SOURCE: Kelly, Aileen M. “The Flesh of Time: Mikhail Bakhtin.” In Views from the Other Shore: Essays on Herzen, Chekhov, and Bakhtin, pp. 192-216. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Kelly compares Bakhtin's approach toward utopian systems and systemic thinking to that of his compatriot and predecessor Alexander Herzen, considered the father of Russian socialism.

In June 1995 an international conference was held in Moscow to celebrate the centenary of one of Russia's best-known intellectuals—the philosopher and critic Mikhail Bakhtin. Participants from twenty countries came together to discuss the legacy of a thinker who had emerged from obscurity in his old age to become the object of a cult, first in his own country and then in the West. His influence on literary and linguistic studies and the human sciences has grown steadily from the mid-1970s, creating a Bakhtin industry of monumental proportions...