In an early essay, Mikhail Bakhtin suggested that the aesthetic consummation of a life begins with death. If we assume that this process necessitates access to a writer's work, then the consummation of Bakhtin's life had to wait more than thirty years after his death in 1975 for a Collected Works. The availability of his full oeuvre opened the door for new, previously impossible approaches to the big questions of who and what Bakhtin was. Ken Hirschkop's The Cambridge Introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin is the first academic volume in English in which the task of contemplating the figure of the Russian thinker in its entirety relies precisely on such an availability. While the genre of Introductions does not presuppose an exhaustive answer, the book is remarkable in offering far more than just the contours of Bakhtin's works and days. Its compact size is amply compensated for by the density of the writing: in 160 pages, Hirschkop produces a brief yet comprehensive narrative of Bakhtin's life, brings into focus its intellectual context, and presents a thorough exegesis of Bakhtin's main ideas.
The effectiveness of the book rests on the balance between the complexity of Hirschkop's readings and the simplicity of the book's structure. Its three main foci—life, context, and works—form an inverted pyramid, in which analysis of Bakhtin's writing is expectedly allotted the most space. Hirschkop classifies Bakhtin's work into larger thematic clusters and provides each not only with a clear exposition of its main concepts, but also with an interpretation that seeks to explain some of the more ambiguous of Bakhtin's claims. In a section on heteroglossia, for example, Hirschkop points out that dialogism does not refer “to a dialogue between or among styles within a novel” (95) but rather to “a kind of testing and exhibiting” (98) through which the novel accomplishes one of its main tasks to reveal the “socio-ideological” image of “rough materials of speech” (96). Such realignment allows Hirschkop to articulate the importance of plot for Bakhtin, a concept that usually hides in the blind spot of Bakhtinian studies. Hirschkop suggests that for Bakhtin, plot is the primary mechanism of dialogic life, “the defining element of that higher unity of the work that determines the place and consequently the tone of the styles that are used within it” (97). Insights like these illuminate the “higher unity” of Hirschkop's own book—in this particular case, by strengthening its hypothesis that Bakhtin's “linguistic turn” was a conscious and necessary progression of his intellectual development rather than a “mask” (20) put on once speaking philosophy proper became unsafe.
Whereas Hirschkop's expositions of Bakhtin's conceptual clusters are invaluable to Bakhtin novices, seasoned Bakhtinians will be most interested in the “critiques” that follow the expositions, designed to explore the “ambiguities and rough edges” (68) of Bakhtin's theories as well as probe their validity and vitality. Some of these, like Terry Eagleton's criticism of carnival as a “licensed affair” (139) are well-trodden; others, however, in which Hirschkop puts Bakhtin's thought into dialogue with contemporary aesthetic and social theory, are less familiar and thus more exciting. Among them, for example, is Hirschkop's pushback on Bakhtin's insistence that heteroglossia is a spontaneous phenomenon of social life. Instead, using the anthropologist Asif Agha's argument that linguistic indexing occurs “through the circulation of discursive artifacts” (104), Hirschkop proposes that the relationship between literature and meta-literary linguistic life is more dynamic than Bakhtin's theory allows. Novels not only reflect the heteroglossic life, they create it.
The book is capped with a brief history of Bakhtin's reception. It neatly and—as all such summaries demand—somewhat reductively explains the three main contemporary trends in Bakhtin studies today: the spiritualist/religious school of interpretation originating in Russia, the personalist one based in the United States, and the sociologically contextualizing one from Britain, with which Hirschkop identifies himself. Such affiliation helps explain the kind of Bakhtin we encounter in this Introduction: a highly original and creative thinker, yet one who was deeply submerged into the philosophical and ideological context of his time. Hence, the book's most intriguing hypothesis presents Bakhtin as a kind of theological Marxist, who, not unlike Walter Benjamin, was captivated by the notion of messianic history that he inherited from his close friend Matvei Kogan. In this sense, Hirschkop's volume follows the spirit of its subject: providing its readers with an overview of Bakhtin's life, context, and thought, it feeds our desire to turn to Bakhtin himself and propels it into the future.
