PERSON
Fyodor Dostoevsky (Bakhtin's Reading)
Russian novelist (1821–1881) whom Bakhtin identified as the creator of the polyphonic novel — granting characters independent consciousness and allowing truth to emerge from their unresolved dialogue.
Fyodor Dostoevsky was, in Bakhtin's analysis, the inventor of a genuinely new literary form. Previous novelists, even the greatest, had written about their characters; Dostoevsky wrote with them, granting each major figure a fully developed worldview that could argue with the author's own position on equal terms. Raskolnikov's utilitarian rationalism, Ivan Karamazov's atheist rebellion, the Underground Man's spite — each is given philosophical weight and allowed to press its case without being refuted by authorial decree. The result is a form in which truth does not belong to any single voice but emerges from the collision of independent perspectives. Bakhtin considered this a revolution comparable to Copernicus: the author no longer occupies the center around which all other voices orbit. Dostoevsky achieved what philosophy and theology had failed to achieve — a representation of human beings as genuinely free, genuinely other, genuinely capable of surprising their creator.
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Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929) was his first major