The Bakhtin Circle was a group of Soviet scholars, including the cultural theorist Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895–1975), the linguist Valentin Nikolaevich Voloshinov (1895–1936), and the literary scholar Pavel Nikolaevich Medvedev (1891–1938). Drawing on a variety of philosophical positions, the group developed a philosophy of the human sciences, language, literary production, and history, and a wide-ranging cultural theory. The group's work combined, in various ways, the neo-Kantianism of the Marburg School (especially Ernst Cassirer), phenomenology (especially Max Scheler and Karl Bühler), Russian Formalism (especially Lev Iakubinskii), Hegelianism, and various types of Marxism current within Soviet scholarship (especially Georg Lukács and "Marrism").

In K filosofii postupka (Toward a philosophy of the act; 1993 [written in the mid-1920s]), Bakhtin combines a neo-Kantian idealism, in which ethics is the foundation of the human sciences and jurisprudence its "mathematics," with the phenomenological notion of intentionality to develop an ethics based...