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under various pseudonyms. Bakhtin was born in
the provincial town of Orel, to the south of
Moscow. He attended St. Petersburg University
until 1918 when he began teaching high school
in Vitebsk, in present-day Belarus. In the early
years of the Russian Revolution Vitebsk was a
center of great intellectual creativity, and Bakh-
tin was deeply involved in organizing lectures
and debates. Turning to ethics and aesthetics,
Bakhtin focused on the semantics of literary
texts, as opposed to the Formalists, who valued
the technical construction of the text. He
returned to St. Petersburg in 1924, the year the
city was renamed Leningrad. With growing
restrictions on intellectual work during the
1920s, Bakhtin published under a pseudonym
works that criticized Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx,
and the Russian Formalists with whom he had
been arguing since his years in Vitebsk. A pio-
neering work on DOSTOEVSKY , Problems of Dosto-
evsky's Poetics, in which he developed the notion
of “polyphony,” or several balanced authorial
voices, as the key to understanding Dostoevsky's
work, was published in 1929 under Bakhtin's
own name shortly before his arrest. Arrested on
charges of belonging to a counterrevolutionary
religious organization, Bakhtin was soon released
and exiled to northern Kazakhstan. In 1945 he
moved to Saransk in the Mordovian Autono-
mous Republic, where he taught at the Mordo-
vian Teachers Training College until 1972, when
he was given permission to return to Moscow.
During these years he continued to write books
on literary criticism, none of which was pub-
lished. It was only in 1963, with the publication
of a second edition of his work on Dostoevsky,
that Bakhtin gradually gained the recognition
his work deserved, first among Soviet scholars
and later, especially after his death, in the West.
In Rabelais and His World (1965) and Voprosy liter-
atury i estetiki (1975, republished in English trans-
lation as The Dialogic Imagination [1981]), Bakhtin
further developed the notions of polyphony, in
which language served as a dynamic rather than
static construct, and dialogism, a term that cap-
tured Bakhtin's understanding that texts are
shaped by the relationship between the author
and the reader and the social context that sur-
rounds them.
Bakikhanov, Abbas-Kuli-Aga
(1794-1847)
(pseudonym: Kudsi)
scholar
An Azerbaijani scholar and writer, Bakikhanov
was born in the village of Amiradzhani, near
Baku, to a family of local rulers. In 1819 he
served as a translator of Eastern languages in
Tbilisi. He participated in the Russian wars with
Persia and Turkey of 1826-29, and in the Russo-
Persian peace negotiations at Turkmanchai. He
was a widely educated man who knew several
languages, as well as Eastern philosophy and lit-
erature. A strong advocate of cultural closeness
between Azerbaijan and Russia, Bakikhanov was
in contact with leading cultural figures of his day,
such as A. S. GRIBOEDOV , A. A. Bestuzhev-Mar-
linski, M. F. Akhundov, Kh. Abovian, and A.
Chavchavadze. True to his social background, he
wrote in favor of the preservation of feudal priv-
ileges, but he also condemned punitive measures
against rebellious peasants in the Kubinskii
province in 1837. In 1841, he completed a work
on the history of northern Azerbaijan from ear-
liest times until 1813, entitled Giulistan-Iram
( Flower of Paradise ), which marked an important
step in the development of Azerbaijani historiog-
raphy. Although he focused primarily on the
actions of rulers through the centuries, Baki-
khanov drew from a wide range of Eastern and
Caucasian sources and devoted extensive cover-
age to issues in the history of Azerbaijan and
Dagestan. Bakikhanov himself translated his
book into Russian from its Farsi original. His
work was not published in its entirety until
Soviet times, first in Russian (1926), later in
Azerbaijani (1951). He also wrote a number of
other literary and scientific works on pedagogy
and philosophy; on the phonetics, morphology,
and syntax of the Farsi language; and on astron-
omy and geography. In his work “The Secret
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