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From Indo-European Philology to the Bakhtin Circle

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Bakhtinian Explorations of Indian Culture

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Among these one may mention Olender (1992 [1989]), Benes (2004; 2008), McGetchin (2009), Trautmann (1997), Arvidsson (2006).

  2. 2.

    There is extensive literature on the war and its impact. For discussion of the perspectival shifts among Asian intellectuals because of the routing of the Russian fleet at the battle of Tsushima see Mishra (2012), Sareen (2007), Marks (2005), and Rodell (2005). On the impact within Russia, see Frankel (2007) and Bushkovich (2005). On the wider impact in challenging Eurocentric assumptions, see Jones (2007).

  3. 3.

    For a more sustained consideration see Brandist (2015b).

  4. 4.

    Shcherbatskoi cited Lapshin’s 1910 book Problema chuzhogo ‘ia’ v noveishchei filosofii (The problem of the alien ‘I’ in recent philosophy) as an important influence, while Lapshin subsequently showed the influence of Shcherbatskoi in ‘Problema “chuzhogo ia” v indiiskoi filosofii’ (The problem of the ‘alien I’ in Indian philosophy, 1947). Lapshin argued in the latter that the philosophy of the East ‘supports in a brilliant way the fact of the unity of human reason’ and that this unity appears because ‘homogeneous or similar ideas, and even a complex of ideas arise in different civilizations completely independently of each other’ (Lapshin in Berniukovich 2008: 241). For an extended discussion of the relationship between the two thinkers see Berniukovich (2008: 239–44).

  5. 5.

    Lapshin pointed to the Buddhist-inspired ideas of Schopenhauer as an example of this in practice (Berniukovich 242). For a more general discussion see Shokhin (1998) and Lysenko (2009).

  6. 6.

    For a consideration of the methodologies of Shcherbatskoi and Rozenberg see Lysenko (2007).

  7. 7.

    Indeed this permeates all of Bakhtin’s work in one way or another, from his early Philosophy of the Act, through the modalities of Author and Hero, considerations of Dostoevskii’s novel of ordeal, and all the way through to the later reflections on the role of the ‘superaddressee’. This concern is a repeated concern of Bakhtin’s Jewish friend Matvei Kagan, and goes back at least as far as the philosophy of the Marburg neo-Kantians who influenced them both. It should be noted that Tubianskii (1924) himself writes of Vaishnavism in similar terms, as a ‘comparatively complete monotheism’, the main content of which is ‘to understand the whole of life as service to god’, leading to ethical slogans and a struggle against the caste system.

  8. 8.

    A balanced assessment of Marr’s work has proven possible only in recent years, though Thomas provided a fair assessment of his linguistic ideas as early as the 1950s. There is now considerable discussion of the phenomenon in Russian, but for a recent assessment in English see Brandist (2015a).

  9. 9.

    See also Poliakov (1974), Trautmann (1987, 213–222), and Arvidsson (2006, 13–22).

  10. 10.

    Brian Poole in his valuable study of the relationship between Bakhtin and Cassirer (1998, 547–549) points out that this connection is present in Cassirer’s second volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Mythical Thought  (1955 [1925]), with which Bakhtin was clearly familiar. Be that as it may, it was further expanded in Frank-Kamenetskii’s article, and the crucial link between Cassirer’s philosophy and Marr’s semantic palaeontology had been clearly established in Frank-Kamenetskii’s (1929) article ‘Pervobytnoe myshlenie’, which was published in the ILIaZV journal Iazyk i literatura.

  11. 11.

    Here we clearly see the connection between Cassirer’s discussion of laughter as an instrument of liberation from dogmatism, as discussed in the final chapter of his Platonic Renaissance in England  (1953[1927]), with the Marrist discussion of the potentially creative role of semantic survivals, as discussed by Frank-Kamenetskii (1929) in ‘Pervobytnoe myshlenie’.

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Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Sergei Burmistrov, Tat’iana Ermakova and Elena Ostrovskaia of the Institut vostochnoi rukopisei in St. Petersburg for their very kind assistance in finding some important materials for this chapter.

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  1. University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

    Craig Brandist

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  1. Department of Psychology, LaGuardia Community College, New York, New York, USA

    Lakshmi Bandlamudi

  2. School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies, Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India

    E. V. Ramakrishnan

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Brandist, C. (2018). From Indo-European Philology to the Bakhtin Circle. In: Bandlamudi, L., Ramakrishnan, E. (eds) Bakhtinian Explorations of Indian Culture. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6313-8_2

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