Morson on Bakhtin.

I’ve been a huge fan of Gary Saul Morson for a long time (see my too-brief review of his Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time here) and I’ve been interested in Mikhail Bakhtin for even longer, but I’ve found him a hard nut to crack, so I was delighted to find Morson’s NYRB review (June 25, 2026 issue; archived) of Sergeiy Sandler’s new translation of Rabelais and His World. In the best review-essay tradition, it covers much more than the book under review, and I found it eloquent and informative enough to post some passages. It starts off: Scholars speak of two Mikhail Bakhtins—on the one hand, there is the author of Rabelais and His World (published in 1965, though he began writing it in the 1930s) and, on the other, the author of Problems of Dostoevsky’s Creative Art (1929; revised as Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 1963), the essays on the novel in The Dialogic Imagination (1975), and various philosophical works. Since Bakhtin first became widely known in the 1980s, his…