly power what God will never be. The gospel’s clown is, like the monk or nun, ‘apophatic’—that is, he or she shows us not what God is, but rather what God is not. The holy fool mimics the standard by which the cross is seen as ‘tragic’, for the gospel is the very antithesis of tragedy.

Liturgy in its structure is the very archetype of divine carnival. In proclaiming God’s
kingdom, it alters the way in which we see this world and forces us into perpetual re-evaluation. Intellectual tyranny and worldly power take themselves seriously. The gospel mocks that seriousness. Liturgical celebration of the gospel brings Christians together in community, where in a structure of ‘dialogue’ they recreate the terms by which they interpret this world. In liturgical structure we see a majestic celebration of what Bakhtin calls alterity, of the ‘otherness’ of God. In liturgy the Christian overthrows the kingdom of this world and celebrates the kingdom of the Trinity. It is the social and religious structure within which the poor are enriched, the meek made courageous, the oppressed made into monarchs. Thus it is hardly an empty ‘cultic’ celebration, an ‘opera’ that is removed from the terms of the lived world. It is indeed in its nature a ‘subversion’ of the structures of tyranny. It demands that we see this flawed and blasted world anew, as renewed in Christ; that we sinners stand as the redeemed. Liturgy does not ‘announce’, in monologue, the Good News. Liturgy dialogically ‘celebrates’ the gospel; it enacts the plan of God. [26]

I realise I have quoted more writing about Bakhtin than I have of Bakhtin. I by no means wish to discourage the intelligent reader from simply picking up one of his books and diving in (I think the Dostoevsky book and The Dialogic Imagination particularly suitable for this purpose). But it’s hard to know exactly what to quote with a thinker like Bakhtin. In this situation, I have chosen a passage from ‘Author & Hero in Aesthetic Activity’ which seems particularly apropos for a blog like Logismoi: a brief consideration of hagiography.

We cannot deal with this form in detail, for this would exceed the bounds of our theme. The vita of a saint is accomplished immediately in God’s world. Every moment of the vita is imaged as possessing validity precisely in God’s world; the vita of a saint is a life that has significance in God.

This significant life in God must be invested in traditional forms; the author’s sense of reverence leaves no room for individual initiative, for individual choice of expression: the author renounces himself here, renounces his own individually answerable activity. . . .

Thus, the unity of the transgredient moments of a saint is not the individual unity of an author who actively utilizes his position outside the saint; the author’s position outside the saint is assumed and maintained in humility—it is a position which renounces all initiative (since, in fact, there are no essentially transgredient moments for accomplishing a consummation) and which falls back upon forms consecrated by tradition. . . . [H]agiography, just like icon painting, avoids any transgredient moments which delimit a human being and render him overly concrete, because they invariably diminish authoritativeness. What must be excluded is . . . anything concrete in a person’s appearance, anything concrete in his life . . . . That is, anything that reinforces a given person’s determinateness in being (the typical and characteristic, and even biographical concreteness) and thus reduces the authoritativeness of that person (the life of a saint proceeds from the very outset in eternity, as it were). . . .

A symbolic tradition in the treatment of the vita is also possible. (The problem of imaging a miracle and the supreme religious event; here the humble renunciation of adequacy and individuality and submission to strict tradition are especially important.) Where the task is to image and express a valid achievement of ultimate meaning, humility to the point of submission to traditional conventionality is indispensable . . . . Thus, renunciation of his position outside the saint as constituting an essential position and humbling himself to the point of submission to pure traditionality (medieval ‘realism’) are highly characteristic of the author of a saint’s life (cf. the idea of blago-obrazie in Dostoevsky). [27]

In the spirit of nezaveršennost’, I will not say ‘finally’, or ‘in conclusion’, but despite Bakhtin’s promotion of prosaics as a opposed to poetics, I will offer in the spirit of carnival the few nuggets Mihailovic has translated of what he calls ‘the nadir in sentimentality’ among Bakhtin-worshippers:

Perhaps the nadir in sentimentality was reached in a 1989 poem dedicated to Bakhtin that has the critic sitting at ‘his desk like Noah on his ark’, where he ‘guffaws with Rabelais until midnight, and sobs with Dostoevsky til the morning’ and ‘dreams of one thing only: that in every word there should be more good.’ A voice says to the poet, ‘There are no prophets in our fatherland,’ to which he replies, ‘But how one yearns for a prophet!’ [28]

[1] Michael Holquist, ‘Glossary’, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas, 1998), p. 423.

[2] Ibid., pp. 424-5.

[3] Ibid., p. 425.

[4] Ibid., pp. 425-6.

[5] Ibid., p. 426.

[6] Ibid., p. 426.

[7] Ibid., pp. 426-7.

[8] Ibid., p. 427.

[9] Ibid., p. 428.

[10] Ibid., p. 431.

[11] Ibid., p. 434.

[12] Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, tr. Caryl Emerson, Vol. 8 in Theory & History of Literature (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1984), p. 6.

[13] Joe E. Barnhart, ‘Introduction—Hearing Voices’, Dostoevsky’s Polyphonic Talent, ed. Joe Barnhart (Lanham, MD: UP of America, 2005), p. ix.

[14] Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, & Fiction (Waco, TX: Baylor U, 2008), p. 4.

[15] Katerina Clark & Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U, 1984), pp. 300-1.

[16] Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais & His World, tr. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana U, 1984), p. 7.

[17] Ibid., p. 8.

[18] Fr Anthony Ugolnik, The Illuminating Icon (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), pp. 158-9.

[19] Ibid., p. 160.

[20] Alexandar Mihailovic, Corporeal Words: Mikhail Bakhtin’s Theology of Discourse (Evanston, IL: Northwestern U, 1997), p. 234. Incidentally, Mihailovic also ends with a typical plea for ecumenism in the spirit of Fedotov and Fr Alexander Men. Yes, I know, it’s a bit annoying.

[21] Ruth Coates, ‘Bakhtin & Hesychasm’, Religion & Literature 37.3 (Autumn 2005), p. 60.

[22] Ruth Coates, Christianity in Bakhtin: God & the Exiled Author (Cambridge: Cambridge U, 1998), p. 22.

[23] Leonard Stanton, The Optina Pustyn Monastery in the Russian Literary Imagination: Iconic Vision in Works by Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy, & Others (NY: Peter Lang, 1995), p. 159.

[24] Reed proceeds from the belief that Bakhtin’s ‘own adherence to Christianity seems to have been persistent’, and that there exists a ‘striking relevance of Bakhtin’s philosophy and aesthetics of dialogue to the peculiarly polyform nature of the Bible’ (Walter L. Reed, Dialogues of the Word: The Bible as Literature According to Bakhtin [NY: Oxford U, 1993], p. 14).

[25] It is interesting to note, in light of C.S. Lewis’s discussion of the notion of solemnity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, that it is not nearly so opposed to the spirit of ‘carnival’ as the word is in modern usage. See this post.

[26] Fr Ugolnik, pp. 170-1.

[27] Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Author & Hero in Aesthetic Activity’, Art & Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist & Vadim Liapunov, tr. & notes by Vadim Liapunov, supp. tr. Kenneth Brostrom (Austin: U of Texas, 1995), pp. 185-6.

[28] Mihailovic, p. 3.

Mikhail Bakhtin: The Man

Although I am early for his birthday and late for the anniversary of his repose, recent comments have led me to a decision to write a post or two on the Russian philosopher and literary critic, Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975). According to Alexandar Mihailovic, ‘In both Russia and the West, Bakhtin has become a revered figure, an almost mythic sage whose gnomic utterances have been pored over with a talmudic zeal.’ [1] Yet many Orthodox Christians, even intellectuals with an interest not only in theology but in literature and philosophy, remain unfamiliar with him. This despite the fact that, as Mihailovic argues, ‘Bakhtin’s own dialogue with the philosophical legacy of Orthodoxy’ is ‘instrumental in shaping the spirit of dialogism that almost all scholars agree is the enduring idea of his work.’ [2] I shall offer first an overview of his life, taken from Tzvetan Todorov’s brief but rigourous study, and then discuss very briefly his relationship to Orthodoxy, biographical and intellectual. I shall reserve a real discussion of Bakhtin’s thought for a second post. First, Todorov:

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was born in 1895 in Orel, in an impoverished aristocratic family; his father was a bank clerk. He spent his childhood in Orel, and his adolescence in Vilnius and Odessa. He studied philology at the University of Odessa and later in Petrograd, graduating in 1918. He taught elementary school, first in the small provincial town of Nevel’ (1918-1920), and then, after 1920, in Vitebsk, where he was married in 1921. In Nevel’, a first circle of friends was formed; it included Valerian Nikolaevich Voloshinov . . . , a poet and musicologist; Lev Vasilievich Pumpian’ski . . ., a philosopher and literary scholar; the pianist M.B. Yudina . . . ; the poet B.N. Zubakin . . . ; and the philosopher Matvei Isaevich Kagan . . . . The last-named began to play the role of initiator; he had just returned from Germany, where he had studied philosophy in Leipzig, Berlin, and Marburg; he was a disciple of Hermann Cohen, and had attended Cassirer’s lectures. Kagan organized an initial informal group that took on the name of ‘Kantian Seminar’. In addition to this private activity, the members of the circle participated in public debates and gave formal talks. . . .

After Bakhtin’s move (and Kagan’s departure, first for Petrograd and the[n] Orel), the circle reformed in Vitebsk, with Voloshinov and Pumpian’ski as well as some new additions: the critic Pavel Nikolaevich Medvedev . . . ; the musicologist I.I> Sollertinski; the painter Marc Chagall belongs to the same milieu. Bakhtin taught literature and aesthetics. Afflicted since 1921 with a chronic osteomyelitis that eventually required the amputation of a leg in 1938, Bakhtin returned to Petrograd in 1924 where he took up again with his friends Voloshinov, Pumpian’ski, and Medvedev. A third circle was formed; it included this time the poet N. Klinev; the novelist K. Vaginov; the Indic scholar M. Tubianski; the musicologist I. Tubianski; and the biologist and historian of science I. Kanaev. The ‘Kantian Seminar’ resumed its activities. Bakhtin supported himself from odd jobs. In 1929 he published a book: The Problems of Dostoevsky’s Work; it is known that an early version, probably quite different from the published one, had been completed as early as 1922. In the same year, 1929, Bakhtin was arrested, for reasons that remain unknown but were most likely related to his ties with Orthodox Christianity. It was indeed for such a reason that his friend Pumpian’ski was arrested in 1928; in 1926, writing to Kagan, who lived then in Moscow, he described the meetings of the circle thus: ‘All these years, and especially this one, we have kept busy dealing with theology. . . .’. Bakhtin was condemned to five years in a concentration camp to be spent in Solovki; for health reasons, however, his sentence was commuted to exile in Kazakhstan. From 1930 on he worked at clerical jobs in various institutions in the small town of Kustanaj on the border of Siberia and Kazakhstan. In 1936 he was given an appointment to the Teachers’ College at Saransk. In 1937, he settled in Kimr, some hundred kilometers from Moscow, where he taught Russian and German in the local secondary school. Occasionally, he participated in the workings of the Literary Institute of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. He returned to Saransk Teachers’ College in 1945 and remained there until his retirement in 1961. His book on Dostoevsky, somewhat enlarged was republished in 1963. The book on Rabelais, actually a thesis completed in 1940 but defended, with many a difficulty, in 1946, finally appeared in 1965. His health declining, Bakhtin settled in Moscow in 1969. The last years of his life were spent in a retirement home in Klimovsk near Moscow. He died in March 1975, at the age of eighty; his funeral followed Orthodox rites. [3]

Concerning Bakhtin’s published works, a brief note explaining one much-debated question is in order. In the 1970s a close follower stated that Bakhtin was the real author of a number of works of the 1920s which had been published under the names of his friends Voloshinov and Medvedev. I won’t go into all of the details, but suffice to say that there is reason to believe there may be some truth to this, but the matter is very complex and likely cannot be resolved conclusively. When citing these works, Todorov proposed a convention to express the openness of the question: using the name under which they were published followed by a slash and Bakhtin’s name. [4] I like this a great deal, and used it myself in my big paper on Dostoevsky years ago.

Todorov mentions the probability of Bakhtin’s having been arrested for ‘his ties to Orthodox Christianity’, and there are some interesting connections to be noted here. Although he left off open religious activities and statements after his arrest, Bakhtin was associated during the early years after the Revolution with some of the circles of religious intellectuals that were active at that time. In their intellectual biography of Bakhtin, Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist note his connection to, though not necessarily membership in, such groups as Voskresenie (one of the leaders of which was George Fedotov), the Brotherhood of St Sophia, and Volfila. [5] But it is interesting to note that Bakhtin was actually charged, though it was later dropped, with being a member of the Brotherhood of St Seraphim of Sarov. [6] This Brotherhood was influenced by Fr Pavel Florensky, founded by Sergei Askoldov, a good friend of the New Martyr Fr Theodore Andreyev, and included among its members Ivan Mikhailovich Andreyev, who later taught at Jordanville. [7] Most of these men were also members of the Catacomb Church under the New Martyr Metropolitan Joseph of Leningrad, which bravely resisted Sergianism.

Nevertheless, it seems clear that Clark and Holquist are largely correct when they write that ‘Bakhtin was never a conventional Russian Orthodox in the sense of conforming to an organized religion’, but rather ‘a religious intellectual from the Orthodox tradition’. [8] He was very much along the lines of Solovyov and the latter's heirs in the Paris emigration. Clark and Holquist compare Bakhtin’s views to those of Fedotov and Fr Florensky, though he is found to be even less Orthodox than they are, and on the other hand they engage in an odd description of the limits of Bakhtin’s reverence for the ‘patron Saint’ of liberal Russian religious philosophers—St Seraphim of Sarov. As Fedotov once wrote, ‘[For this] generation of the Orthodox Renaissance, the last before the Revolution . . . St Seraphim was the prophet of the expected revelation of the Holy Spirit and the forerunner of the new form of spirituality which should succeed merely ascetical monasticism’. [9] Thus, according to Ruth Coates, Bakhtin ‘would refer to Seraphim as his “heavenly protector”’. [10]

Another brief point of dispute is Bakhtin’s relationship to Marxism. Fr Anthony Ugolnik writes that conversations with Bakhtin's ‘colleagues and contemporaries . . . revealed that to the end of his life Bakhtin was a confirmed socialist’. [11] But on the other hand, Mihailovic quotes acquaintances of Bakhtin as saying that he was ‘always categorically opposed to Marxism’ and that, in his own words, ‘I am not a Marxist [and] was never interested in Marxism in the slightest’. [12] In an analogue to the issue of Christianity and Orthodoxy in Bakhtin, critics dispute the importance of Marxism to his work.

Continued here.


[1] Alexandar Mihailovic, Corporeal Words: Mikhail Bakhtin’s Theology of Discourse (Evanston, IL: Northwestern U, 1997), p. 1.

[2] Ibid., p. 16.

[3] Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, tr. Wlad Godzich, Vol. 13 of Theory & History of Literature (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1984), pp. 3-5.

[4] Ibid., p. 11.

[5] Katerina Clark & Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U, 1984), pp. 120-42.

[6] Ibid., p. 142.

[7] On these connections, besides Clark & Holquist, see Hieromonk Seraphim (Rose), ‘Ivan Michailovich Andreyev: True Orthodox Convert from the Russian Intelligentsia’, Orthodox Apologetic Theology, by I.M. Andreyev, tr. Hieromonk Seraphim (Rose) (Platina, CA: St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1995), pp. 20-8. Unfortunately, however, Fr Seraphim was probably unaware of Bakhtin and makes no mention of him.

[8] Clark & Holquist, p. 120.

[9] George P. Fedotov, ed., A Treasury of Russian Spirituality (Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1988), p. 146. I have noted before the very perceptive comments on this statement in Ruth Coates’s fascinating article, ‘Bakhtin & Hesychasm’:

Fedotov’s description of the reception of Seraphim by the religious intelligentsia rings true, and betrays the arrogance and ignorance of that generation: so far from being the forerunner of a new form of spirituality, Seraphim was in his time the latest representative of an ancient tradition of Eastern Christian spirituality, a practising hesychast whose spiritual authority as a starets, or elder, derived from his direct mystical knowledge of God through prayer, as opposed to his position in the institutional Church’s hierarchy. Moreover, so far from succeeding ascetical monasticism, Seraphim was a hieromonk . . . who maintained close links with the monastery to which he was attached, in keeping with the hesychasts of old, and who continued to take part in the sacramental life of the Church. (Ruth Coates, ‘Bakhtin & Hesychasm’, Religion & Literature 37.3 [Autumn 2005], pp. 61-2.)

[10] Ibid., p. 60.

[11]Fr Anthony Ugolnik, The Illuminating Icon (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), p. 159.

[12] Mihailovic, p. 3.