BOOKS
635
period of immense upheaval and dislocation, he was exiled to remote
parts of Russia where he lived until the last part of his life in relative
seclusion and intellectual isolation from the mainstream of Soviet
life . He didn't write letters, and he didn't keep intimate journals or
diaries (though this may have been general political common sense
at the time, to judge from the Akhmatova biography) . We shall
never know why he was so apparently indifferent to his own
documents and writings - he used one important manuscript for cig–
arette paper during a paper shortage. What can be written about
him in large measure has to be circumstantial, inferred either from
the kind of company he kept or from his published scholarly writings.
In the absence of a substantial amount of biographical material,
most of the book is given over to a critical elucidation of Bakhtin's
major writings, which Clark and Holquist have done the invaluable
job of translating and disseminating in the West over the last few
years. But alas , any hope we might have had that biographical light
could be shed upon the writings is quickly disappointed . In his book
on Dostoevsky, Bakhtin remarked that critics take note of the swarm–
ing ideologies which conflict and collide with each other in Dostoev–
sky's world, "and yet sooner or later they end up choosing one of the
conflicting voices as 'truly representing' Dostoevsky's 'own' point of
view, which is really their own point of view." The same holds true of
course for critical discussion of Bakhtin himself, and though his
biographers here responsibly point out this danger
r
they naturally go
ahead to do precisely the same thing.
The resulting interpretation is a very conservative one. The
biography reveals an embarassment with Bakhtin's Marxism that it
seeks to resolve by emphasizing the religious and metaphysical strands
in his thinking. Bakhtin's Marxism is either presented as superficial,
no more than a pragmatic genuflection for reasons of self-preserva–
tion in the Stalinist state, or it is denied altogether. Is it really true,
as Clark and Holquist suggest, that when Bakhtin arrived in Len–
ingrad in 1924 during his "most productive period," he began his
translation of Lukacs's
Theory of the Novel
purely as a "quixotic at–
tempt to make money"? What evidence is there that this was a proj–
ect motivated only by financial necessity? And why is translating
Lukacs "quixotic"? In this respect the project is reminiscent of the
current mystification of Walter Benjamin, which metamorphoses a
committed Marxist who was
also
a deeply religious thinker, exclu–
sively into a Jewish mystic. I am suspicious of the way this biogra-
