Stalin’s Brothers Karamazov
Stalin’s Brothers Karamazov

Summary/Abstract: In the 1930s, while a political exile in Kazakhstan – during what Anna Akhmatova might have called a vegetarian, rather than carnivorous, experience of suppression – Mikhail Bakhtin offered “the internally persuasive word [slovo, discourse]” as a counter to “the authoritative discourse” (read, Stalinist and Stalinism) that should have made Bakhtin’s continuing (and more rigorous) suppression an inevitability. That it did not is one of the mysteries in Bakhtin’s biography, but there is no doubt that Bakhtin’s dialogic imaginings were also a political critique of contemporary realities. “The authoritative word demands that we acknowledge it” and requires “our unconditional allegiance,” Bakhtin wrote, while “the internally persuasive word” remains “supple and dynamic” through its “semantic openness to us, its capacity for further creative life in the context of our ideological consciousness, its unfinishedness and the inexhaustibility of our further dialogic interaction with it.” Regardless of the moment of reading, “we have not yet learned from it all it might tell us.”

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