Russian Studies in Philosophy

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Tones and Overtones of the Serious in Mikhail

Bakhtin's Philosophy

E.V. VOLKOVA & S.Z. ORUDZHEVA

To cite this article: E.V. VOLKOVA & S.Z. ORUDZHEVA (2004) Tones and Overtones of
the Serious in Mikhail Bakhtin's Philosophy, Russian Studies in Philosophy, 43:1, 35-61, DOI:
10.1080/10611967.2003.11063479

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10611967.2003.11063479

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 SUMMER 2004 35

Russian Studies in Philosophy, vol. 43, no.1 (Summer 2004), pp. 35–61.
© 2004 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.
1061–1967/2004 $9.50 + 0.00.

E.V. VOLKOVA AND S.Z. ORUDZHEVA

Tones and Overtones of the Serious

in Mikhail Bakhtin’s Philosophy

“The tone of threat-intimidation and of fear-meekness. These . . .

tones have numerous variations (and are rendered more complicated by
various overtones) . . . they are outside the familiar and are serious.”
—M. Bakhtin
“Only a dialogic stance of mutuality takes another’s word seriously.”
—M. Bakhtin

The judgments Bakhtin expresses in the above epigraphs are polar op-
posites. Fear and intimidation become manifest in situations involving
unequals, and their seriousness tends toward the negative pole. A dia-
logic stance involving a response to either a spoken or merely potential
word is a seriousness of a different, positive type, for it presupposes the
right of the other to his or her vision of meaning, space-time, and val-
ues. Between these poles of interaction, according to Bakhtin, there are
many variations, including antinomic ones.
With the publication of the fifth volume of the projected seven vol-
umes of Bakhtin’s collected works1 Bakhtin emerges as a philosopher
who thinks through the problem of seriousness as an inseparable aspect

English translation © 2004 M.E. Sharpe, Inc., from the Russian text © 2000 the
Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences. “Tona i obertony ser’eznogo v
filosofii M. Bakhtina,” Voprosy filosofii, 2000, no. 1, pp. 102–18. A publication of
the Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences.
Elena Vasil’evna Volkova is a doctor of philosophical sciences and a professor in
the department of esthetics of the Philosophy Faculty of Moscow State University.
Sabina Zaidovna Orudzheva is a candidate of philosophical sciences.
Translated by Laura Esther Wolfson.
35
36 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

of being, culture, and art. And not only official, frozen, rather gloomy
seriousness, which is opposed to the unofficial force of the carnival, but
also the seriousness of the unofficial. And the force of laughter itself,
either openly revealed or reduced, emerges in turn as serious-laughing.
It is only in the archival texts of the fifth volume that the problem of
the significance of seriousness in art and philosophy receives the atten-
tion it deserves: “the tragic cosmos,” “the lachrymose aspect of the
world,” fear, pity, suffering, solitude, pride, and all-forgiving love. If
these texts are read alongside Bakhtin’s well-known works, it follows
from them that the problem of seriousness interested the philosopher in
all periods of his intellectual life but assumed particular importance in
the context of his “Rabelais cycle.” The commentators of the fifth vol-
ume subsume under this name not only the three editions of Rabelais
(1940, 1949/50, 1965) but also the articles and notes that laid the ground-
work for this massive oeuvre, are close to it in their problematic, and
develop and amend the ideas of carnivalesque-generic culture and the
ways in which it interacts with personalistic culture. Bakhtin’s interest
in tragedy and the tragic, as well as in cathartic liberation from fear and
false hope, becomes obvious: “in different ways, tragedy frees from them
and laughter frees from them.”2
Overall, the fifth volume is of immense value for students of Bakhtin’s
philosophical legacy. The works in this volume lay out a new synthesis
of all the problems that interested Bakhtin throughout his entire life. To
use Bakhtin’s own words, the published archival notes “draw into a single
knot” as it were all the problems that previously interested Bakhtin.
Thus, among the works published in the fifth volume there are sev-
eral devoted to problems of Dostoevsky’s work: “Toward a History of
the Type (Genre Variety) of the Dostoevsky Novel” [K istorii tipa
(zhanrovoi raznovidnosti) romana Dostoevskogo], “1961. Notes” [1961
god. Zametki], “Dostoevsky, 1961,” and “Notes, 1962–1963” [Zametki
1962–1963]. From 1940 to 1960 Bakhtin continued to probe more deeply
into Dostoevsky’s work on the basis of much new literary material
(Flaubert, France, Sterne, Jean-Paul, Mérimée, Daudet, etc.). As is well
known, not all of these notes made it into the second edition of the work
on Dostoevsky, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics [Problemy poetiki
Dostoevskogo]. Clearly, we are now dealing with a mass of ideas and
additional observations by Bakhtin on the topic of Dostoevsky’s literary
work, which are nonetheless linked by a single thread, namely, the con-
ception of the polyphonic novel and the specifics of novelistic prose.
 SUMMER 2004 37

Obviously, the task of the immediate future is to recreate a unified con-

ception of Dostoevsky’s work in Bakhtin’s interpretation.
In this article we will pay particular attention to the problem of seri-
ousness in Bakhtin’s interpretation. It is revealed quite vividly in the
texts of the fifth volume, for that is where the problem of seriousness in
the broad sense of its main tones and overtones is posed.3
In connection with these concepts, which are also mentioned in the
title of the article, we should note Bakhtin’s extensive use of musical
terminology, which he raised to the rank of philosophical-esthetic con-
cepts, although he noted their metaphorical genealogy. Thus, starting
with his earliest works the words “tone,” “tonality,” and “voice” carried
a special semantic load; then such terms as “high register” and “orches-
trate” appeared; and the phrase “polyphonic novel” became widely
known. How were these terms filled with new meaning? Generally, it
was done as follows. For Bakhtin “voice” is not only pitch, range, tim-
bre, and esthetic coloring, but also worldview, destiny, and unique indi-
viduality. “Tone,” adopted by Latin (tonus) from the Greek, means
tension, stress, accentuation. Also, as a musical term, it is the main to-
nality of a work, in which the work begins and ends. The basic tone is
heard more clearly than the others, while overtones, “harmonic subnotes,”
which fill out the sound of the main tone, are fainter than it, but as it
were blend with it. “Tone” in the broader sense in Bakhtin’s philosophi-
cal interpretation is an emotional-volitional “attitude of consciousness,
morally significant and responsibly active.”4 It expresses the entire “full-
ness of event-as-being;” the interpenetration of the concrete uniqueness
of man and the unity of culture, theory, and morals; the interrelation of
the time and space of limited life and eternity or limitlessness; and the
interplay of small and large time in art and of everydayness and being.
In each one of Bakhtin’s verbal images the sound of muted paired
tones of seriousness can be heard. He calls this “resonance” of an image
or word artistic tonality. The first pair of serious tones is supplication-
prayer and praise-glorification. Various supplicatory and laudatory styles
are linked to these tones. The second pair of serious tones is threat-
intimidation or fear-meekness (116). All these primary serious tones
have many overtones and variations of resonance, such as request, ten-
derness, veneration, threat, complaint, sorrow as an element of com-
plaint, woe, fear, despair, anxiety, pity, gratitude, compassion, veneration,
piety, anger, the triumph of strength, and so on and so forth. All these
numerous manifestations of seriousness have, nonetheless, a single root.
38 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

To such tones and overtones, which resound in a setting of inequality,

Bakhtin juxtaposes the tone of pure love.
Bakhtin particularly notes “the dialogic overtones that in any speech
are mixed into its primary tone.” These are “expressions that have to
do not with the subject but with someone else’s speech about the sub-
ject . . . expressions of agreement-disagreement (expressed in intona-
tions), irony, doubt about the correctness, etc.” (238). Expression
appears also when someone else’s speech remains outside utterance.
However, a contradiction can arise between the direct emotional im-
pression and its interpretation-assessment at the rational level; we can
fail to distinguish what is acting upon us—the main tone or its over-
tones. Thus, in reading Shakespeare, we are moved by the truly pro-
found tone of his plays—the tragedy of any self-affirming life that is
doomed to birth and death, the tragedy of self-crowning and power as
a supra-judicial crime. But we prefer to discuss only the overtones of
the judicial traits and historical specifics.
In the early 1960s, almost twenty years after “Supplements and
Changes to Rabelais” [Dopolneniia i izmeneniia k “Rable”] was writ-
ten, when the monograph about Rabelais was published, and the book
about Dostoevsky was republished, the possibility appeared of adding
an essay on the carnivalesque-laughing wellsprings of Dostoevsky’s
works to the second edition of the book on him, and an analysis of the
problems of the serious, including of the tragic (based on material on
Shakespeare’s tragedies and parallels in the Russian literary tradition,
in Gogol and Dostoevsky), to the book on Rabelais. The first task was
carried out, although Bakhtin himself thought that it was not done ad-
equately, while the second took merely the form of a digression, an
extended “qualification” by Bakhtin. S.G. Bocharov recalls, “He val-
ued the qualification as a necessary corrective that obviated an ex-
tended judgment and he had mastered the culture of the qualification.”5
However, the qualification remained an unnoticed criticism. Its con-
ceptual meaning becomes clear, perhaps, only in light of the publica-
tions included in the fifth volume.
In his monograph, in the section “Rabelais in the History of Laughter”
[Rable v istorii smekha], Bakhtin explains that the carnivalesque form
of laughter in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which he is inves-
tigating, is not opposed to seriousness in general (!) but rather to one-
sided, dogmatic seriousness. Bakhtin distinguishes gloomy dogmatic
seriousness and open seriousness that is not dogmatic or one-sided.6
 SUMMER 2004 39

Nondogmatic seriousness is tragic seriousness. It is expressed in an-

cient Greek tragedy, which did not rule out the laughing aspect and even
“required such a corrective and compensation.” This, notes Bakhtin, is
also a form of Socrates’s critical philosophy, which liberated the philo-
sophical dialogue from “one-sided rhetorical seriousness.” In the cul-
ture of the modern period, he says, one can speak of strict scholarly
seriousness: it is not dogmatic but is problematic, self-critical, and
uncompletable. Authentic open seriousness fears neither parody nor irony,
nor other forms of diminished laughter, for it feels its closeness to the
uncompletable whole of the world.7
In “Supplements” and other working notes, Bakhtin referred to these
two types of seriousness by other names—official and unofficial seri-
ousness. Unofficial seriousness is above all the seriousness of weakness
and suffering, of the slave and the victim. This seriousness expresses the
protest of any individual against the eternal law of change and renewal,
against dissolution in the characteristic facelessness of the whole. This
consists of “the greatest and most justified claims to eternity, to the in-
destructibility of everything that once was” (81). Dostoevsky’s heroes
are serious with precisely this type of unofficial seriousness, Bakhtin
suggests (81). They are constantly engaged in a strenuous search for
answers to the “ultimate” questions of human existence: “Am I a quiver-
ing wretch or do I have rights?” Dostoevsky’s heroes are always seeking
and learning. Among them there are almost no characters that are con-
cerned with the external, official side of life, comfort and prosperity.
Almost all of them, from the lowliest to princes, discuss the meaning of
life, divine justice, eternity, love, and beauty.
But if seriousness is absolutized, it turns into frozen officiality. Of-
ficial seriousness is of one tone and style, according to Bakhtin. It
completely repudiates laughter as its complementary pole. Official seri-
ousness is the seriousness of power that intimidates and threatens.
Unofficial seriousness is not the absolute opposite of carnivalesque
laughter. It exists alongside the latter and complements it. In doing so
unofficial seriousness reinforces and deepens significance of carnival
images and plots for worldviews. Ambivalent and universal laughter,
in turn, does not negate, but on the contrary, completes and purifies
seriousness, prevents it from freezing and separating from “the
uncompletable wholeness of being.” Dogmatism in all of its versions
kills both authentic tragedy and ambivalent laughter. Bakhtin believes
that there are works of world literature in which the serious and the
40 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

laughable aspects of the world are harmoniously linked, mutually ful-

filling, and reflecting each other. Among them are the immortal plays of
William Shakespeare and the novels of F.M. Dostoevsky.
Bakhtin calls the specific type of worldview and culture that arises as
a result of the absolutization of monolithic and monotonal official seri-
ousness “officialized” (81). The process of officialization begins with
removing an image’s original carnivalesque double meaning. Opposites,
previously organically linked in an ambivalent image, are now sepa-
rated and set against each other, and the boundaries between them are
fixed and reinforced. In the framework of officialized culture, forms of
monumentalized and heroized images predominate. Bakhtin notes a cer-
tain degree of “internal and external coerciveness” and completeness of
form in officialized cultures and the literary genres (such as the ode,
epic, and epopee) to which they give rise. The act of eternalization, the
striving for the indestructibility of all that exists—the setting of bound-
aries, hierarchies, and the basic tone—plays a leading role in forming
genres and images of officialized culture. In the officialized picture of
the world all phenomena are strictly segregated. Everything is “equal
only to itself.” The images of such cultures are one-sided and have no
prospects: they are completed. Here, various types of reduction or parody
and any familiarity with the role and mask changes inherent in them are
unacceptable. Officialized cultures are hostile to change. They are “mono-
lithic-serious” and “substantial.” They dogmatize content and its forms
and include many prohibitions and taboos. Carnivalesque laughter is
almost never heard here, for it destroys all existing boundaries and wel-
comes and extols change. The images of officialized culture are the di-
rect opposites of carnivalesque and carnivalized images.
However, officialized culture is a mere “islet, surrounded by an ocean
of the unofficial” (81)—this is one of Bakhtin’s most important insights.
Remaining within the boundaries of the official, hierarchical-stable world,
neither image, man, nor phenomenon can fully manifest and reveal all
of its sides. In such conditions only the external, formal side, the “face,”
is revealed. To reveal its depths and fully “bare itself” an image must be
encountered on a different plane, beyond the official and hierarchical
one. To uncover suddenly the rich palette of unofficial serious hues and
their accompanying laughing tones the images must be removed from
the official sphere.
To shed light on the question of the appearance of the tone of serious-
ness in culture and literature Bakhtin turns to the phenomenon of fear.
 SUMMER 2004 41

The problem of fear in its broad existential sense had already been raised
in the history of philosophy prior to Bakhtin. In Schopenhauer’s,
Kierkegaard’s, Jaspers’s, and Heidegger’s philosophy, fear emerges as a
metaphysical horror before the suddenly opened abyss of existence into
which man, the finite individual, is “thrown.”
As he said, Bakhtin became acquainted with Kierkegaard “before
anyone else in Russia.”8 A Swiss by the name of Hans Linbach, a pas-
sionate follower of Kierkegaard, presented young Bakhtin with
Kierkegaard’s books in German translation. Bakhtin had a high opinion
of the Dane’s philosophy and spoke of him as “the great Dane” and “a
great scholar,” whose “closeness to Dostoevsky is astonishing, and
[whose] problematic is almost the same, with almost the same profun-
dity.”9 The existential problematic of Kierkegaard’s works, which by
that time had all been translated into German (Bakhtin studied them in
the German collection), is extremely close to Bakhtin’s philosophical
interests: seriousness, fear, eternity, and temporality—all of these is-
sues were raised by Kierkegaard.
Turning to the problem of defining seriousness, Kierkegaard stated
that in science there is not a single definition of seriousness, since seri-
ousness “is such a serious thing that any definition of it will turn out to
be frivolous.”10 In Kierkegaard’s philosophy seriousness is one of the
basic existential concepts. It is “an essential characteristic of personal-
ity, “an acquired originality” of its mood. The object of seriousness,
according to Kierkegaard, is “certainty,” the “internal sense” as a source
of eternal life. The concept of internal sense in Kierkegaard’s philoso-
phy is revealed as the internal unity of man’s soul with the existence of
God. For that reason the internal sense is the source of eternity.
Kierkegaard believed that anyone who does not understood the eternal
according to its true worth is lacking in internal sense and seriousness.
Kierkegaard also analyzed various types of seriousness. Thus, he wrote
that anyone who has not acquired seriousness in respect to its true ob-
ject but has acquired it in respect to something else—to his work, for
example—remains for all of his outward seriousness simply a buffoon.
And vice versa: he who is truly serious where it is necessary can treat
everything else in a lighthearted manner.11 These comments mesh with
Bakhtin’s ideas.
While absorbing the existential “serious” problematic of Kierkegaard’s
works, Bakhtin at the same time creatively rethought and developed it.
As V.L. Makhlin rightly writes, “this is a case in which the ‘degree of
42 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

responsibility’ (understanding) is so great that it is more correct to speak

not of ‘influence,’ but rather of the systematic place that the problematic
of the Danish thinker occupies in the system of Bakhtin’s theoretical
philosophy.”12 Makhlin suggests that Bakhtin’s reception of Kierkegaard
was of an “inheriting-integrating” character and was combined with
completely different problems that Bakhtin had set for himself.
In our opinion, for Bakhtin seriousness is linked above all with the
idea of “nonalibi in being,” with the theme of “obligatory singularity”
and responsibility. Seriousness lies in the correlation of the eternal
with the determined life of mortal man, of the little world of the self
with the great world of culture. Hence, the encounter between author
and hero is treated as an event of being “of their life, of a tense-serious
[emphasis added—E.V. and S.O.] relationship and struggle.”13
The difference with Kierkegaard lies in the consistent value-based
interpretation of the serious as esthetic: “We create a musical form not
in a value vacuum and not amid other musical forms (music amid mu-
sic) but in the event of life and only this makes it serious, eventfully
significant, weighty”14 (emphasis added—E.V. and S.O.). Since for
Bakhtin seriousness is an essential “internal form” of self-conscious-
ness, it acquires an esthetic meaning in his philosophy thanks to his
attention to the external forms of its expression and various tones of
its resonance in literature. Thus, the examination of the problem of
seriousness in “Toward the Philosophical Foundations of the Human
Sciences” [K filosofskim osnovam gumanitarnykh nauk] begins with
a description of the external expression of seriousness: “wrinkled brows,
intimidating eyes, tensely gathered folds and wrinkles, and so on—
elements of fear or intimidation, a preparation for attack or defense, a
call to submission (?) an expression of iron necessity, categoricality,
indisputability, etc.” (10).
In distinction from the existentialist reading of the serious and the
fear and the overcoming of fear associated with it, the Bakhtinian in-
terpretation examines seriousness within the framework of the con-
ception of dialogism and in close correlation with the goal of the culture
of laughter. In his book on Dostoevsky Bakhtin writes: “The hero is
neither ‘he’ nor ‘I’ for the author, but rather a full-fledged ‘thou,’ that
is, another foreign, independent ‘I’ (‘thou art’). The hero is the subject
of a deeply serious, genuine, and not rhetorically staged or literally
conventional, dialogic address.”15 Only the dialogic attitude, accord-
ing to Bakhtin, takes “the other’s word seriously.” Seriousness lies in
 SUMMER 2004 43

the fact that every lived experience, every thought, is accompanied by a

glance at another person.
Seriousness arises where there is a threat and its accompanying fear—
of the future, of disappearing, and of change. It is born of danger. When
the danger is overcome, seriousness is replaced by laughter. Genuine
gaiety cannot be compatible with fear, Bakhtin believed, for laughter
does not fear change: on the contrary, it fixes the very moment of change
and welcomes it.
However, Bakhtin does not accept naive optimism, which he finds
even in Lev Tolstoy. He not only had a deep understanding of the deep-
est anxieties of existentialism, but he shared the fate of a human being
and scholar of the tragic twentieth century. Because of this, in his philo-
sophical esthetics Bakhtin wrote much about death and said that our
tragedy, in contrast to Greek tragedy, cannot be “as pure.” It is more
terrible and “imbued . . . with the sensation of emptiness” and, at the
same time, inseparable from comedy.16 What is more, knowledge of
emptiness and even involvement in emptiness is necessary for a poet. In
genuine, serious music and in serious poetry, there is always an element
“from the end, from death, of some sort of form, some kind of forebod-
ing.”17 And if this is lacking, then, according to Bakhtin, poetry too is
lacking. Let us note here a typically Bakhtinian line of thinking on the
significance of memory, on not forgetting that which has passed, on the
glance at the graves: “and yet, the arts have always been linked with the
memory of the ancestors, the dead, with the grave . . . with lamenta-
tion.”18 For Bakhtin memory has the ontological and cultural force of
the requiem as purification.
Obviously, the initial occurrence of fear is unofficial seriousness,
the seriousness of the frightened victim, the small and weak individual.
But then arises the protest of this individual, “the protest of the part
against its dissolution in the whole” (81). Fear can grow into a threat
that claims to become an official force. Such seriousness begins to
strive for the complete stabilization of the world and the monotoneness
of its images, the establishment of hierarchy, and the strict fixation
and hardening of boundaries. In essence, this is, according to its ori-
gin, an attempt to confirm and eternalize oneself as an individual, an
attempt to overcome the transitory nature of individual human life.
And here lies the root of the tragic conflict that Bakhtin analyzes on
the basis of Shakespeare’s tragedies.
Seriousness, which is born of fear, presupposes supplication, prayer
44 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

or threat, a definite interest (in the broad sense of the word), and a striv-
ing for stabilization and completion. Thus, seriousness is not a peaceful
and self-confident force; it is “a threatened and therefore threatening
force or a supplicant weakness” (10). Here is the remarkable peripeteia
of Bakhtin’s antinomic thought: the threatening force of seriousness
suddenly turns into frightened weakness. Sure of itself, the invincible
force can only smile, Bakhtin asserts. Thus, “nature represented as an
all-powerful and all-conquering whole is not serious but rather indiffer-
ent or simply smiling (‘beaming’)” (10).
Breaking away from the laughing polarity that gives it balance, seri-
ousness becomes monotonal and official. Now it will not be able to exist
without the necessary form of the lie. Bakhtin raises a profound ethical
problem that in his philosophy is inseparably connected with ethical
issues. It seems that in his rough notes the philosopher sketched a very
interesting line of analysis of lying. Unfortunately, it is only outlined in
a few conjectures that look like the points of a definite plan of analysis:
“The phenomenology of the lie. . . . Philosophy of the lie. The rhetorical
lie. The lie in artistic imagery” (69–70). Bakhtin believed that the lie is
a necessary component of all forms of official seriousness, which are
connected with fear, violence, and threats. The lie is directly propor-
tional to violence. It can be said that violence is impossible without
lying. This is a highly ingenious, concealed, and for that reason the most
dangerous form of violence. Therefore, for Bakhtin the lie is “the most
modern and relevant form of evil” (69).
Absolutizing certain individual aspects of reality, the lying utterance
blinds people: it either frightens, intimidates, threatens, or else entices,
promises, and subordinates the deceived by raising hopes. The lie “reifies”
a person, that is, deprives his personality of full freedom and turns him
into an object of manipulation. The deceived is easy to manage: he is
transformed into a thing. This tendency to “reify” man has penetrated
deeply into literature, Bakhtin suggests. This is why he writes that lit-
erature is “infected” with violence and lies.
It is possible to overcome and neutralize the lie in an art image by an
ambiguous merging of laudatory and abusive tones. This is possible
within the framework of the tradition of carnivalization. Such, for ex-
ample, is the literary image of the merry conman, who opposes the pa-
thetic lie that has accumulated in the language of official canonized genres
not with the pathetic direct truth, but with “the merry and clever decep-
tion”: by periodically reproducing any kind of pathos, the conman ren-
 SUMMER 2004 45

ders it harmless, “pushing it away from the lips with a smile and decep-
tion, mocking the lie and thus transforming the lie into a merry decep-
tion.”19 In this way the lie parodies itself. There is yet another way of
overcoming the lie in an artistic image—by the special dialogic position
of the author, the specific nonviolent tone of the authorial word.
The tones that resonate in literary space were born in a world of
unequals, of strong and weak, of fathers and sons. Practically all of them
are “obscured,” as Bakhtin writes, by hierarchical tones. Infected by
violence the literary authorial word seems remote. It does not acknowl-
edge the right of man-as-image to an equal voice and speaks of him as
absent and silent, that is, it crushes and subordinates him to a certain
degree. What is more: “There are no forms yet that have matured in the
world of equals and in an atmosphere of fearless freedom except for
specific forms of familiar communication (isolated, utopian, market-
square forms)” (117). Bakhtin greatly appreciated Dostoevsky precisely
because the latter gave each protagonist the right to speak without re-
stricting his image with an unambiguous and final assessment. A differ-
ent tendency, which Bakhtin welcomed, emerged in Dostoevsky’s
work—the tendency to “de-reify” the image of man in literature in which
the image of the protagonist-personality voluntarily “self-reveals itself”
before the reader, carries on a dialogue with the other protagonists and
with itself, speaks in its own possible justification, and at the same time
judges itself. The highest form of man’s voluntary self-revelation is the
protagonist’s confession. This is why there are so many confessions in
Dostoevsky’s novels.
The problem of a “new seriousness” that Bakhtin raised in this con-
nection is both esthetic and moral-ethical in nature: “genuine, deep seri-
ousness leaves behind all ready-made, prepared, stable, traditionally
sanctified, and comfortable forms and begins to feel ashamed of all these
forms; it hangs in mid-air and seeks new forms. A great migration of
seriousness occurs” (50–51).
Bakhtin suggests that in literature the seriousness of the word uttered
until now has often been linked with fear and violence, while the revela-
tion of the protagonist before the world of others should be voluntary.
Bakhtin firmly believes that it is impossible to spy and eavesdrop on the
inner life of another’s soul. A soul will reveal itself to us fully and will
present us with the secret depths of its self only if its self-revelation is
voluntary. A pure tone of love, unclouded by any impurities, has yet to
be born in the world language of images. At the basis of the artistic
46 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

tonality of the word there is always some minimum of esthetic love

without which an artistic approach to the world, Bakhtin believes, is
completely impossible. But in spite of this, genuine, selfless, undemand-
ing love in its pure form does not resound yet in the larger space of
world literature, although its radiant motif sometimes pierces the cus-
tomary cover of certain images, for example, of Sonechka Marmeladova,
Ophelia, and Cordelia. This love is “still serious, but it wants to smile; it
is a smile and a joy that ceaselessly vanquish seriousness, smooth the
facial features of seriousness, and overcome the threatening tone” (66).
This is almost laughter, the smile through tears not yet dried. A similar
pure tone appears in literature only from time to time and does not dis-
turb the habitual structure of the artistic image.
There is yet another broad theme in which serious tones sound with
full force: this is the theme of solitude. It is directly linked with the very
emergence of the serious tone in culture. In this case we are speaking
not only of the solitude of the individual surrounded by “others” who do
not understand him. There is an existential level to this problem. What
we are talking about is the profound solitude of any man, of every indi-
vidual being living on Earth. For Bakhtin one of the authors who were
able to sense this existential situation of individual life, express it, and
solve it through the very form of its presentation was Dostoevsky.
The tone of solitude in Dostoevsky’s novels receives the most unex-
pected antinomic expansion. “To be—means to communicate. . . . To
be—means to be for the other and through the other for oneself ” (344).
This is how being is realized for all of Dostoevsky’s heroes without
exception. They communicate everywhere and always, they do so with
intensity and passion. Bakhtin sees all of Dostoevsky’s heroes partici-
pating in a worldwide dialogue, their lives unfolding on the world stage,
in the sphere of expressive and talking being (8). Dostoevsky’s heroes
participate in the worldwide argument of voices with their own word,
gesture, act, silence, and even their death. They always look at them-
selves through “another’s” eyes. This is why, Bakhtin writes, they are
always “before a mirror” (368). This is the starting position.
At the same time in his novels, Dostoevsky often depicts suffering,
humiliation, and nonrecognition by others. Some of his characters are
deprived of any recognition and are driven into forced solitude, which
they strenuously try to overcome. The old man Marmeladov or Nastas’ia
Filippovna strive to get at least a drop of human warmth, of understand-
ing and forgiveness from other people. Here sounds the overtone of pride
 SUMMER 2004 47

as proud solitude. Bakhtin treats pride as an attempt to renounce the

necessary communication with the world: as the self-sufficiency of the
solitary self that does not need others for its being, although this rheto-
ric conceals a yearning for understanding. Such are Nastas’ia Filippovna’s
angry outbursts and Ivan Karamazov’s exaggerated intellectual snobbism.
But, as Bakhtin suggests, shutting oneself off in one’s own world and
repudiating the “other” cannot solve the problems of solitariness.
In this sense, Bakhtin feels, Dostoevsky is opposed to all decadent
and individualistic culture as a culture of fundamental solitude. For him
one of Dostoevsky’s achievements is to overcome ethical solipsism. All
of Dostoevsky’s work affirms the impossibility and illusory nature of
solitude, the illusory nature of self-fullness. Man as a person becomes
himself and can be himself only at the border with the world of “others,”
and not in isolation from it. All that is meaningful and serious occurs on
the border of one’s own and another’s consciousness, at the threshold.
This idea is a central idea in Bakhtin’s philosophy.
The tragic genre is the apotheosis of the resonating tone of serious-
ness in world literature.
It would not be completely correct to assert that an interest in the
problem of the tragic is unexpected and uncharacteristic of Bakhtin’s
work. Already in an early work dating back to the first half of the 1920s
“Author and Hero in Esthetic Activity” [Avtor i geroi v esteticheskoi
deiatel’nosti], the philosopher reflected on the nature and character of
the tragic hero’s guilt. In addition Bakhtin mentioned the tragic hero as
an object of the author’s/viewer’s esthetic love in his conception of es-
thetic completion. Nonetheless the significant amount of material in
“Supplements and Changes to Rabelais” that is devoted to the problem
of tragic conflict based on the example of Shakespeare’s tragedies makes
it possible to speak about the discovery of a new, previously unknown
page in Bakhtin’s philosophical work.
“Supplements and Changes to Rabelais” adds to the book on laughter
and the culture of laughter not merely the problem of seriousness but
also an analysis that is directly linked with the seriousness of the tragic
conflict, which was left outside the framework of the 1965 publication.
As L.A. Gogotishvili rightly notes, the presence of the tragic aspect in
the popular carnivalesque world-perception has not been clearly brought
out in Bakhtin studies in spite of Bakhtin’s own numerous, although
very brief, comments on this.20 True enough, the prevailing opinion
among researchers is that Bakhtin’s understanding of the popular-
48 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

carnivalesque world-perception is exclusively in terms of laugher and

profanation. In reality, in Bakhtin’s esthetics it is “tragedy plus satiri-
cal drama that restore the ambivalence and the integrity of the popular
image” (80).
Such an approach to the problematic of tragedy is not new in the
history of esthetics. Scholars had already noted the initial kinship of the
two at first seemingly opposed genre tendencies. Even Aristotle in his
Poetics pointed to the fact that tragedy at the very start of its develop-
ment had a “mocking mode of expression,” since it had been derived
from satirical performances and dithyrambs, and only with time did it
liberate itself from its laughing tones.21 Nietzsche made a similar point
in his The Birth of Tragedy or Hellenism and Pessimism, where he views
tragedy as the offspring of the Dionysian, orgiastic cult of the ancient
Greeks in which tragic motifs of death were juxtaposed with the merry
orgies of the rebirth of a dismembered god.22 A scholar of the Dionysian
cult, Viacheslav Ivanov, also noted the fact that “in the early synchretic
play, the tragic-sorrowful was whimsically mixed with unbridled merri-
ment.”23 Later on the tragedy of the modern age repudiated the laughing
tones and concentrated on the heroic-lofty.
Bakhtin’s interpretation of the tragic conflict can be properly delin-
eated only in close connection with his theory of carnival laughter and
the ambivalent category of the serious-laughing. The tragic conflict arises
on the border of the clash of the officialized, monotonal-serious picture
of the world and the uncompleted, ceaselessly becoming, and self-
renewing whole of being.
In close connection with the theme of seriousness, which arises in the
work “Supplements and Changes to Rabelais,” Bakhtin gives a non-
traditional interpretation of the problem of the tragic in world literature.
However, this is not the first work in which Bakhtin turns to the problem
of the tragic. In an early work of the 1920s, “Author and Hero in Es-
thetic Activity,” investigating the specific aspects of the character of the
classical hero, Bakhtin studies the nature of tragic guilt. Here one can
already note a particular line in Bakhtin’s understanding of the tragic
conflict. He proposes that guilt can be transferred fully beyond the lim-
its of the tragic hero’s consciousness to the past of his genus (mankind).
Guilt exists initially in being as a kind of generic force and is not born
for the first time in the moral awareness of the hero as its free initiator.
Here is what Bakhtin writes in this regard, as if placing himself in the
position of the tragic hero: “I do not begin life and am not its valuatively
 SUMMER 2004 49

responsible initiator; I do not even have the valuative approach to ini-

tiate actively the valuative-meaningful, responsible order of life; I can
act and valuate on the basis of already given and valuated life; the series
of acts does not begin with me, I merely continue it (including acts-as-
thoughts, acts-as-feelings, and acts-as-actions); I am linked by an un-
breakable relationship of filiality to the fathers and mothers of the family
(family in the narrow sense, family-as-nation, mankind). . . . I can only
be what I already essentially am; I cannot reject my essential already-
being for it is not mine, but my mother’s, my father’s, family’s, nation’s,
humanity’s” (EST, 155). In other words, the tragic guilt of the hero,
according to Bakhtin, has the power of the very being of the human
race, that is, it is in a certain sense ontological. Guilt exists as an es-
sential characteristic of being, its unavoidable quality. It arose with
the appearance of human existence, long before the appearance and
the actions of the concrete hero. In his early analysis of the tragedy
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, L.S. Vygotsky called this kind of guilt
the “guilt of being.” The tragic hero, of course, is guilty (almost al-
ways guilty, Bakhtin clarifies), but he is not guilty of the original ap-
pearance of this guilt as an eternal force. He assumes the burden of
this guilt and expiates his share, but he did not give rise to it. Thus,
Bakhtin understands guilt as a universal category of the being of the
human race.
The original interpretation of the tragic conflict in world literature
that Bakhtin presents in “Supplements and Changes to Rabelais” be-
came the logical continuation and completion of the tendency to
ontologize the tragic conflict that he set forth in “Author and Hero in
Esthetic Activity.” Gadamer noted that in contemporary esthetics there
is a tendency to regard the tragic as an extra-esthetic phenomenon. We
have begun to treat the tragic primarily as an ethico-metaphysical phe-
nomenon that falls into the sphere of the esthetic problematic only from
outside.24 From outside, that is, from life itself, from being. In the es-
thetics and philosophy of the last two centuries of European culture,
tragedy has been perceived as an inseparable part of life itself, its essen-
tial, if not primary, characteristic. A similar nonclassical line of inter-
pretation of the tragic conflict in the history of esthetics and philosophy
was laid out by the German philosopher Schopenhauer, who interpreted
tragedy as a poetic genre whose goal was to depict the horrible side of
life as a senseless struggle of the blind world will with itself. Nietzsche,
who also repudiated the explanation of the tragic conflict as compre-
50 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

hensible and declared tragedy to be the original irrational essence of

human existence, continued this tradition. Subsequently, this motif was
highly developed in existentialism. The unavoidability of tragedy as an
essential trait of human life was noted by Heidegger, Jaspers, and Camus.
Bakhtin analyzes the structure of the tragic conflict on the basis of
Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth and reveals three levels in it.
At the foundation of any tragedy lies the profound tragedy of any
individual life that is born of another’s death and gives birth with its
own death to a new, alien life. The logic of tragic heroes’ actions is the
necessary “iron logic of self-crowning.” The essence or nucleus of any
tragedy is the “suprajudicial” crime of any self-affirming life, if one
stubbornly insists on it. The crime necessarily includes the negation of
the preceding link in the chain of generations (rejection of the father’s
authority and, ultimately, his murder) and the renouncement of the suc-
ceeding link (reluctance to make way for the son as the potential succes-
sor and, ultimately, once again the murder of the son).
The ultimate triumph of the individual is the crowning, the kingdom.
This is why in Macbeth Shakespeare inserts the tragedy of the individual
into a tragedy of power. Any power is hostile to change; it is based on
lies, violence, intimidation, and the mutual fear of ruler and ruled.
Thus yet another suprajudicial crime occurs—the crime of any power.
The second level of images involves the tragedy of the ruler-criminal.
Here the judicial crime (against people and society) takes place.
Shakespeare takes the situation to its extreme: we are faced with a power
that consolidates itself by spilling other people’s blood, through murder.
According to Bakhtin, the third, more superficial level of images has
to do with concrete historical reality: Rome, Denmark, Scotland, and
Britain. The images are made concrete in a cross section of historical
reality. Bakhtin uses a very expressive comparison of this level of im-
ages with an architectural ornament: while it has, of course, an indepen-
dent significance, this level nonetheless basically softens and veils the
movement of the primary weight-bearing structures of tragedy. There
are works in which the entire burden of meaning rests mostly on the
historical ornament. For this reason they lack that internal power and
nontransitory profound meaning that strikes us in the works of
Shakespeare, who is a playwright primarily of the first, profound level
of images. In his plays, according to Bakhtin, we are struck and fasci-
nated mostly by precisely the basic tones, that which is usually hidden
beneath the surface of a specific historical epoch and political intrigue.
 SUMMER 2004 51

Bakhtin suggests that the author must give the tragic hero an “ex-
treme” character in order to bring about and reveal the deep tragic con-
flict of the individual life. Macbeth is both guilty and not guilty at the
same time. He is guilty insofar as he has murdered and keeps on mur-
dering. He is not guilty insofar as life itself has determined his unstable
and fleeting position in this world, as it does for every man, and Macbeth’s
strong nature rises up against the implacable law of existence.
The dialogue of ideas of the two brothers, Mikhail and Nikolai Bakhtin,
is important. Any form, writes Nikolai Bakhtin, always heralds a struggle,
always reveals pressure coming from within, a selfless effort directed
outward. A living form is an expression of self-affirming existence. A
form is “like a fragile boundary defined by the encounter and struggle of
two irreconcilable and unequal forces. On the one hand, a being driving
for realization; on the other hand, the invisible and fateful given,” heavy
with all the inertia of the elements, space, and time. The outcome of the
struggle is already decided in advance.”25 And the more clearly the form
expresses a “proud opposition, a divine-brief triumph of the one, singu-
lar, and unrepeatable,” the crueler is its subjugation to the faceless cha-
otic absolute as “pure negation of form.” Given this state of affairs, any
form is always tragic, Bakhtin says. “Individuality is the final, ultimate
definiteness and is thereby the purest fatality, the purest negation of eter-
nity.”26 Thus the more a person is aware of himself as an individual, the
stronger and deeper is the sense of the tragic nature of his own existence
in his soul. However, in Mikhail Bakhtin, in contrast to Nikolai Bakhtin,
there is no tonality of pure negation of eternity by the self-affirming
existence of the individual, there is no subjugation to the faceless abso-
lute. The younger brother was not a passionate admirer of Nietzsche. In
his conception the most important links are the idea of communication-
dialogue, which continues even after the hero’s death, the ideas of onto-
logical, cultural, and personal memory of the past, the idea of unofficial
seriousness and the search for a new seriousness, and the idea of selfless
and undemanding love.
Introducing an image-concept such as the “shame of seriousness,”
Bakhtin states that kindness and love lend the word irony, uncertainty,
and bashfulness. For this reason “only love can see and depict the inner
freedom of an object. It is still serious, but it wants to smile; it is a smile
and a joy that ceaselessly vanquish seriousness, smooth the facial fea-
tures of seriousness, and overcome the threatening tone. The absolute
superfluousness of the object reveals itself only to love. Love leaves it
52 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

completely outside itself and beside (or behind) itself. Love fondles and
caresses boundaries; boundaries take on new meaning” (66). This is taken
from the text “Rhetoric, to the Degree of Its Lying” [Ritorika, v meru
svoei lzhivosti]. As in the works of the 1930s on the prose novelistic
text, the word that speaks with the subject and penetrates the dense ver-
bal context surrounding it is contrasted with the word-as-violence, which
does not enter into dialogue with the subject.
Bakhtin’s analysis of the problem of death on the individual (serious-
tragic) level in Shakespeare’s tragedies and Dostoevsky’s novels supple-
ments his research on the image of death on the supraindividual
(laughing) plane in Rabelais’s work and in carnival culture in general.
This leads one to conclude that in Bakhtin’s esthetics both aspects of
human existence—the individual and the all-generic—are thought out,
as commentators on the fifth volume constantly point out. Man’s per-
ception of the phenomenon of death from the position of his own tem-
porality and finiteness determines the presence of the serious-tragic
tone in man’s world-perception. At the same time the laughing popular-
festive tradition sees individual death from the standpoint of the entire
people and humanity. From this perspective death is comprehended as
something that is not fearsome and is even joyful as a natural aspect of
being that does not end life but merely renews it.
Starting with the article “Satire” [Satira], written in 1940 for volume
10 of Literaturnaia entsiklopediia, Bakhtin speaks in fact about the unity
of the serious and the comic, and he widely uses the concept of the
serious-laughing in the subsequent works: “The Epic and the Novel”
[Epos i roman] and Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics in volume 5.
Bakhtin believes that the world, which is perceived valuatively by
man, is not monotonal. “Every thing has two names—a lofty and a lowly
one. . . . The world has two names, two languages about one and the
same world” (63). The valuatively perceived is a cyclic flow of oppo-
sites: praise—abuse, life—death, up—down, face—rear, inside—out-
side. These opposites are reflected, to a greater or lesser degree, in
culture and in literary genres. But there is a specific type of culture
that succeeds in grasping and reflecting precisely the bitonality, the
multitonality, and the ambiguity of all that exists in ambivalent concrete-
sensuous images.
Bakhtin demonstrates brilliantly the resonance of various motifs of
unofficial seriousness in Dostoevsky’s works, which he believes culmi-
nate the development of a particular—carnivalesque—branch of the
 SUMMER 2004 53

novelistic genre. He speaks of the existence of serious-laughing genres,

including in them genres that arose at the close of classical antiquity and
during the Hellenistic period.27 Among them are the Socratic dialogue,
early memoiristic literature, pamphlets, bucolic poetry, and Menippean
satire. For all of their external diversity all of these genres have in com-
mon, according to Bakhtin, a profound link with carnivalesque folklore
and are imbued with a carnivalesque worldview. Bakhtin selects and
analyzes two genres that played a determining role in the development
of the carnivalesque line of the novel. These are the Socratic dialogue
and the Menippean satire.
Carnivalesque plots differ from heroizing epic legends by bringing
the hero down to earth, making him familiar, and humanizing him
without destroying the heroic content, the core of the image. Such is
the image of Eulenspiegel in Charles de Coster’s tale. At the same
time a typical feature of the carnivalesque worldview that has strongly
influenced carnivalesque literature is the constant dwelling of thought
in the domain of the most important serious “ultimate questions,” which
are played out in the form of concrete images and plots. This trait is
manifested to the highest degree in Dostoevsky’s work. In his work
we find not only a deeply serious and “lachrymose” pole but also the
opposite and balancing laughing pole. And laughter is present both on
the surface of Dostoevsky’s prose and deep in its substantive struc-
ture. What is more, such serious themes as death, fear, love, solitude,
and the dialogue of equal consciousnesses are expressed precisely
thanks to the principle of laughter and the strong carnivalized subtext,
which is present in a more or less open form in practically all of
Dostoevsky’s works.
Even if the laughter itself is barely audible, hints of it can be detected
in all of Dostoevsky’s works. And the most important and meaning-
determining laughing carnivalesque “trace” is left in the position of the
author himself. What Bakhtin has in mind is not so much the author’s
concealed mocking of his heroes as the absence of one-sided dogmatic
seriousness in the author’s position and, by the same token, of any striv-
ing to absolutize one of the viewpoints or one of the poles of emotion or
meaning. Dostoevsky-the-author smashes the most one-sided and mono-
lithic-serious viewpoints into each other and provokes them into a dia-
logic exchange in which they lose their closedness and seeming
absoluteness and completeness.
In spite of its roots in the carnival genre, the novel above all speaks of
54 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

essential and serious things. Dostoevsky’s use of carnivalesque images

and plots permitted him to foreground in his works the very deepest
overtones of unofficial seriousness and to lay bare before the reader
aspects of the life, fate, and character of his heroes that could not be
revealed under normal conditions.
The bitonality and bipolarity of the carnivalesque worldview has also
determined the topographical conception of the cosmic whole reflected
in art and preserved in it, albeit in a hidden form, to this day.
Bakhtin developed the theory of world topographic coordinates pri-
marily in the work “Supplement and Changes to Rabelais.” The con-
cepts “topographical” and “topography” (from the Greek topos for
“place,” “locale,” and grapho for “to write”) have a geographical deri-
vation. But in Bakhtin’s esthetics these terms take on a new philosophi-
cal meaning. Bakhtin believes that outside the theory of topographical
poles and world coordinates, it is impossible to understand fully and
decode the universalized (that is, related to the cosmic whole) artistic
images of Shakespeare’s tragedies and other authors’ works that contain
prominent aspects of carnivalization, for example, Dostoevsky’s works.
“Individualizing universalization” (111) is an artistic approach, a pro-
cess of relating the artistic image to the world whole, a definition of its
value coordinates in universal space-time, not only in the narrow every-
day, plot-pragmatic plane.28 Thanks to the universalization of the image,
the “overcoming of its extra-artistic oneness and abstract commonality
(conceptness, examplarity, typicality, etc.)” is achieved (111). At the
root of individualizing universalization lies the topographical scheme
of the world whole. Bakhtin believes that the topography of the world
whole, as well as the concealed topographic meaning of images and
gestures, determine all of those eternal categories of praise and abuse.
These categories reflect the value priorities of humanity: in the space of
the topographically conceived world, the upper region is the heavens,
involvement in life and eternity (laudatory tone), and the lower region is
associated with death, hell, the nether world or the earth (abusive tone).
The laudatory tone relates a phenomenon and man with the positive
pole of the world—the upper level, the sky, front, face; the abusive tone
lowers and relates things to the negative pole: the lower level, earth,
netherworld, rear, seemy side. Not only spatial but also temporal rela-
tions are incorporated into the topographical scheme. Thus, eternity as
something positive from the standpoint of a mortal creature is associ-
ated with heaven, with the topographical upper region, while disappear-
 SUMMER 2004 55

ance, perishability, and finiteness are associated with the topographical

lower region. “The farther from the final whole, the closer to the sphere
of the partial and temporary, the farther from the merging of praise
and abuse” (109). Thus, in officialized cultures the tones of praise and
abuse are categorically opposed, separated, and unreconciled in the
framework of one image or phenomenon. At the same time, laudatory
tones tend to predominate in officialized images. Commenting on this
claim of Bakhtin’s, one can conclude that the images of such cultures
as a rule disappear from the universal topographic world scheme: they
lose their value coordinates in the human universe because they are
oriented to only one pole.
The carnivalesque picture of the world, on the contrary, aims to merge
and preserve both poles in its images: the laudatory and the abusive, the
high and the low. In carnivalesque images the laudatory and abusive
tones are mostly linked and inseparable from each other, and they
define the ambivalent character, the “bitonality” of the word and the
image, their artistic universalism. This is why Bakhtin refers to the
carnivalesque image by word as a “two-faced Janus.”
In this bitonality Bakhtin sees a conjunction and an attempt at recon-
ciling—be it utopian—of death and the birth of new life. The bitonal
image strives to capture the moment of change, of transition from the
old to the new, from death to birth. For this reason in the topographically
conceived carnivalesque image there always resounds humanity’s fear
embodied in it and humanity’s laughter, which overcomes it (99).
Bakhtin believes that man, his word, act, and gesture assume artistic
significance only when they are correlated with the spatiotemporal to-
pographical poles of the world, when from behind each real place in
everyday life its topographical place “shines through.” Then our per-
ceiving eye, moving from one pole to its opposite, will pass through the
point of the hero who speaks and acts between these poles, and this
gives the image a deeper sound of value. Thus the entire world is drawn
into the game: “art is structural (the large is repeated in the small)” (110).
This makes it possible to bring together all of the meanings of what is
occurring, all that is “disconnected and distant” into a single “point” of
space-time and meaning. The problematic of “the ultimate questions of
the world order” is taken in this way beyond the limits of the everyday
environment—rooms and houses—onto the all-national world stage. And
here the serious-tragic individual tones take on particular sounding power
in relation to the valuatively comprehended cosmic whole.
56 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

One of the essential “serious” themes of world literature, including

carnivalized literature, is pity. It is expressed in the framework of senti-
mentalism, a tendency that so far has been underestimated, Bakhtin
believes.
It is well known that among Bakhtin’s works there was a major manu-
script on sentimentalism as a literary phenomenon. Most regrettably,
this work disappeared and never reached a large readership. However,
some of Bakhtin’s notes on the subject have been preserved. For ex-
ample, a small section on sentimentalism can be found among the “Notes
of 1970–1971” [Zapisi 1970–1971] (EST, 345–46). Sentimentalism as
a literary tradition is discussed in two works in the fifth volume, “The
Problem of Sentimentalism” [Problema sentimentalizma] and “On
Flaubert” [O Flobere].
Bakhtin states that sentimentalism, in spite of a certain instability
and vagueness of its historical boundaries, is nonetheless a perfectly
definite, clear, and unique phenomenon in the history of literature. Un-
doubtedly, this is an emotionally rich tradition: it reverberates with the
serious motifs of compassion, commiseration, mourning and pity, all of
which are various overtones of the single tone of seriousness.
Sentimentalism, like tears, is anti-official (EST, 346). It comprehends
aspects of reality that remained outside the field of vision of other ten-
dencies in art and can be comprehended and justified only in the senti-
mental aspect. At the root of this tradition lies a particular emotional
approach to man and the world—to nature, animals, and things. Senti-
mentalism debunks the primacy of brute force, official might, and hero-
ism, and carries out a revaluation of existing scales; the small, the weak,
the distant, the inessential and secondary, and “the elementary aspect of
life” (131) draw closer and take on new meaning. In this sense senti-
mentalism renounces “large spatiotemporal historical perspectives,” and
because of this it cannot grasp the universal, cosmic aspect of being
(EST, 345–346). It is focused on small life.
In the tradition of sentimentalism, “elementary life” is understood as
a combination of innocence, purity, simplicity, and sacredness all at the
same time—the whole world seems close and familial. The image of a
child in this sense stands as it were alongside the image of a beast. This
elementary being is innocent, defenseless, and trusting: it is created from
without; it cannot be responsible for its creation and therefore cannot
save itself. Even the bloodthirstiness of animals is in this sense inno-
cent. Such innocent being must of necessity be pitied and “pardoned.”
 SUMMER 2004 57

But for Bakhtin pity as a method of artistic depiction of man is not an

unambiguous phenomenon. He who pities is superior to or above him
who is pitied. “Pity degrades a person, it ignores his freedom, completes
and even reifies a person” (76). For this reason pity as the love for all
that is weak and small, as the “sentimental-humanistic type of the de-
reification of man” still does not de-reify the image completely. Here
there arises the danger of replacing sentimentalism with its byproduct—
sentimentality, an exalted lachrymose sensibility. While ceasing to be a
thing, one does not yet become a person. Bakhtin writes that pity must
never be counterposed to a higher, absolutely undemanding love, which
is the first condition for creating an artistic image. Pity and love should
always be inseparable. “Pity refers to the animal principle in man, to
any ‘creature’ and to man as creature, while love refers to the spiritual,
supracreatural, free principle (where man does not coincide with him-
self, with his ‘to be’)” (133).
According to Bakhtin, Gustave Flaubert’s work is a soberly realistic
node concluding the “Rabelaisian-idyllic” line of European literature.
In Flaubert’s novels the topographical poles of the world are worn and
barely sensible, although Flaubert, like Alphonse Daudet and Prosper
Mérimée, was an apologist for Rabelais. Bakhtin suggests that what
is most important in Rabelais—his ambivalent folkloric laughter—
remained alien to these writers and their time.
But, the carnivalesque serious-laughing tradition is still present in
Flaubert’s works. Bakhtin proposes that Flaubert almost succeeded in
getting a grasp of the profound, basic paths of life itself behind the
short perspectives of his historical time. In his works one senses “the
horror of indifference, the horror of coinciding with oneself, reconcil-
ing oneself with one’s given life in its well-being and security, and be-
ing satisfied with unambiguous, univocal, fully given and ready, and
self-congruent thoughts” (136). It is not negative qualities that are brought
to the foreground in Flaubert, but rather “the emptiness and nothingness
of the positive” with the obvious absence of striving for answers to the
eternal “ultimate” questions of the universe. The monotony and mean-
inglessness of philistine existence, superbly presented by Flaubert, call
forth a feeling, as yet vague but persistent, of dissatisfaction and the
need for something different.
In Flaubert’s works, we also hear the theme of suffering and of the
person as an end in itself. He depicts the inner person and the inner
intimate ties among people. In his work, the image of the beast as an
58 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

unprotected and trusting “biological minimum” of existence is very

important. This is where the monotonal-serious motifs of pity resound:
“Humanity . . . has completely ceased to be ashamed of slaughter, has
lost the ancient shame of slaughter and the blood of animals” (131). In a
spirit of the antinomicity characteristic of him, Bakhtin writes of the
world-contemplative significance of tears and sorrow, but at the same
time notes possible “fakery” (“Sentimental Butchers” [Sentimental’nye
palachi], EST, 345).
Since we do not have a completed whole work by Bakhtin on the
serious, but are only attempting to restore at least the outlines of his
conception on the basis of the “archival” fifth volume of his works,
containing rich deposits of ideas, conjectures, and hypotheses that were
not formatted especially for publication, and are projecting them onto
the philosopher’s well-known works, it is difficult to drawing any sharp
conclusions without being in danger of oversimplifying Bakhtin’s
thought. Let us try to register only the more or less clear direction of
his thought.
The positive serious tone, including the esthetic, is the correlation of
the eternal with the determined life of mortal man. This is an event of
individual life that is correlated with the universal whole, with the world
topographical coordinates. A positive, serious, responsible act is based
on the “nonalibi in being” of singular obligatoriness. Art that not only
orients the form among other artistic forms but also creates values in the
event of life, art that is pierced with the thread of ontological, cultural,
and individual memory is serious. Bakhtin’s ideas about the lie as the
servant of fear and violence in art, and about the ways of overcoming
them on the path of esthetic love and in the process of seeking new
forms, are courageous, almost audacious.
The internally necessary “compelling” strivings of the individual ac-
complishing an act are serious for Bakhtin. If a sculpted-painted picture
of an action is present in “the consciousness of the agent himself, then
his action immediately breaks away from the compelling seriousness of
its goal, from real need . . . changes into a game, degenerates into a
gesture” (EST, 43). Therefore “a loving lingering over an experience” is
a betrayal of “compelling seriousness of the seriousness of the goal’s
meaning” (EST 102). In similar statements by Bakhtin, “seriousness”
as a property of life, of its goal-directed proceeding, has a positive valu-
ative slant. The seriousness illuminated by higher goals is all the weightier
in value. It “is an element of my higher creative seriousness, of higher
 SUMMER 2004 59

productivity” (EST, 104-5), a precondition for “significant” creative work

(EST, 179). Literature also begins to seem “a petty and unserious affair,
if there is not only no upward flight, but also no drilling into the depths,”
into “the powerful deep streams of culture, into the peculiarities of the
low, the popular” (EST, 330).
However, one-sided, exaggerated, emotionally wrought-up serious-
ness “accumulates hopeless situations,” while “laughter rises above them
and liberates from them” (EST, 338-39). For “only existence is naive
and joyful” (EST, 119). Multitonal culture in which serious tones also
lose their overtones of hopelessness as they are attacked by laughing
reflexes leads the person to such existence.
A dialogizing stance, dialogizing tones, capable of hearing another
voice, can carry various expressions of a serious-laughing nature. In the
serious-laughing sphere the serious passes over to the laughing and
carnivalized forms of language give expression to existential problems,
the ultimate questions of being. The seriousness of the tragic conflict
lies in the fact that the hero assumes the guilt of existence, that he real-
izes his individual finiteness, and protests against dissolution in the whole.
The seriousness of exhausted, obsessed tonality is negative. Bakhtin’s
judgments on the seriousness of fear and intimidation, beseeching and
threat, official violence through seduction by lies and unofficial illusory
hopes and self-deception are highly antinomic. The boundaries between
yearning for understanding by the “other” and closure in proud solitude,
between pity as humanitarian compassion and pity as a sentimental nar-
rowing of the world to the limits of a room are shifting and ambiguous.
Here the main expressive tones vary and are reinforced by overtones
and the transition from one tone to another occurs at the border that is
open in both directions and is not rigid but flexible. According to Bakhtin,
the “great migration of seriousness,” which has begun, is the expression
of the profound dialogicity and multitonality that penetrate life, culture,
and human communication.

Notes

1. M.M. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii v 7-mi t. Vol. 5. Raboty 1940-kh–nachala

1960-kh godov, ed. S.G. Bocharov and L.A. Gogotishvili (Moscow, 1996). The vol-
ume is quite rightly called archival. Half of it is devoted to commentaries, including
descriptions of manuscripts, typographical markings, etc. They make use of episto-
lary and documentary materials preserved in the Bakhtin archive and recreate the
context of the commented-upon text, which consists of both Bakhtin’s own works
60 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

and the philosophical, esthetic, and philological research of other authors working
on closely related questions (both temporally remote and contemporaneous).
2. Bakhtin, “(Ritorika, v meru svoei lzhivosti . . . ),” in his Sobranie sochinenii,
vol. 5. p. 63. Henceforth, references to this work will consist of a page number in
parentheses.
3. See “K filosoficheskim osnovam gumanitarnykh nauk” (the previously un-
published final section, set apart by Bakhtin himself under the heading “Problema
ser’eznosti”); the article “Satira,” written in 1940 for volume 10 of Literaturnaia
entsiklopediia; the correspondence with editor B. Mikhailovskii, inserted into
the notes; “K voprosam teorii romana. K voprosam teorii smekha. (O
Maiakovskom)”; “(Ritorika, v meru svoei lzhivosti . . . )”; “(K voprosam
samosoznaniia i samootsenki . . . )”; “(O Flobere)”; “Problema sentimentalizma”;
and especially, “Dopolneniia i izmeneniia k ‘Rable’”; “Iz arkhivnykh zapisei k
rabote ‘Problemy rechevykh zhanrov’”; “Problema teksta”; and the notes on
Dostoevsky referred to above.
4. M.M. Bakhtin, “K filosofii postupka,” in Filosofiia i sotsiologiia nauk i
tekhniki. Ezhegodnik, 1984–1985 (Moscow, 1986), p. 109.
5. S.G. Bocharov, “Ob odnom razgovore i vokrug ego,” Novoe literaturnoe
obozrenie, 1993, no. 2, p. 81.
6. M.M. Bakhtin, Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaia kul’tura srednevekov’ia
i Renessansa (Moscow, 1965), pp. 135–37.
7. Ibid., p. 136.
8. Besedy V.D. Duvakina s M.M. Bakhtinym (Moscow, 1996), p. 36.
9. Ibid., p. 37.
10. S. K’erkegor [Kierkegaard], “Poniatie strakha,” in his Strakh i trepet (Mos-
cow, 1993), p. 235.
11. Ibid., p. 237.
12. V.L. Makhlin, “Filosofskaia programma M.M. Bakhtina i smena paradigmy
v gumanitarnom poznanii.” Avtoreferat dissertatsii na soiskanie uch. st. doktora
filosofskikh nauk, MPGU, Moscow 1997, p. 40.
13. M.M. Bakhtin, “Avtor i geroi v esteticheskoi deiatol’nosti,”in Filosofiia i,
sotsiologiia nauki i tekhniki. Ezhegodnik, 1984–1985, p. l57.
14. M.M. Bakhtin, Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva (Moscow, 1979), p. 175.
Henceforth referred to in parentheses as EST.
15. M.M. Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo (Moscow, 1963), pp. 84–85.
16. Besedy Duvankina s Bakhtinym, pp. 97–98.
17. Ibid., pp. 161–62.
18. Ibid., p. 162. Compare with Joseph Brodsky’s “Sochinitel’stvo stikhov tozhe
est’ uprazhnenie v umiranii,” Naberezhnaia neistselimykh (Moscow, 1992), p. 31.
19. M.M. Bakhtin, “Slovo v romane,” in his Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Mos-
cow, 1975), p. 213.
20. L.A. Gogotishvili, “Varianty i invarianty M.M. Bakhtina,” Voprosy filosofii,
1992, no. 1, p. 131.
21. Aristotle, Ob iskusstve poezii (Moscow, 1957), p. 51.
22. F. Nitsshe [Nitzsche], Rozhdeniie tragedii, ili Ellinstvo i pessimism in his
Sobranie sochinenii v 2-kh tt. (Moscow, 1990), vol. 1.
23. V. Ivanov, Dionis i pradionisiistvo (St. Petersburg, 1994) p. 229.
24. G.G. Gadamer, Istina i metod (Moscow, 1988), pp. 174–75.
 SUMMER 2004 61

25. M.M. Bakhtin, “Chetyre fragmenta. Forma kak stupen’ obrechennosti,” in

his Iz zhizni idei (Moscow, 1995), p. 37.
26. Ibid., p. 38.
27. See Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo, in his Problemy tvorchestva/
poetiki Dostoevskogo (Kyiv, 1994), p. 314.
28. On artistic universalization in Bakhtin, see also A.A. Durov, “‘I smekh i
slezy . . . , ’ Zametki izuchaiushchego narodnuiu kul’turu posle Bakhtina,” The Sev-
enth Bakhtin Conference, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1995), pp. 144–51.

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