and this is what makes each person unique. Like Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy before 1880, and Anton Chekhov, Bakhtin belongs to the great anti-tradition of Russian thought that, unlike the dominant groups of the intelligentsia, denied that any system could explain, much less redeem, reality.
In his earliest work, Bakhtin developed various models of self and the other, and attempted to develop an approach to ethics. He believed that ethics could not be a matter of applying abstract rules to particular situations, but comes instead from careful observation and direct participation in ultimately unrepeatable circumstances. He argued that through a reliance on rules and ideology, rather than really engaging oneself with a given situation, one is using an alibi and, thus, abdicating responsibility. He countered this approach by saying that, in life, there is no alibi.
As an enemy of all comprehensive theories, Bakhtin opposed formalism and structuralism, although he learned a good deal from them. Basically, he accepted the usefulness of certain formal approaches and methods employed by these theoretical schools, but insisted that human purpose-fulness and intentionality lay behind these formal models. Unlike the formalists and structuralists, he developed a theory of language and the psyche that was based on the concrete utterance (what people actually say), and on open-ended dialogue. This latter is perhaps the most famous of the concepts he introduced.
Bakhtin developed a theory of polyphony, which he elaborated in his book on Dostoyevsky (1929). With this theory, he tries to show how an author deliberately creates without knowing what his or her characters will do next, and, in so doing, the author also creates a palpable image of true freedom. Bakhtin equated that freedom to that which is enjoyed by God, who did not foresee the outcome of the creatures made by God. In taking this stance, he argued against the determinists or predestinarians, for he believed that people are truly free and ever-surprising, if they are as the polyphonic novel represents them.
Bakhtin’s work on the novel during the 1930s and 1940s is justly renowned. It is certainly his most durable contribution to semiotics. He identifies how novelistic language works; how the self and plot are tied to concepts of time and becoming; and how elements of a parodic (or carnivalis-tic) spirit have infused the novel’s essence. This theory, as well as in theories of culture that he developed during the 1950s, emphasized dialogue,
112
temporal openness, surprisingness, the uniqueness selfhood, and fundamental principles of ethical responsibility. See also: CHEKHOV, ANTON PAVLOVICH; DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR MIKHAILOVICH; TOLSTOY, LEO NIKOLAYEVICH
Bakhtin, Mikhail. (1968). Rabelais and His World, tr. H?l?ne Iswolsky. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and tr. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Clark, Katerina, and Holquist, Michael. (1984). Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Morson, Gary Saul, and Emerson, Caryl. (1990). Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Baku is the capital of Azerbaijan and a major port on the Caspian Sea. The city was first taken by Peter I in the 1710s and held for two decades. The entire region of Caucasia was conquered by Russian forces in a war against Iran in the 1800s and confirmed by the 1813 Treaty of Gulistan.
Baku has meant two things to Russia: oil and strikes. The former has had the more enduring significance. The Baku oil fields were the object of Russian desire since the occupation by Peter I. Significant output began only with drilling in the 1870s. The oil rush of the last third of the nineteenth century brought thousands of Russian peasants to the Baku region to work in the oil fields. By the imperial census of 1897, the Russians were nearly as numerous as the native Azerbaijani Turks (approximately 37,400 to 40,000). By the 1903 city census, the Russians outnumbered them (57,000 to 44,000). Other national groups came to Baku. Armenians were a small but economically powerful minority with long-established communities, mostly involved in trade. Iranian Azerbaija-nis crossed the border in large numbers. They were part of the same ethnic and religious group, speaking the same language as did the local residents. There were also communities of Georgians, Jews, Germans, and peoples from the Caucasus Mountains. Europeans arrived as investors, engineers, and skilled technicians. By 1900, Baku had a telephone system, European-style buildings, and an active City Council (Duma). It had a relatively high crime rate and a reputation akin to that of the Wild West in North America.
In the dangerous conditions of the oil fields, a labor movement emerged around the turn of the century. The Russian Social Democrats regarded Baku’s activity as an alarm bell for the strike movement across the southern part of the empire. Baku provided a training ground for such future luminaries as Grigory Ordzhonikidze and Josef Stalin. For a time under Menshevik leadership, the Baku Committee of the party permitted the formation of a special party only for the Muslim workers, the Hummet. Class solidarity usually broke down along national lines, however, and the violence occasionally led to arson in the oil fields. In 1918 a Bolshevik-led government, known as the Baku Commune, ran the city briefly before the city fell to the invading Turkish army. Baku was the capital of the independent Republic of Azerbaijan (1918-1920) and, from April 1920 to 1991, of the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan.
Although Baku’s oil was largely depleted by the 1920s, the city was a target of Nazi advances in World War II. The Soviet Gosplan invested very little in the oil industry in Baku after the war and left its infrastructure to languish.
In the post-Soviet period, offshore drilling has taken the place of the old wells as a prize for foreign investors. Russia has tried, again, to maintain access to the oil and has fought proposals by Azerbaijan and foreign oil companies that seek to route the oil around Russian pipelines and Black Sea ports. See also: AZERBAIJAN AND AZERIS; CAUCASUS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Altstadt, Audrey. (1986). “Baku: Transformation of a Muslim Town.” In The City in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Michael F. Hamm. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
113
(1814-1876), world-famous revolutionary and one of the founders of Russian anarchism and revolutionary populism.
Although born into a nobleman’s family, Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin was hostile toward the tsarist system and the traditional socioeconomic and political order. An extreme materialist, he was bitterly antireligious and saw organized religion as oppressing people.
Despite his revolutionary passion, Bakunin, as a contemporary Western philosophical encyclopedia puts it, “was learned, intelligent, and philosophically reflective.” By contrast, a Soviet-period philosophical dictionary describes Bakunin as a “revolutionary-adventurer [who] blindly believed in the socialist instincts of the masses and in the inexhaustibility of their spontaneous revolutionary feeling, especially as found among the peasantry and lumpen-proletariat.”
The “reign of freedom,” Bakunin insisted, could come for the masses and for everyone only after the liquidation of the status quo of traditional bourgeois society and the state. Bakunin soon fell out with the Marxists, with whom he had originally been tenuously allied in the First International in Geneva. He denounced the Marxist teaching of the necessity of a dictatorship of the proletariat in order to usher in the new order of socialism. He also disagreed with those Russian revolutionists who advocated terrorism and various forms of postrevolutionary authoritarianism and dictatorship, such as the Russian Jacobins. “Every act of official authority,” Bakunin once wrote, “necessarily awakens within the masses a rebellious feeling, a legitimate counterreaction.”
In a letter to the 1860s revolutionary terrorist Sergei Geradievich Nechayev, Bakunin once wrote: “You said that all men should follow your revolutionary catechism, that the abandonment of self and renunciation of personal
