Unmasking Bakhtin

The (presumed) author of books on Dostoevsky and Rabelais, Mikhail Bakhtin was
elevated to the rank of “the greatest theoretician of literature in the
twentieth century” by a two-pronged process: the publication of a number of
his old manuscripts, and the assertion that he was also the true author of
most of the texts published in the 1920s under the names of his “friends” P.N.
Medvedev and V.N. Voloshinov, who both died at an early age. Even though the
theory of authorial substitution rests entirely on the declarations of
Bakhtin, this dual process gave birth to the “Bakhtin Industry,” involving the
elaboration of extremely creative hypotheses as to how exactly the works
signed by his friends were written, and numerous studies aiming to demonstrate
the unity and coherence of the Bakhtinian corpus. But at the end of the 20th
century, the publication of archival texts and interviews with Bakhtin
revealed that he had lied about his biography and about his participation in
the writing of the disputed texts. Further research showed that the supposed
dates of his early manuscripts had been falsified, and that many of these
writings consist largely of plagiarism. Jean-Paul Bronckart and Cristian
Bota’s conclusions lead us to investigate the motivations behind Bakhtin’s
usurpation of other people’s work, as well as the true origin of the various
texts that appeared under his name. They also call for reflection as to why
belief in the existence of a single and homogeneous Bakhtinian corpus persists
among many literary scholars, alongside their continued celebration of its
author’s many-sided genius.