452
PARTISAN REVIEW
of how civilization should deal with the individual's sense of insig–
nificance in the universe- is no small matter, after all.
STANISLAW BARANCZAK
DOSTOEVSKY'S CRISES
PROBLEMS OF DOSTOEVSKY'S POETICS. By Mikhail Bakhtln.
Edited and Translated by Caryl Emerson. Introduction by Wayne
C.
Booth.
University of Minnesota Press. $35.00.
DOSTOEVSKY: THE YEARS OF ORDEAL, 1850-1859. By Joseph
Frank.
Princeton University Press. $25.00.
Considering the historical circumstances in which he lived ,
Mikhail Bakhtin's longevity (1895-1975) was not the least of his ac–
complishments. Although his death is less than a decade behind us
and the attractive interpretive power of his open-ended and far-reach–
ing ideas have only recently begun to make themselves felt, he was
basically a man of the 1920s, that great period of transition, adjust–
ment and maladjustment, carnival time, the Soviet Union of the NEP ,
with the sinister shadow of the 1930s at the edge of the horizon.
Frances Yates, reviewing his book on Rabelais in the late 1960s,
thought him a Marxist. Perhaps he was. Yet he was also a Christian,
perhaps even Orthodox, but altogether free of sectarian narrowness or
closure. A typical and favorite adjective of his was "unfinalizable," and
he exults in what he calls "joyful relativity." He was, as his biographer
Michael Holquist has put it, "the poet of openness."
His book on Dostoevsky first appeared in 1929, the year of
Bakhtin's arrest, and a revised, expanded version was published in
Moscow in 1963, shortly after his return from years of semi-exile in
the East and Central Asia. An awkward English translation appeared
in 1973. (It has since been republished by Ardis Press, with only a few
corrections.) The present volume, edited and translated by Caryl
Emerson, more than makes good the frustrating inadequacies of the
older version, even carrying the tone and inflections, the poetic flare–
ups and occasional heaviness and repetitions of Bakhtin's authentic
voice. She has translated as well Bakhtin's notes and drafts for his
revision, has written a learned, perceptive preface and provided a
glossary of exotic reference. In his introduction, Wayne Booth, in-
