Thread by @akoz33

Today again a fragment from Ivanov’s memoirs. This time about the remarkable and original philosopher & literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_B… ).
Bakhtin’s story also shows something unexpected, even in the worst

period, it was sometimes possible to hide from the NKVD, if one had devoted and courageous friends.

“To us of the older generation, Bakhtin, who survived until this time by some miracle, meant a great deal. He had a very serious bone marrow disease.

He lost a leg during his exile to Central Asia. They sent him there for participating in Leningrad underground Christian philosophical circles. This was a man from a distant past, his book about Dostoevsky - was written in the late twenties. It was published immediately after

his arrest, as well as several other books that, as he and his wife told me, he wrote, but they appeared under the names of other people. Bakhtin was from the breed of those humanities who are trying to understand everything in a new way, in their own way.

This is especially true of his wonderful book on Rabelais and carnival laughter culture ... How did this affected all of us? You see, all the time we tried to combine different disciplines. And the germ of this compound was in Bakhtin.

After the exile, he left for his years in Saransk when he was not allowed to live in Moscow. He had a “minus” in his passport - this means that he had no right to live in any large city.

Saransk remained for him the only place where he could somehow exist and teach at the pedagogical institute with this “minus”. Inside the Gulag Archipelago was Dubravlag with its center in Saransk. Since this is the territory of the camps, there was no reason not to let Bakhtin

live there. All around were long term exiles. Although Bakhtin gave a myriad of lectures in Saransk, on ancient, Western and Russian literature, I believe hedid not have any students there.
Well, there was hardly o gone there on the required level. That, it wasn’t the exiled

intellectuals who came to his lectures, but the locals, who were not sufficiently well prepared.

In 1938, he came to give a lecture on some topic in Moscow and stayed with one of his friends, whom I later visited when Bakhtin was there.

After his lecture, he returned to the home of the friend, where a another good friend from Saransk was waiting for him to say: “they came to arrest you”. Then his friend, who provided him with the opportunity to spend the night in Moscow, says: you can’t return to Saransk,

they will arrest you immediately. Stay in my country house near Moscow. The is only one problem: it is possible to hide you, but you will be working on your Rabelais - and how can we prevent library books from being traced?

This friend worked in biology, a completely different area. And he came up with the idea that he would borrow the books needed by Bakhtin - well, mainly French ones - from Leningrad libraries. And then no one will notice. A biologist borrows some books for himself from

the library in Leningrad, nobody will bother to track them. Thus, Bakhtin hid in a friend’s country house. He lived there for more than a year. Then everything became forgotten. Several people tried this method of hiding from the NKVD. Lidia Korneevna Chukovskaya

was saved in this way. Also Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam. It was necessary to disappear from their field of vision. Their memory was not long. All such primitive organizations do not have a serious memory.

In those days there were no computers, it helped, of course. So, Bakhtin, whom I liked very much and whom I visited frequently when he could already live freely near Moscow, was one of the great people of the older generation who meant a lot to me ... In England there is

his center. According to this center, more books and journal articles have been written about Bakhtin than about anyone in the humanities in the 20th century. That is, if we talk about world scholarship, then in the whole world Bakhtin is of the first magnitude.
We had such

movements in all areas of culture, but they were all cut short. And we, our generation which could begin to act somewhat independently already in the mid-1950s, considered the revival of all that an essential task.

Bring back the names of many wonderful people, print their unpublished works. There were so many of them! For example, Vygotsky’s classic work “Thinking and Speech”, now translated into many different languages, was printed immediately, in the year of his death, in 1934,

and the next publication was 1956. Here twenty-five years between - a time of tragic silence. That is, the whole culture, Russian culture of the 20th century, was forced into silence. I brought Shklovsky “Psychology of Art” by Vygotsky.

This is a book that Vygotsky wrote in the early 1920s, and I managed to publish it in the early 1960s. Shklovsky said: “It seems that these are fragments of a sunken culture.” In my opinion, Russia and England are different in that they know that they have many great people,

and are in no hurry to print them. Think about it: some of Newton’s works have only recently been published. During the depression, on Einstein’s insistence, when they sold Newton’s manuscripts at cheap prices, a university in the future Israel bought them. Therefore,

in Israel, some of Newton’s manuscripts were printed. for the first time. They were not considered serious in England because they relate to history. When I studied Newton as a historian and philologist, I discovered he was wonderful at this. So it’s the British and us.

We compete in that we do not print works of our great people. But, of course, our circumstances and reasons are somewhat different from those of the the British”.