634
PARTISAN REVIEW
is full of repetitions and typographical errors . And the writing is
often quite pedestrian.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS
BAKHTIN'S MASKS
MIKHAIL BAKHTIN. By Katerlna Clark and Michael Holqulst.
Harvard
University Press. $25.00.
What kind of man was it who, having lost one leg through
osteomyelitis and in danger of losing the other, who seemingly drank
only tea in a life of austere marital seclusion, wrote so enthusiasti–
cally of the "grotesque body" and "prandial libertinism"? Who was
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin? Currently among the most influen–
tial and fashionable of critics, he is an enigma. We're not even sure
whether he wrote the books that are ascribed to him. Was he a wily
Christian who kept his head down and disguised his crypto-religious
beliefs as an enthusiasm for folk-populism, or was he a dedicated anti–
Stalinist Marxist? Was he both, and if so where did his mysticism
and his politics conflict and converge?
Despite assiduous archival research and patient gleaning of
facts from those who knew him, Clark and Holquist, in this am–
bitious biography, are able to answer none of these questions satis–
factorily . At the end of their sizeable book one gets the uncomfort–
able impression that , like the rogue
SeT Ciapelletto,
in the Boccaccio
story of which he was very fond, and which Clark and Holquist
rather ruefully quote in their introduction, Bakhtin has outwitted his
biographers .
He emerges from these pages without motives or passions, a
sort of puzzling and empty appendage to his own major writings:
bland, remote, even colorless, his thoughts and emotional life hid–
den from us despite the diligence and admiration of his biographers.
Aside from his academic publications, the whole biography contains
no single revealing word from Bakhtin about himself. The fact is
that he was a remarkably undemonstrative , phlegmatic , at times
even reclusive personality. Many of those who knew him best died in
the terrible years of the thirties. Living precariously through a
