Mikhail Bakhtin

Although Bakhtin's first book, on Dostoevsky, was published in 1929, it was only in the last thirty years of the twentieth century that the publication of much of his writing, in Russian and then in translation, allowed his work to become widely influential. Along with the recovery of Bakhtin's writing, the related work of the Bakhtin Circle (a group of intellectuals from the 1920s) has also been rediscovered, especially the writings of V. N. Vološinov and P. N. Medvedev. Much controversy has surrounded the authorship of the work of these latter two writers, which has been widely ascribed to Bakhtin himself; however, in the absence of conclusive archival evidence, it is safest to consider their books to be their own work, albeit closely