Mikhail Bakhtin Quotes

#1. The events of my birth...and finally of my death are not accomplished in me or for me. The affective weight of my life as a whole does not exist for me. Only the Other is in possession of the values of the being of a given person.

Mikhail Bakhtin

#2. This relative freedom of a hero does not violate the strict specificity of the construction, just as the specificity of a mathematical formula is not violated by the presence of irrational or transfinite quantities.

Mikhail Bakhtin

#3. To a greater or lesser extent, every novel is a dialogized system made up of the images of "languages," styles and consciousnesses that are concrete and inseparable from language. Language in the novel not only represents, but itself serves as the object of representation.

Mikhail Bakhtin

#4. Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its homecoming festival.

Mikhail Bakhtin

#5. To think about them means to talk with them; otherwise they immediately turn to us their objectivized side: they fall silent, close up, and congeal into finished, objectivized images.

Mikhail Bakhtin

#6. This is a profoundly universal laughter, a laughter that contains a whole outlook on the world.

Mikhail Bakhtin

#7. The primary carnivalistic act is the mock crowning and subsequent decrowning of the carnival king.

Mikhail Bakhtin

#8. Carnival laughter does not permit a single one of these aspects of change to be absolutized or to congeal in one-sided seriousness.

Mikhail Bakhtin

#9. A third characteristic is the deliberate multi-styled and heterovoiced nature of all these genres. They reject the stylistic unity (or better, the single-styled nature) of the epic, the tragedy, high rhetoric, the lyric.

Mikhail Bakhtin

#10. Dostoevsky, like Goethe's Prometheus, creates not voiceless slaves (as does Zeus), but free people, capable of standing alongside their creator, capable of not agreeing with him and even of rebelling against him. A

Mikhail Bakhtin

#11. Each novel presents an opposition, which is never canceled out dialectically, of many consciousnesses, and they do not merge in the unity of an evolving spirit, just as souls and spirits do not merge in the formally polyphonic world of Dante.

Mikhail Bakhtin

#12. In poetry, even discourse about doubts must be cast in a discourse that cannot be doubted.

Mikhail Bakhtin

#13. Discourse about the world merges with confessional discourse about oneself.

Mikhail Bakhtin

#14. Histories are like novels in that they set out to provide more or less comprehensive accounts of social systems.

Mikhail Bakhtin

#15. In none of Dostoevsky's novels is there any evolution of a unified spirit; in fact there is no evolution, no growth in general,

Mikhail Bakhtin

#16. The novel has become the leading hero in the drama of literary development in our time precisely because it best of all reflects the tendencies of a new world still in the making; it is, after all, the only genre born of this new world and in total affinity with it.

Mikhail Bakhtin

#17. The essence of polyphony lies precisely in the fact that the voices remain independent and, as such, are combined in a unity of a higher order than in homophony.

Mikhail Bakhtin

#18. Dostoevsky's hero is not only a discourse about himself and his immediate environment, but also a discourse about the world; he is not only cognizant, but an ideologist as well. The

Mikhail Bakhtin

#19. drama is by its very nature alien to genuine polyphony; drama may be multi-leveled, but it cannot contain multiple worlds; it permits only one, and not several, systems of measurement. Secondly,

Mikhail Bakhtin

#20. In Dostoevsky, two thoughts are already two people, for there are no thoughts belonging to no one and every thought represents an entire person. This

Mikhail Bakhtin

#21. For him, to get one's bearings on the world meant to conceive all its contents as simultaneous, and to guess at their interrelationships in the cross-section of a single moment. This

Mikhail Bakhtin

#22. For the prose artist the world is full of other people's words, among which he must orient himself and whose speech characteristics he must be able to perceive with a very keen ear. He must introduce them into the plane of his own discourse, but in such a way that this plane is not destroyed.

Mikhail Bakhtin

#23. All words have the "taste" of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life ...

Mikhail Bakhtin

#24. Prophecy is characteristic for the epic, prediction for the novel.

Mikhail Bakhtin

#25. What is realized in the novel is the process of coming to know one's own language as it is perceived in someone else's language, coming to know one's own belief system in someone else's system.

Mikhail Bakhtin

#26. No, the hero interests Dostoevsky as a particular point of view on the world and on oneself, as the position enabling a person to interpret and evaluate his own self and his surrounding reality.

Mikhail Bakhtin

#27. That accents of the hero's self-consciousness are really objectified and that the work itself observes a distance between the hero and the author. If the umbilical cord uniting the hero to his creator is not cut, then what we have is not a work of art but a personal document. Dostoevsky's

Mikhail Bakhtin

#28. The fundamental category in Dostoevsky's mode of artistic visualizing was not evolution, but coexistence and interaction. He saw and conceived his world primarily in terms of space, not time.

Mikhail Bakhtin

#29. Words belong to nobody, and in themselves they evaluate nothing. But they can serve any speaker and be used for the most varied and directly contradictory evaluations on the part of the speakers.

Mikhail Bakhtin

#30. Dostoevsky's hero is not an objectified image but an autonomous discourse, pure voice; we do not see him, we hear him;

Mikhail Bakhtin

#31. everything resulting from socio-hierarchical inequality or any other form of inequality among people (including age). All distance between people is suspended, and a special carnival category goes into effect: free and familiar contact among people.

Mikhail Bakhtin

#32. 14. Finally, the last characteristic of the menippea: its concern with current and topical issues. This is, in its own way, the "journalistic" genre of antiquity, acutely echoing the ideological issues of the day.

Mikhail Bakhtin

#33. The way in which I create myself is by means of a quest. I go out into the world in order to come back with a self.

Mikhail Bakhtin

#34. Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction.

Mikhail Bakhtin

#35. The movement of time is guaranteed by the birth of generation after generation, a never-ending succession that fills the gods with fear.

Mikhail Bakhtin