Russian Literature L (2001) 165-184 www.elsevier.com/locate/ruslit North-Holland CONTEXTUALISING BACHTIN: TWO POEMS BY MANDEL'STAM GALIN TIHANOV Until very recently, Michail Bachtin has been considered a solitary thinker, a man without roots or - at best - someone with a romantically dark intellec- tual pedigree. At the same time, he has been thought of as a powerful predecessor of a whole range of later developments in theory and criticism. Bachtin studies are still dominated by the desire to employ his writings as a possible solution and an interpretative key to the work of Dostoevskij, Go- gol', Joyce, Rushdie, Walcott, to name but a few of the countless figures of the Russian, Western, Afro-American I and other literary canons of longer or shorter standing, whose writings have been studied in Bakhtinian terms. Confronted with this veritable mania of applying Bachtin to the study of (Russian) literature, over time one inevitably grows suspicious of Bachtin's omnipotence and feels increasingly tempted to counterbalance it with a better grasp of his intellectual roots. It was only in the early 1990s that a more persistent interest in the vital contexts of Bachtin's own intellectual formation arose. 2 This reinforced the latent struggle over Bachtin's legacy: is he a thinker emerging from Western, mainly German, philosophical culture, 3 or an exclusively Russian (Orthodox) philosopher?4 The current state of interpretation of Bachtin continues to be marked by this division, although its artificiality is gradually being under- stood and work is appearing, both in the West and in Russia, that seeks to dispense with it. 5 The passionate discussion of B achtin's (inter)national style of theorising is slowly giving way to a sober examination of the intellectual and biographical sources of his texts. 0304-3479/01/$ - see front matter© 2001 ElsevierScienceB.V. All rights reserved. PII: S0304-3479(01)00080-1