By the time his boom and cult had passed, Mikhail Bakhtin had become a twentieth-century classic and the beneficiary of a huge research industry. Accordingly, the most exciting work shifted from literary or political applications of his famous terms—dialogue, carnival, chronotope—and toward the finer, and far more interesting, arts of historical recuperation: Bakhtin's intellectual debts, and his social and philosophical contexts (see Brandist 2002). For Bakhtin Studies, 1990 was something of a watershed year. It marked, of course, the beginning of the end of Soviet Communism, which made it possible for Russians to pursue pluralistic and de-ideologized scholarship throughout the humanities. For English speakers it was also the year that Bakhtin's writings from the 1920s (combining Kantianism and phenomenology in a distinctive moral philosophy) were published in the excellent Liapunov annotated translations.

It took several years for these difficult early texts to...