From Indo-European Philology to the Bakhtin Circle

Bakhtin’s work of the 1930s and 1940s is considered in the context of the development of Soviet Indology in the same period. There is discussion of the anti-Eurocentric thrust of Soviet Oriental Studies generally and the way in which Mikhail Tubianskii brought this into the discussions of the Bakhtin Circle directly. It is also shown that the institute at which other members of the Circle worked was a centre for the development of semantic palaeontology, an approach to narratives that spurned the conventions of Indo-European philology and treated each text as a sedimentary phenomenon in which ways of thinking of previous stages of social development could be ‘excavated’. These stages were not specific to particular peoples but universal. It is shown that Bakhtin’s work on the chronotope and carnival, among others, cannot adequately be understood unless the influence of these trends are considered. It is suggested that application of Bakhtinian ideas to non-European literatures needs to take account of these features of his work.