Bakhtin and the actor (with constant reference
to Shakespeare)
Caryl Emerson1
Published online: 3 July 2015
Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
Abstract The Bakhtin we know best is something of a lyricophobe and theatrophobe.
This is surprising, since he loves the act of looking. His scenarios rely on
visualized, collaborative communion. He cares deeply about embodiment. Does he
care about the tasks that confront the actor? Not the improvising clown of carnival
(carnival is theater only in the broad sense of performance art), but the trained artist
who performs a play script on stage? In discussing these questions, this essay draws
on two suggestive places in Bakhtin’s writing where he addresses the actor’s art.
One is from the mid-1920s; the other (1944), is on Shakespearean tragedy. If
Bakhtin has a theatrical imagination, it will be found here. His grasp of an actor
‘‘living in’’ to a role and his comments on the evolution of the European stage cast
his better-known ideas of dialogue, comedy, seriousness and the sacred into
unexpected perspective.
Keywords Bakhtin Theatre Actor Phenomenology Tragedy Oedipus
Shakespeare Topographical stage
As concerns carnival. I didn’t have in mind carnival as something cheerful.
Not at all. In every carnival image there’s the presence of death. Speaking
your terminology, carnival is a tragedy. It’s only that here, tragedy is not the
final word.
Bakhtin’s concluding remarks at his defense, Moscow, November 15, 1946.1
& Caryl Emerson
cemerson@princeton.edu
1 Princeton, NJ, USA
1 Bakhtin defended his ‘‘Rabelais in the History of Realism’’ as a dissertation at the Gorky Institute of
World Literature in 1946, after several fruitless years seeking a publisher for it. The transcript is
published in full in Bakhtin (2008, pp. 985–1065). Quote on p. 1063.
123
Stud East Eur Thought (2015) 67:183–207
DOI 10.1007/s11212-015-9238-1
At the end of his grueling dissertation defense in November 1946, Bakhtin tried to
clarify carnival to his wary examiners by invoking the classical dramatic categories
of comedy and tragedy. The epigraph above—a key moment in his ‘‘concluding
remarks’’—serves this essay as a springboard to the paradoxical topic of Bakhtin
and the acting arts. We say paradoxical, because formal theater is something of a
lost zone in Bakhtinian poetics. It belongs neither to the novel nor to carnival, lying
somewhere between what is written (to be silently read) and what is acted (to be
watched and heard). Novels celebrate the dialogic word and carnival the laughing
body, but those two modes of being are very differently equipped and do not
naturally unite in an actor. The novel, the first literary genre to be both created and
consumed by solitary individuals, is built up of silent printed letters with the help of
enabling, often invisible narrators.2 Carnival would seem to be the opposite: a
public (if unofficial) square or stage—visual, spatial, improvisatory, performative.
Immediately moving, acting, and interacting bodies are indispensable to it. But
literacy (or for that matter, sustained verbal dialogue of any sort) is not necessary at
all; the antics of bodies in carnival have little to do with the scripted acting out of a
show. There are further puzzling aspects of Bakhtin’s clarifying comment. We are
accustomed to viewing carnival as fertile and life-affirming. It is comedy to the
extent that it provides a model for material abundance, acts of generosity, and
freedom from fear. ‘‘In your terms,’’ Bakhtin informed his examiners, ‘‘carnival is a
tragedy.’’ The ‘‘you’’ refers to his listeners in the room, but his larger addressee
surely included all of modern European culture. What might it mean to call carnival
a ‘‘tragedy,’’ even if its tragic word is not the final one? When Bakhtin uses terms
like tragedy and comedy, does he have in mind an actual staged action, an acted-out
text—or more a state of consciousness? Do his insights apply to the art of the
playwright, the craft of the actor, and the profession of theater?
Bakhtin turned his mind to these questions in two curious and provocative
discussions separated by 20 years. The first is a brief discussion from the mid-1920s
on ‘‘the creative work of the actor.’’ The second is a set of working notes on
Shakespeare that date from 1944, intended to supplement his study of Franc¸ois
Rabelais and mediaeval laughing. The earlier remarks, part of Bakhtin’s lengthy
ruminations on ‘‘Author and Hero,’’ have been available in English translation since
1990. But they attracted little attention, beyond one path-breaking dissertation in
2004 on Bakhtin and theater by the British theater practitioner and academic Dick
McCaw, now reworked into a monograph for Routledge and forthcoming in 2016.3
2 For a probing discussion of the advantages of muteness, iconic perception, and forms of intellectual
silence within Russia’s non-Classical tradition that encouraged hesychastic practices of prayer over
voiced public declamation, see Lock (2001), especially pp. 55–56.
3 See McCaw (2004). To my knowledge, this is the first full-length study of the topic by a theater
professional. Part I, ‘‘Bakhtin,’’ traces early theories of author-hero relations in the context of staged art
and how they depart from Stanislavskian method, and then follows the theatrical metaphor as it survives
in Bakhtin’s analysis of Dostoevsky’s characters and scenes, the history and theory of the novel, the
chronotope, the mask-bearing performative aspects of carnival, and the hermeneutics of speech genres.
Part II, ‘‘Theatre,’’ applies Bakhtinian concepts to five schools of actor training: Stanislavsky, Meyerhold,
Grotowski, Mladen Materic, and Anatolij Vasiljev. The forthcoming book, which omits discussion of the
last two directors but engages profoundly with Stanislavskian psychology and practice, is an invaluable
guide to the potentials, as well as the limits, of Bakhtin’s stage imagination. See Dick McCaw, Bakhtin
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The 1944 text has been more elusive. An excerpt made its way into English only
very recently, as ‘‘Bakhtin on Shakespeare, ‘‘in the July 2014 issue of the USAbased
academic journal PMLA, in Sergeiy Sandler’s expert translation (Bakhtin
2014). These Shakespeare notes are part of what has come to be called the ‘‘dark
Bakhtin’’—the Bakhtin who, in the mid-1940s, lost faith in the word, the image, the
mission of the writer, and even the very possibility of representation, all of which,
he noted, had succumbed to violence and the lie.4 Amid these ruins of culture,
Bakhtin recommends that we fall silent and exercise a discerning, although noncondemning,
sacrificial love.
While we await a more thorough integration of these wartime writings into
Bakhtin’s overall aesthetics (and such projects are underway),5 it is worth
considering the context of Bakhtin’s rudimentary theatrical imaginings. His early
remarks on the actor constitute an extended metaphor inside a larger negative
critique of German aesthetics. The notes on Shakespeare, as we shall see, contribute
to Bakhtin’s lifelong meditation on the status and virtues of ‘‘inwardness’’—or
rather, on Bakhtin’s move in and out of inwardness.6 When theater is present in his
thought, it seems to serve some other purpose, not the particulars of its own form
and medium. But there are more surprises. Commenting on staged art, Bakhtin
scarcely mentions festive comedy, satire, or farce—those staples of world dramatic
repertory that would seem to bear such affinity with the comic novel and carnival,
sharing as they do the same quickness of pace and appreciation of witty servants and
nimble fools.7 In both ‘‘Author and Hero’’ and the notes on Shakespeare, however,
Bakhtin deals exclusively with the brooding classics of tragedy: Oedipus, King
Lear, Othello, Macbeth, and their passionate descendent in the nineteenth-century
polyphonic novel, Ivan Karamazov.
Footnote 3 continued
and Theatre. Dialogues with Stanislavski, Meyerhold and Grotowski (forthcoming Routledge 2016). For a
preview of his comparison of Bakhtin with Stanislavskij on the tasks of the actor, see McCaw (2014).
4 The central texts are three wartime fragments, none prepared for publication by Bakhtin himself:
‘‘Rhetoric, to the extent that it lies’’ (1943), the paragraph-long ‘‘Person at the mirror’’ (Bakhtin 1943–
1944a) and ‘‘On questions of self-cognition and self-evaluation’’ (Bakhtin 1943–1944b). For explication
see Nikulin (2011; a reading of ‘‘The Person at the Mirror’’) and Sandomirskaja (2004; a postmodern
treatment of Bakhtin’s dark texts in light of Konstantin Vaginov’s novels of the 1920s).
5 An exegesis of Bakhtin’s wartime notes, focusing on the role of writing in modernist aesthetics through
texts by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky and Osip Mandelstam, has been undertaken by Alexander Spektor
(2014–2016).
6 For this formulation I am grateful to Denis Zhernokleyev, whose generous attention to this essay over
several drafts is reflected throughout, but especially in the ontological and religious hypotheses at the end.
7 For a persuasive study of the logic and ethics of comedy from this perspective by an experienced
Bakhtin scholar, see Nikulin (2014), especially ch. 3, ‘‘Everyone Joins the Fight: the Dialectic of Comic
Action,’’ and ch. 5, ‘‘The Catastrophe of the Good Ending.’’ Nikulin argues that the usual comedic
denouement is unexpected (an overturning or ‘‘catastrophe’’), other-oriented, democratic, deeply invested
in cooperation of an ad hoc and non-ideological sort. But it is neither chaotic nor mindlessly impulsive:
comedy is the thinking person’s genre of choice, ‘‘a carefully calculated solution to a problem within a
complex comic ‘argument’’’ (p. 93). Like carnival, comedy deals with the vulgar and base. This need not
make it happy in any utopian sense—only fertile, communal, and pragmatically committed to optimal
well-being in a flawed world. ‘‘The goodness of comedy consists, then, in its capacity to overcome
suffering and to suggest ways of doing so’’ (p. 95).
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Theatrophobic Bakhtin
The biggest surprise for many readers of Bakhtin may be the discovery that he had
anything constructive or interesting to say about the art of the stage at all. The
Bakhtin most familiar to us from the 1930s is both a lyricophobe and a
theatrophobe. He is famous for feeding every genre of a classical poetics—epic,
lyric poetry, drama—to his omnivorous novel, which he came to celebrate as the
world’s optimally freedom-bearing form. An ‘‘anti-theatrical’’ chord already sounds
in the Dostoevsky book (1929, rev. 1963). When a ‘‘double-voiced and doubleaccented’’
novelistic utterance is declaimed out loud rather than relished silently, it
always risks being flattened out, losing the subtle polyphony of voices that is packed
inside every word. ‘‘Loud and living intonation excessively monologizes discourse,
and cannot do justice to the other person’s voice present in it,’’ Bakhtin writes.8
Silence, it seems, is safer, more diversified and more free than an utterance could
ever be; speaking with others in your head is richer and more rewarding than
venturing into public exchange, whether on street or on stage. In his 1997 essay on
Bakhtin and Jacques Derrida, Robert Cunliffe attributes this glorification of the
graphic sign and distrust of intonation to Bakhtin’s belief in ‘‘the phoneyness of
phone` (of all spoken forms of utterance)’’—and he considers Bakhtin’s ‘‘deprivileging
of drama’’ to be ‘‘key to his whole concept of the dialogic word’’
(Cunliffe 1997, p. 349).
The problem, however, lies not only in the threat of oral speech or delivery
bleaching out the heteroglossia [raznorechie] packed into every word. Also
problematic for Bakhtin is the very structure of any work of art composed to be
acted out in space by individual bodies. Bakhtin admits that drama might
superficially seem full of dialogues. But the fact that people talk to one another in
plays, and do so without the mediation of a narrator, is a mere ‘‘compositional’’
feature of the work—an ornament, a description of its surface traits, not necessarily
part of its deeper ‘‘architectonics.’’9 As Bakhtin later explains at length in
‘‘Discourse in the Novel,’’ although all words are naturally dialogic, in some genres
this dialogization is ‘‘not put to artistic use’’ (Bakhtin 1981a, p. 285). Drama, it
would appear, is one such site. As we read in the Dostoevsky book, ‘‘precisely in
drama is [a monologic framework] especially monolithic,’’ because ‘‘in drama, the
world must be made from a single solid piece [on dolzˇen byt’ sdelan iz odnogo
kuska]’’ (Bakhtin 1963, p. 23, 1984, p. 17).
The narrowness of this definition has long embarrassed serious students of the
stage. For one thing, it ignores all those early-twentieth century theatrical
8 Bakhtin (1929, p. 95, 1963, p. 221, 1984, p. 198). The idea that a specific intonation delineates and thus
limits, rather than liberates, the expressive potential of language is developed by discourse analyst
Banfield (1982).
9 In his early essay responding to the Formalists (1924, first publ. 1975), Bakhtin makes a distinction
between architectonic and compositional form: the former bestows value, the latter merely describes the
distribution of parts. See Bakhtin (1924, pp. 276–77), in English Bakhtin (1990c, pp. 268–269). Bakhtin
notes this distinction as it applies to genres of staged art: ‘‘Drama is a compositional form (dialogue,
division into acts, etc.), but the tragic and the comic are architectonic forms of completion’’ (Bakhtin
1924, p. 277, 1990c, p. 269).
186 C. Emerson
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experiments (surely known to Bakhtin) that were designed specifically to disrupt all
‘‘monologic’’ environments, targeting precisely the causal, linear unfolding of
narrative within a single integrated space. To be sure, Bakhtin paid little attention to
modernist texts. But he did have some experience writing and thinking about
theater. In the provincial town of Nevel in 1918–1919, Bakhtin collaborated with
Lev Pumpianskij in Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonnus, deploying 500 high-school
students in an open-air production.10 (Oedipus will resurface as central to Bakhtin’s
theatrical musings.) In 1930, when Bakhtin was already under arrest, his preface to
Tolstoy’s dramas appeared in volume 11 of a new Collected Literary Works of
Tolstoy edited by Boris Eixenbaum.11 Although the piece is thoroughly party-line
and Bakhtin later dismissed it as rubbish, it remains a useful guide to Tolstoy’s turn
to serious theater in the 1880s.12 And at the far end of his career, Bakhtin, a
professor of world literature at the Saransk Pedagogical Institute and a legendary
lecturer on a massive number of topics in the humanities, offered a seminar on
aesthetics and the history of theater at the Mordovia Theater for Music and Drama.13
We even have Bakhtin’s opinion of some local theater productions. His 1954 review
of Victor Hugo’s 1833 play Marie Tudor is an uncharacteristically drab piece of
ideological boilerplate from Bakhtin’s pen.14
Still, for all this thin line of attention to stage performance threading through
Bakhtin’s life and work, his lack of enthusiasm for the actual practice of theater
continues to rankle. It seems so counterintuitive. Taken as a whole, Bakhtin’s world
seems highly theatrical, non-Platonic in its pleasures and rewards. He loves the act
of looking. So much so, that he would have been shocked and dismayed by the rise,
some decades ago, of theoretical hostility against the ‘‘gaze.’’ Bakhtin believed that
when we look at a thing or a subject, we never reify it; on the contrary we animate
it, envelope it in love, help it to ‘‘consummate’’ itself by watching it and hearing it
perform.15 So many of Bakhtin’s insights and scenarios rely on the idea of
visualized, collaborative embracement.
10 The Nevel newspaper ‘‘Den’’’ reported on these dramatic activities. See Clark and Holquist (1984,
p. 42).
11 It appears that Boris Eikhenbaum, by this time a major Tolstoy scholar as well as a discredited
Formalist and no stranger to political harassment, courageously offered this commission (Prefaces to the
dramas and to the novel Resurrection) to the threatened and ailing Bakhtin. See Bakhtin (1930a,
pp. 176–84).
12 More appears in Bakhtin’s notes to the Tolstoy Prefaces than made it into the published text. See
Bakhtin 1930b. ‘‘Why Tolstoy arrived at the dramatic form,’’ Bakhtin jots down in his opening paragraph.
‘‘The crisis of the narrating word’’ (p. 205).
13 See Clark and Holquist (1984, p. 327), and also the first Russian biography of Bakhtin by his
colleagues and personal friends Konkin and Konkina (1993, pp. 268–69). Neither source suggests any
special interest on Bakhtin’s part in the production or craft of theater.
14 Konkin and Konkina (1993, pp. 268–69). Bakhtin’s review of Hugo’s Marie Tudor in Sovetskaja
Mordovija (12 December 1954) is very politically correct: commenting on the gloomy realism of the set,
he notes that ‘‘prison is not only the Tower… but the Queen’s palace, and the banks of the Thames, and
London and the entire life of England during this epoch, with its executions, hangmen, gallows, bonfires,
with its monstrous violence and eternal terror’’ (qtd. p. 269).
15 See the welcome discussion in Peeren (2008), especially her chapter 3, ‘‘The Intersubjective Eye: The
Look Versus the Gaze,’’ (pp. 73–82).
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In 1992, just as the Bakhtin boom was beginning to subside, the theater historian
Marvin Carlson published his essay ‘‘Theater and Dialogism.’’ Carlson was puzzled
that Bakhtin’s few comments on the formal art of theater were limited largely to
classical tragedy; as literary criticism, they ventured no further than Hegel and the
German Romantics (Carlson 1992, pp. 313–14). Otherwise, theater as a great human
art form was simply not seen. The only aspect of Bakhtin that seemed enduringly
relevant to drama studies, he wrote, was the excess, liminality, and subversiveness
of carnival rogues and fools.
If Carlson is right, it is very curious. For Bakhtin did not investigate the purely
theatrical potentials of carnival. He revered the marketplace and public square as
‘‘unofficial’’ locales where authority could be de-crowned, natural body functions
celebrated, where friends could punch one another in the stomach without malice
and where a hungry person could eat and drink forever. Since this behavior calls to
mind such beloved characters of the world stage as Sir John Falstaff, books exist
with titles like Shakespeare and Carnival after Bakhtin.16 But as any ethnographer
will readily admit after reading Bakhtin’s Rabelais book, carnival was fundamentally
a spiritual category for Bakhtin, a state of mind. It describes neither a
historically real world (even in its holiday moods), nor a fictive world created by the
devices of a master-artist. Carnival was precious to Bakhtin because it was fearless,
and fearless because full of laughter and therefore able to transcend torture, hunger,
and thoughts about death. Carnival is not formal theater. It knows no footlights and
employs no ‘‘actors.’’ No one is supposed to merely watch it. It is not even
‘‘theatrical’’ in the capacious sense that the field of performance studies now
deploys the term, which includes almost any enactment of anything: rituals, games,
children’s play, competitive sports, trying out a role, telling a story with hand
gestures, telling a lie, falling into a trance.17 Carnival can, of course, inform the
approach to any of those activities. But carnival is a worldview, a mode of being,
not an art form. There are good reasons why certain disciplines in the social
sciences—anthropology and political philosophy especially—have been inspired by
the ritualism or the radicalism of the Bakhtinian grotesque and carnivalesque. But
one will search the Rabelais book in vain for any advice on how to stage these
values and appetites. Or even for advice on how actors should orient toward the
audience, toward one another, and toward their role.
Does Bakhtin care about the tasks that confront this actor? Not the ritual player of
pre-modern societies and not the improvising clown of carnival, but the artist
trained to bring a play script to life? Actors do not engage Bakhtin as novel-writers
and novel-readers do, and he thinks more in terms of metaphor than of practice.18
16 See Laroque and Hall in Knowles, ed., (1998). These essays exhibit the conventional fixation on
traditionally tabooed words, body parts, and glee at defecation, gluttony, carefree sloth, etc., that
Bakhtin’s Rabelaisian carnival also celebrates. Both underplay the drunkenness, sexual abuse and
violence of the ‘‘carnival interval.’’
17 For a rich sample of these enactments arranged as an exemplary textbook (with follow-up on each
topic arranged as ‘‘Talk about,’’ ‘‘Perform,’’ and ‘‘Read’’), see Schechner (2006).
18 In his comparison of Bakhtin and Stanislavsky, Dick McCaw acknowledges several areas of overlap—
in their concepts of experience [perezˇivanie], double life, acting as authorship, the boundary between
playing and imagination. But McCaw is brought up short by the fact that Bakhtin always cares most about
188 C. Emerson
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But even as metaphor, his use of the actor’s art is instructive. Philosophically,
Bakhtin approaches theater as a phenomenologist. He focuses on the experience of
being a thing from a certain perspective or point of view.19 This move is neither
radical nor original with Bakhtin. ‘‘It is easy to see why phenomenologists are
drawn to the theater metaphor so often,’’ the drama theorist Bert States writes, for it
is the goal of dramatic art to make persuasive ‘‘the frontality of everything in the
world before the eye of consciousness’’ (States 2007, p. 28). And yet States
acknowledges as equally necessary a simultaneous move inward, a collaboration
‘‘between the frontside illusion (character and scene) and the backside reality (the
actor, the unseen stage brace that ‘props’ up the illusion)’’ (ibid.) Distinctions such
as these, between inner and outer within a unified visual field, are the bedrock of
Bakhtin’s dialogic philosophy of consciousness. And the actor’s art complicates
them maximally—since the end-point of this art, the creation and projection of a
role, cannot technically be separated from the artist who is creating it. All takes
place in a single integrated body. There is no stepping back to view the finished
artifact, no laying it aside for later, no getting out of live performance, no easy
otherness.
Bert States is one of several theater phenomenologists who would find Bakhtin of
interest. These critics fall into two categories, the secular-psychological practitioners
(usually involved in actor training) and the theistic spiritual thinkers (many of
them Christian or Judeo-Christian).20 Both groups have long considered Bakhtin an
eloquent, if at times obscure, ally in their enterprise. At the end of this essay we
return to them to speculate on further extensions of Bakhtin’s thought into the
performing arts field. Taking our cue from Dick McCaw’s dissertation, Chapter 2
(McCaw 2004, p. 39): ‘‘Bakhtin offers both a Stanislavskian and a Brechtian
account of acting. He has so much to say about theatre despite himself.’’
The early Bakhtin on the actor, despite himself (Oedipus
and outsideness)
In his early essay ‘‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,’’ Bakhtin digresses for
several pages on the ‘‘creative work [or creativity] of the actor’’ [tvorcˇestvo
aktera].21 The larger context for his digression is an inquiry into ‘‘spatial form,’’
Footnote 18 continued
the ‘‘production of meaning’’ and Stanislavsky, unsurprisingly, about the practicalities of mounting a
show. See McCaw (2014, p. 37).
19 In viewing Bakhtin as a phenomenologist, I follow the lead of Poole (2001). As a problem of
apperception and creation, the coexistent duality (or feedback loop) in a single person between inside and
outside when the actor creates a role could only have intrigued Bakhtin.
20 For the foundational texts in the secular-psychological-practical group, see Wilshire (1982), States
(1985), Garner (1994), Zarrilli (2004, 2013) and Rayner (2006). Important discussions of theater from the
religious realm (in addition to the technical subfield of theo-drama, or theological dramatic theory,
founded by Hans Urs Von Balthasar in the 1980s), are Harris (1990; on theater as incarnation), Harris
(2003; on Christian aspects of Latin American carnival), and Bouchard (2011; on theater and integrity).
21 Bakhtin (1922–1926, pp. 150–55); Bakhtin (1990b, pp. 76–78). The unfinished ‘‘Author and Hero’’
essay can be only imprecisely dated, but probably belongs to the early-to-mid 1920s.
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specifically the ‘‘expressive and impressive functions of the outer body.’’ Since the
outer body is the raw material of the actor—as well as the moving surfaces that we
the spectators see—let us start with the larger context.
At this point in his career, Bakhtin had not yet formulated his theory of the
dialogic word. He was working more with angles of vision than with words.
Accordingly, his metaphors are not so much verbal as they are spatial: not how
people sound to one another, but how they look. Constructed people—that is,
literary characters, or ‘‘heroes’’—get their ‘‘looks’’ in two basic ways. They can be
controlled from the outside, by what an author sees, or controlled from the inside, by
what the character thinks or feels.22 The author, from an outside position,
‘‘impresses’’ on the emerging hero certain basic external features: a visual exterior, a
biography, the overarching shape of a plot. But the hero, to the extent that he or she
is beginning to ‘‘come alive’’ from within, also begins to express personal qualities:
idiosyncratic goals, values, a distinctive manner of perceiving the world. In
Bakhtin’s view, the successful creation of every fictional character is the result of a
shifting ‘‘author-hero ratio’’ as regards this initiative and control.
Now consider the situation of an actor constructing a role. When, and how, does a
stage actor become an ‘‘author’’ in Bakhtin’s sense?23 Early in his ‘‘Author and
Hero’’ essay (Bakhtin 1922–1926, pp. 104–10, 1990b, pp. 22–27), Bakhtin sketches
out a rough scenario by which an author might get a taste, but only a taste, of a
character’s inner life. It can serve as a dry run for an actor getting down to work on
his role. In this scenario, authors dart briefly ‘‘inside’’ the emerging fictive creature,
look at the world through its eyes, feel the world through its body. This dynamic
moment Bakhtin calls vzˇivanie [or ‘‘living into’’ a person]. But the author cannot
remain there, in someone else’s place, while continuing to create. Reliable
knowledge about the world (which includes the truth of our feelings as well as
cognitive truths) can only be accessed from the outside.24 Bakhtin insists that I do
not even know the emotional genre of my lived experience—whether it is sad or
happy, a tragedy or a comedy—until I imagine myself a spectator of it.25 The
22 Overall, Bakhtin writes, a character will end up either ‘‘author-centric’’ or ‘‘hero-centric.’’ Authorcentric
heroes are sharply delineated, easy to recognize, relatively unself-conscious, tied in tightly to
ancestors and kinship systems, and behave as their plots tell them to. Hero-centric heroes, in contrast, are
innerly, unpredictable, solitary, hard to pin down, rebellious: the Romantic hero. The outwardly molded,
author-centric Classical hero dominated ancient epic and Greek tragedy, which is where Bakhtin’s
theatrical concepts are grounded and from where they never strayed. For an excellent account of
Bakhtin’s early views on character-building based on the ‘‘Author and Hero’’ essay in the context of the
classicist Lev Pumpianskij, see Kliger (2011, pp. 78–79).
23 McCaw (2014) elegantly approaches this question in terms of Bakhtin’s evolving use of the concept of
image [obraz], which at this early period signifies a plastic, pictorial representation that is available for
another to see and love. This image is spatial and dynamic, in the Aristotelian sense of imitation not only
as appearance but as action. The artistic image is ‘‘the form in which a character is authored’’ (p. 30).
24 Thus distancing becomes ‘‘the hinge upon which everything phenomenologically observable swings’’
(Poole 2001, p. 118). Crucial for Bakhtin was the work of Max Scheler and the Marburg philosopher
Nicolai Hartmann on the need to leave and return to the self for any reliable act of cognition. The best
discussions of Bakhtin’s ‘‘living-into’’ and its Schelerian implications for ethics and novels remain
Wyman (2008) and (2015).
25 ‘‘From within lived experience, life is neither tragic or comic, neither beautiful nor sublime, for the
one who objectively experiences it himself and for anyone who purely co-experiences with him. A soul
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profound theatricality of Bakhtin’s scenario is clear. Also clear is that Bakhtin, in
1920s Leningrad, would have had some methodological differences with his
Moscow compatriot Konstantin Stanislavsky. Stanislavsky’s method as practiced in
the Moscow Art Theater during that decade counseled actors to access authentic and
playable feelings through affective or ‘‘emotion memory,’’ recuperating individual
experience [perezˇivanie] in the interests of the creative imagination. Bakhtin did not
believe this could be done—and if attempted, the result could not be trusted.
We must not make too much of this opposition.26 Stanislavsky is done a
disservice when his ‘‘system’’ is reduced to narcissistic innerness; his concern
always was to see the self in the role, which is given empty to the actor and must be
filled. Optimally, recuperated experience would be a shared, lived experience by
actor and character. Stanislavsky (grounded in plays) and Bakhtin (grounded in
novels) each readily acknowledge that the quest for a satisfying role is always a
relationship. And an ‘‘actor in search of the character’’ is probably the most intimate
dialogue between ‘‘I’’ and ‘‘other’’ that a person can experience. For Bakhtin, this
search is a subset of a larger category: that of any author imparting life to a fictional
character. But a novelist creating a fictional character—say, Fyodor Dostoevsky
creating Raskolnikov—is tied to a wholly different dynamic than, say, Richard
Burbage creating Hamlet. Forget even that Dostoevsky makes up his own story,
whereas Burbage must follow Shakespeare’s play text. Novelist and actor stabilize
their work at different points. They relate differently to their creative product. At the
end of the day, Dostoevsky and his readership are left with a freestanding novel that
survives the absence and death of its author. The actor Burbage, while ‘‘writing’’
himself into his part, might indeed dart into the role, then dart out of it, but he must
return to live in Hamlet for the duration of his artistic activity. His creativity, played
out minute by minute in real time before a live audience, must be sustained
uninterruptedly inside the role.
This ‘‘insideness’’ was bound to be a stumbling block for Bakhtin, for all the
reasons we know. What is inside is illusory, mute, in constant flux. Its authority,
sincerity, authenticity, and honesty are forever in doubt. Bakhtin rejects in principle
the Cartesian model of the autonomous, articulate subject, open and accessible to
itself in a transparent act of self-reflection, a model summed up for him in the
misleading metaphor of the mirror.27 Thus is Bakhtin so critical of the European
movement he calls ‘‘Expressivism’’—largely for its naı¨ve faith in communicating
information honestly from the inside. Especially unattractive to him about
Footnote 25 continued
living and experiencing its own life will light up for me with a tragic light or will assume a comical
expression or will become beautiful and sublime—only insofar as I step beyond the bounds of that soul,
assume a definite position outside it, actively clothe it in externally valid [lit. signifying] bodiliness
[aktivno obleku ee vo vnesˇne znacˇimujiu plot’] (Bakhtin 1922–1926, p. 145, 1990b, p. 70).
26 I thank Susanna Weygandt for this cautionary note. In addition to McCaw (2014), who urges us to
move beyond cliche´ in assessing the sophistication and flexibility of Stanislavsky’s method, see also
Carnicke (2009, ch. 7), ‘‘Stanislavsky’s Lost Term,’’ and the glossary entries on pp. 213–14. For more on
Stanislavsky’s ideas in the other-oriented context of Gustav Shpet, Russia’s accomplished phenomenologist
and student of Husserl, see Matern (2013).
27 Such is the theme of a fine close reading of a tiny Bakhtin text from our second period (1943–1944),
‘‘The Man at the Mirror’’; see Nikulin (2011).
Bakhtin and the actor 191
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‘‘expressivist aesthetics’’ is its reliance on imitative, or duplicative, sympathy
toward a suffering hero. Pity that is simply mirrored by the audience—reciprocal
self-pity—is spiritually unworthy of its subject and wholly unproductive. We have
now arrived at the theatrical core of the matter: the poverty, in Bakhtin’s view, of
any economy of identification and catharsis. This impoverishing move should not
happen in the theater hall, and it should not happen in the actor. For as Bakhtin
never tires of insisting, we do not duplicate a feeling in order to understand it. I
‘‘have’’ a feeling not when I find myself at its mercy, but when I respond to it. To
understand something and to experience it fully, we must be outside of it and
assume a position toward it. Aesthetic consummation requires distancing and
detachment [otresˇenie].28
Bakhtin begins his digression on the actor with a prior digression on that staple
ingredient of German Romantic theater criticism, the tragedy of Oedipus.29 But he
does not limit himself to offering advice to actors ‘‘living in’’ to the role. True to his
orientation toward the outside, he would also like to teach proper creative behavior
to the spectator. How should I, an outsider in the hall, participate in the tragic fate
and perspective of this hero? Many are the ways, Bakhtin suggests, but the one thing
I must never do is to merge with the hero’s on-stage perspective, reproduce its
horror and entrapment, for then ‘‘the tragedy would be nullified’’ (Bakhtin 1922–
1926, p. 146, 1990b, p. 71). All that would remain in the hall, or the amphitheater,
would be a confused heap of faked feelings (for I know I am not Oedipus; I can only
be I). All the imitative sympathy in the world will not change one jot the awfulness
of the King’s tragic plight. By attempting to co-experience his despair, I forgo the
chance to help him (to ‘‘enrich him in principle’’) with my outside perspective on
his life. Bakhtin’s eccentric reading of Sophocles, which appears to forget that
Oedipus is not our needy next-door neighbor but a character fixed in a play, has not
gone unnoticed by theater professionals like Dick McCaw.30 In this grand conflation
of life and art, we see Bakhtin smilingly take on Aristotle’s catharsis, Stanislavsky’s
28 See Bakhtin (1924, p. 314, 1990c, p. 306). Here Bakhtin provides his own equivalent to
phenomenological theories of distancing developed by Russian critics in the 1920s: Viktor Shklovsky’s
device of ostranenie or estrangement, and Gustav Shpet’s concept of ‘‘detachment’’ in his ‘‘Theater as
Art’’ [Teatr kak iskusstvo]. Shpet argues that actors live in a ‘‘detached reality’’ [dejstvitel’nost’
otresˇennaja] of their own, not correlated with pragmatic life or pre-existing literary texts except through
freely-chosen personal work (see Shpet 1922).
29 The Oedipus digression is in turn preceded by a digression on play [igra] (Bakhtin 1922–1926, p. 150,
1990b, p. 74). Key for him is the difference between a game that is imagined [voobrazˇaetsja] from within,
‘‘played at’’ (say, by unselfconscious children) and thus admitting of no actors, and a performed spectacle,
acted because it is ‘‘imaged forth’’ [izobrazˇaetsja]. Only this act of creating an image is genuine
authorship, and images are always constructed on the outer boundary. Bakhtin builds on earlier
distinctions drawn between ‘‘imagining’’ and ‘‘producing an image of’’ for someone else: to the extent
that aesthetic activity must create wholes, co-experiencing is inadequate for art. I might be moved by the
sight of a menacing sea, but as an artist ‘‘what I must do is paint a picture or produce a poem or compose a
myth (even if only in my imagination), where the given phenomenon will become the hero of the event
consummated around him. So long as I remain inside the given image or configuration (co-experiencing
with it) this is impossible to do’’ (Bakhtin 1922–1926, p. 141, 1990b, pp. 66–67, trans. adjusted).
30 See McCaw (2004) for an exasperated discussion of the Oedipus example: ‘‘Bakhtin has failed to
mention one significant thing about Oedipus—he isn’t an actual act-performing person but a character in
a play!’’ (p. 37).
192 C. Emerson
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emotion-memory, and Tolstoy’s ‘‘art as infection’’—all in the service of his master
truth: when multiple perspectives collapse into one, life closes down and the artistic
event disintegrates.
So much for the proper way to view Oedipus from the hall. What about the
proper way to play the role of Oedipus from the stage? When Bakhtin turns to the
actor playing the hero, he invokes the same two parameters that he uses to orient any
human being anywhere. The first is the world as others see it from where they are,
with me in it. The second is the world as I see it from where I am, with others in it.
The first parameter Bakhtin calls ‘‘surroundings’’ [okruzˇenie]. It is a panoramic
affair that can be grasped only by an outside author or creator. The second
parameter he calls the ‘‘horizon’’ [krugozor], which is what my eyes see at any
given moment. It belongs to the creature. My horizon cannot (of course) include the
full, closed-up contour of my own body, because that body has my eyes looking out
of it. And what of the actor? The actor is obliged, not only as a mind but as a body,
to sustain both perspectives at once. The actor is simultaneously the author of the
hero (that is, the creator of the role, with all its unseen inner complexity) and its first
spectator, who must constantly keep the outer body of this emerging ‘‘creature’’
before his eyes. Bakhtin calls this fused position that of an ‘‘author/contemplator’’
[avtor/sozertsatel’] (Bakhtin 1922–1926, p. 146, 1990b, p. 71). At times, this
authoring task is considered the work of the actor alone, shuttling between self and
other, between ‘‘seeing’’ the role and being seen in it. At times it is the work of other
theater personnel, such as a director.31 What would appear to unite author, director,
spectator and actor in a single function is a faith in the rightness of outside
perspective.
In this economy, two factors are for Bakhtin non-negotiable. First, the actor
cannot apply to the role any categories that govern solely his own individual ‘‘I.’’
Those categories are too fluid, too undisciplined, and cannot be isolated; or as
Bakhtin puts it, the structure of inner experience as stored in my memory resembles
‘‘the most unrestrained daydreaming about myself’’ [Bakhtin 1922–1926, p. 147,
1990b, p. 72). The innerness of my ‘‘I’’ cannot be turned into a tool with which to
grasp the essence of another person, in this case the desired role. So Stanislavsky, it
would appear, is naı¨ve—although Bakhtin hastens to excuse himself from that
debate, claiming that he is ‘‘not objecting to realism or naturalism,’’ nor is he
‘‘defending an idealist transfiguration of reality in art’’ (ibid.). He is arguing on a
‘‘wholly other plane.’’32 This undefined other plane, as theater professionals have
pointed out, does not include the practical aspects of formal stage work: arduous
rehearsals, nightly reincarnations, and lengthy runs.
31 ‘‘The actor is aesthetically creative only when he is an author,’’ Bakhtin writes, ‘‘—or to be exact:
[when he is] a co-author, a stage director, as well as an active spectator of the portrayed hero and of the
whole play (after discounting certain mechanical factors, we could even use an ‘equals’ sign here:
author = director = spectator = actor)’’ (Bakhtin 1922–1926, p. 150, 1990b, p. 76). The English text
here contains a typographical error: the sequence reads ‘‘author = director = actor.’’ Zritel’ (the
spectator) is omitted.
32 McCaw (2014, pp. 34–37) defends Stanislavsky’s manifestly ‘‘Tolstoyan’’ approach to co-feeling and
co-experiencing emotional memory as more likely to train actors for the rigors of sustaining a role over
multiple performances, a question that interests Bakhtin not at all.
Bakhtin and the actor 193
123
And now the second factor. In building up the role, Bakhtin insists, as much as
possible must be done from the outside: ‘‘in front of a mirror,’’ or better (given
Bakhtin’s distrust of reflecting surfaces), ‘‘in front of a director.’’ (Stanislavsky too
insisted on this.) These activities include make-up, costume, gesture, body and voice
training, and continual external feedback on them all. Otherwise the artistic whole
will be lost. Only at the final minute, poised to begin the play, does the actor-author
dare to tip the inner-outer ratio toward the inside: the actor then ‘‘shifts the center of
gravity to the inner experience of his hero as a person, as a subject of life, that is, he
shifts into extra-aesthetic material’’ (Bakhtin 1922–1926, p. 151, 1990b, p. 77).
Note Bakhtin’s crucial point. When the ‘‘center of gravity’’ shifts to the ‘‘inside
of the hero as a person’’—that is, to the hero as the ‘‘subject of its own life,’’ looking
out rather than being looked at by another from without—the actor is no longer
dealing with ‘‘aesthetic material.’’ For Bakhtin, identifying with the role removes it
effectively from the realm of created art. The very concept of the aesthetic, for him,
implies an external perspective, the fact of being seen by another—because only
from the outside can an author be active.
This entrapment of perspective inside a body and face, a defining trait of all
creatures, implies for Bakhtin a certain inescapable passivity. Of course Bakhtin
admits that the inner and outer aspects of the actor’s work are ‘‘everywhere
interwoven… the actor is an artist in the full sense of the word’’ (Bakhtin 1922–
1926, p. 151, 1990b, p. 77). But to serve this art, actors must strive to postpone as
long as possible the ‘‘move toward innerness.’’ The actor knows that the inside
realm—full of fantasies, desires, flux—fuels the role and permits it to cohere. But
the transition to the role is a high-risk event. Vision is radically narrowed, appetites
are focused and enhanced, yet at the same time the actor becomes strangely
helpless.33 In this model, once the actor disappears into the role, it is the spectator
who assumes the dominant authoring position. As so often in Bakhtin, the Other is
the one who stabilizes and defines us, releasing our ability to act. So of course we
should not squander ourselves by identifying with Oedipus. Why duplicate his
anguish in order to cathart our own, when we have a chance to actualize something
else? The outside other always has the agency that matters. If Bakhtin believes in
tragic knowledge as well as in comedic knowledge—and the verdict on that is still
out—then those darker, more solitary acts of knowing are also bestowed on us by an
outside consciousness.
There are theological and ontological dimensions to Bakhtin’s thinking about
theater that will be noted at the end of this essay. Suffice it here to consider Bakhtin
and the challenge of theatrical seeing as akin to the challenge, and limitations, of the
proscenium stage. The fact that I have two eyes facing front means that as a creator,
I am not competent to live ‘‘in the round’’—that is, I cannot understand the fluidity
of life, the realness of its multiple perspectives, the many valid angles from which
any truth can be approached, the displaceable quality of all parts. Always I risk
33 ‘‘At the moment of reincarnation [perevoplosˇcˇenie], he [the actor] becomes passive material (passive
in relation to aesthetic self-activity)—he becomes a life within that artistic whole which, earlier, he had
himself created, and which is now being actualized by the spectator. In relation to the aesthetic activity of
the spectator, all the life-activity of the actor [as] hero is passive’’ (Bakhtin 1922–1926, pp. 77–78, 1990b,
p. 151).
194 C. Emerson
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forgetting the smallness of myself on another’s horizon. Or as Bakhtin put the
matter mournfully in the final sentence of his unfinished sketch on Gustav Flaubert,
probably also penned in the dark year 1944: ‘‘Everything proves an obstacle to our
getting a good look back at our own selves.’’34 For that, the perspective of a higher
Being is required.
Topographical stage, symbolic gesture (Bakhtin on Shakespeare
and tragic seriousness)
Let us now fast forward two decades, on to our second, briefer and darker text. It is
the third year of Russia’s Total War. Bakhtin is in provincial exile, teaching German
in high school, with few colleagues, little food, scarce firewood. In 1944, he jotted
down some provocative comments on Shakespearean tragedy (Bakhtin 1944a). The
topic was timely. Since 1934, Shakespeare had been co-opted by the Stalinist
establishment and heavily sponsored; commissions were set up to advise the major
theatres on how the plays could contribute to a re-forging of the New Soviet Person.
King Lear was very popular, as was Macbeth. Othello (with its magnificent set-up
for torturing Iago in its final lines) was Stalin’s personal favorite among the
tragedies.35 Bakhtin intended his comments, which focus solely on Shakespearean
tragedy, as an addition to his sprawling manuscript on Rabelais, not yet placed with
a publishing house. Perhaps he hoped that supplementing his study with a darker
perspective might balance the optimism of his carnival. If ‘‘in our terminology’’
carnival can be tragic, then—as these notes attest, especially on King Lear—tweak
those terms ever so slightly, remove one or another of carnival’s interpenetrating
virtues or allow them to decay, and the horror of the scene is beyond salvation.
Again Bakhtin begins his thinking about theatre with the doomed Oedipus. But
he is no longer interested in pleading for a non-duplicative psychological response
to the suffering King of Thebes. By the 1940s he is working with the concept of the
chronotope, deployed toward a ‘‘historical poets.’’ What interests him now is the
tragic ‘‘historical line’’ stretching from Sophocles through Shakespeare to Dostoevsky
in The Brothers Karamazov. Chronotopically, it does not seem to matter that
two are playwrights and one a novelist. These three benchmark authors become for
Bakhtin three stages in the breaking-out of the individual from the collective
body.36
34 See Bakhtin (1944b, p. 137). Bakhtin insists on Flaubert’s ‘‘extraordinary importance for the fates of
realism, its transformation and degeneration…the definitive dying-out of two-bodiedness [dvutelost’] and
two-tonedness [dvutonnost’] in the novelistic-prose image’’ (p. 130). Flaubert—like modern theater—is
contributing to the de-carnivalization of the world.
35 See Ostrovsky (2006) for an overview of the Stalinist Shakespeare industry. Bakhtin’s interest in the
Bard might have been triggered by this campaign. In 1970 Bakhtin wrote a very positive reader’s report
for his friend Leonid Pinskii’s new book on Shakespeare, Sˇekspir. Osnovnye nacˇala dramaturgii, noting
(in addition to the carnival spirit of the comedies) Pinskii’s understanding of freedom in the tragedies as
‘‘personal caprice’’ serving a ‘‘demonic violation of justice’’ (Bakhtin 1970, p. 445). Pinskii’s volume was
published in 1971.
36 See Commentary to Bakhtin (1944a, pp. 891–92), where Bakhtin, with some help from St. Augustine,
intends to chart the following movement, with his peculiar sense of genre as something that has ‘‘eyes’’:
Bakhtin and the actor 195
123
As the PMLA excerpt ‘‘Bakhtin on Shakespeare’’ makes immediately clear (and
as evidenced by the longer, more rambling Russian text), this break-out is not a
comfortable process. Nor is its spokesperson our familiar, rosy, hopeful Bakhtin.
The pessimism of these notes is startling. There are no open-ended dialogues, no
words-with-a-loophole, no trace of that generous default position that Bakhtin called
‘‘Great Time,’’ no unfinalizability or rejuvenating grotesque, no bonds of family
love. Children thirst to kill their parents; parents are suspicious of their offspring.37
In Shakespearean tragedy Bakhtin sees only power, brutal instinct, fear of
extinction, and the desire of rulers to hang on, no matter what. This he calls
destructive self-affirmation. When measured against the collective life cycles of
folklore and carnival, an individual life—in fact, individuation as such—can only be
tragic. Showcasing Macbeth and King Lear, Bakhtin argues that such separation
from the whole not only isolates the hero (as happened to the tragic Greek hero,
when he separated from the Chorus), but inevitably turns the hero into a criminal.
Bakhtin explains this ‘‘tragedy of individuation’’ along lines that appear to
parallel his elder contemporary, the Symbolist poet and theoretician Vjacˇeslav
Ivanov. Ivanov connects the rise of the solitary tragic stage hero with the collapse of
the unity of the ancient chorus.38 In place of Ivanov’s Dionysus, Bakhtin puts
carnival. Unlike Ivanov, however, he holds out no promise of an ecstatically
reunified future whole. And nowhere does Bakhtin suggest (as his compatriots often
did) that Holy Russia might lead the world toward such rebirth. In his Shakespeare
notes, Bakhtin is indifferent to the communal good or any eventual restoration of
universal harmony. He has nothing to say about the troubling but ultimately
redemptive late plays, The Tempest, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, where
criminally tragic ingredients in the first half of the story are allowed to mature
into benign, natural, even supernatural grace, miraculously delivering the survivors
Footnote 36 continued
‘‘the external person, as part of the ancestral folk body [rodovoe narodnoe telo] in the external topographical
coordinates of the world in Rabelais—the discovery of individual life in the external world in
Shakespeare—the discovery and justification of the inner person, of the soul, in the intensive coordinates
of the ‘deepest possible innerness’ in the novels of Dostoevsky’’ (pp. 891-92).
37 Here is one of several places that Bakhtin resonates with Freud: A man who ‘‘patiently waits for the
death of his father, is sincerely afraid of it and mourns it, sincerely loves his son and heir (and successor)
and sincerely lives for his son: such a man is not fit to be the hero of a tragedy’’ (Bakhtin 1944a, p. 688,
2014, p. 528).
38 See Ivanov (1906). This essay, together with ‘‘On the Essence of Tragedy’’ (O susˇcˇestve tragedii
1912), traces the modern era’s loss of community to the emergence of the lonely (often criminal) tragic
hero out of the ancient Greek chorus. Much in this theory of disintegration recalls Bakhtin’s later
commentary, for example: ‘‘The chorus, long ago separated from the community, also became dissociated
from the hero….The chorus then became utterly unnecessary and even restrictive. Thus arose the ‘theater’
(the´atron), i.e. ‘spectacle’ (Schauspiel), only a spectacle. The ‘mask of the actor thickened, so that one
could no longer glimpse through it the countenance of the god of orgies, whose hypostasis the tragic hero
once was: the ‘mask’ condensed into a ‘character.’… In the age of Shakespeare, everything was
calculated to reproduce this ‘character’’’ (Ivanov 1906, p. 102). In his 1911 lecture ‘‘Dostoevsky and the
Novel Tragedy,’’ however, Ivanov anticipates the rebirth of community out of the chaos of Dostoevsky’s
novels (where Bakhtin, significantly, does not follow him; see PDP, 10-11). For an intriguing discussion
that unfortunately does not incorporate Bakhtin’s comments on Shakespeare, see Kliger (2011). Kliger
concludes that ‘‘Bakhtin reads Dostoevsky as staging the tragedy of individuation on the level of every
utterance’’ (83).
196 C. Emerson
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into a new and potentially fertile order. The collapse Bakhtin predicts is one-way,
and he channels it through his own favorite mode of being, which is carnival.39 But
it is disabled, darkened carnival—nasty, satirical, death-dealing and irreversible,
like the gothic nighttime laughter of Edgar Allen Poe compared with the brightly
restorative laughing world of Rabelais. It appears that a type of carnival is the
default position when a Shakespearean tyrant cannot let go. As a fallback position it
is feeble. In a chilling reading of King Lear, Bakhtin shows how an insanely
prolonged appetite for patriarchal power ends up depriving the self-decrowned Lear
of everything but the outer mocking forms of carnival life. At the end of his ghastly
experiment in testing family love, when the ex-King has been ousted from his castle
and cast into the space of commoners, fools, and unmediated violence, he has access
to none of carnival’s healthy laughter, ambivalence, resilience, or potential for
rebirth.40 If Lear gains tragic knowledge, Bakhtin is uninterested in it.
While addressing Shakespearean tragedy, Bakhtin performs another service. He
counsels us on some proper, and even profound, ways to be serious. Here Bakhtin
has in mind unofficial forms of seriousness (that is, non-exploitative forms):
weakness, sadness, suffering, timidity, ‘‘the seriousness of the slave and the
seriousness of the victim’’ (Bakhtin 1944a, p. 682, 2014, pp. 524–25). Two dozen
pages are all we have of his unrealized project on ‘‘seriousness’’—or, as he referred
to it, the ‘‘seriousification of the world’’ [oser’eznenie mira].41 These notes never
made it into the dissertation or the Rabelais book, and Bakhtin never prepared them
for publication. It appears that even Bakhtin’s free-ranging mind realized that an
overly ambitious side-thought could burst apart a book. In his working notebook for
1938, he noted with dissatisfaction that he was ‘‘drawing out too many threads from
Rabelais in all directions, into past and future, we are allowing ourselves too many
distant and inner juxtapositions, comparisons, analogies, we are weakening the
constraint [uzda] of scholarly method.’’42 Thus ‘‘the plans for reworking Rabelais
remained unrealized,’’ the editors write. From the notes, only fragments on Ivan the
Terrible and Peter I entered the book on Rabelais. ‘‘MMB did not again return to the
problem of seriousness, the tragic cosmos, or the menippean tradition in the context
of Rabelais’’ (Bakhtin 1944a, p. 893).
39 In their Commentary, the editors distinguish between ancient tragedy and more basic carnivalistic
forms: ‘‘In the tragedies of Sophocles, death in the form of fate becomes a cosmic force and takes on the
features of an individualizing universality, in contrast to mythological consciousness, in which time is
experienced as an uninterrupted chain of births and deaths’’ (Bakhtin 1944a, pp. 888–89). Although the
‘‘liberating tones of Saturnalia and carnival’’ continue to sound even in the darkest tragedies (Bakhtin
1944a, p. 690), sooner or later absolute power will contaminate the public square and strip away the
ambivalence of its signs.
40 See Bakhtin (1944a, p. 689, 2014, p. 528–29). In his discussion of Lear, Bakhtin makes much of the
fraud attending ‘‘the superficial censorship-bound logic of feeling, thoughts, words’’ [podverkhnostnaja
podcenzurnaja logika cˇuvstv, myslej, slov] marking the censored, although sincere, love that children bear
their father; and it is unclear whether this censorship is meant to be political (imposed by the state) or
psychological, as in a Freudian model.
41 Bakhtin (1944a, p. 682); Sandler renders this phrase as ‘‘seriousening the world’’ (Bakhtin 2014,
p. 524).
42 See Bakhtin (1944a, p. 890). The only strand he followed up intensively was menippean satire, and
this research did not see the light of day until it was inserted, with some artificiality, as a new chapter four
in the 2nd edition of the Dostoevsky book (Bakhtin 1963, 1984).
Bakhtin and the actor 197
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Menippean satire found its way, albeit awkwardly, into the second edition of the
book on Dostoevsky, as its new Chapter Four. But seriousification and the tragic
cosmos remain stranded themes. This is unfortunate, for seriousness has gotten short
shrift in the published Bakhtin. It receives nothing like the spiritually heightened
attention allotted to the laughing genres. Bakhtin dislikes seriousness, does not take
it seriously, links it with political power [vlast’] (which he also dislikes and
devalues), deems it hopelessly ‘‘official’’ and monologic, fusing it with terror
[strakh]. The serious in Bakhtin tends to be simplified and homogenized, reduced to
the losing side of a binary with laughter.
These notes on Shakespeare, tucked between two parricides (Oedipus and the
Karamazov brothers), complicate Bakhtin’s thinking on the ‘‘serious’’ and the
‘‘official’’ by deepening the relation between individuation and tragedy.43 This
essay is not the place to investigate Bakhtin’s thoughts on the Birth of
Shakespearean Tragedy out of the Spirit of Degenerate Carnival. That discussion,
hopefully, will come. What we have meanwhile is the trajectory of seriousification,
buttressed with opinions on European theater practice, and all of it argued more in
the manner of notes to himself than as a scholarly exegesis. Unsurprisingly, Bakhtin
grounds these projects in his dialogic (I-Other) philosophy of cognition, impressing
Sophocles and Shakespeare into its service. Only peripherally is he concerned with
the concrete work of professional actors who enable the art of those two
playwrights. This much can be said, however: that for Bakhtin, an actor ‘‘living
into’’ a role is engaged in a fretful, tense relationship—one in which intuitive,
improvisatory energies figure only negligibly. The spontaneous, stress-free performance
art that is carnival, undertaken in the spirit of holiday (prazdnik: a day freed
up from discipline, an idle and carefree day) is distant from the rigorous mentation
required for formal stage work.
In his superb study of Bakhtin and theater, Dick McCaw notes several startling
things about this rigor. First, unlike Stanislavsky (so painfully personal in his
method and his discoveries), Bakhtin writing on the body, for all his emphasis on its
concrete particularity, is ‘‘effectively impersonal.’’ Each body is different in its own
way, but these ways remain schematic. Second, Bakhtin’s basic scenarios for selfother
definition tend to be frontal and static. He grasps the body primarily in visual
and intellectual terms. Yet for human relations to acquire a third dimension or
develop creatively through time (minimal requirements to work in the performing
arts), people must move. In Bakhtin, McCaw notes, ‘‘there is no knowing or feeling
body at work—simply an eye whose I is trained upon the object on the horizon.’’
43 See the editors’ summary of the ‘‘seriousification’’ project from just this ‘‘I-Other’’ perspective: ‘‘The
line of serious culture, as it is presented in Additions [to Rabelais], from the tragedy of Sophocles
(Oedipus Rex) to the tragedies of Shakespeare (Hamlet, Macbeth), and from them to the novels of
Dostoevsky (Brothers Karamazov) mark three stages in the becoming [stanovlenie/Werden] of
personality in European culture. The path from the general sensation of life [osˇcˇusˇcˇenie zˇizni] to the
cognizing of one’s own ‘I’ passes, on one hand, through the separation of the material [vesˇcˇnyj] subject
from the material object, that is, through cognition, and on the other hand through an opposition of ‘I’ to
‘other,’ that is, through self-consciousness. In ancient tragedy, what is required for the consciousness of
the unity of a man’s personality is the ‘other’; in Shakespeare’s tragedies, individual life is discovered and
justified in the external topographical coordinates of the world, and in Dostoevsky’s novels, in the
discovery and justification of the inner man’’ (Bakhtin 1944a, pp. 888–89).
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What this ‘‘I’’ feels (how it experiences) is determined for him by what it can see.
And thus, McCaw concludes, ‘‘Bakhtin’s body offers little enlightenment in terms
of actor-training since it is deprived of all senses apart from vision and thus has no
means of learning or adapting to the environment. His theory is about dialogue, but
the need for the other is mainly created by this sensory impoverishment.’’44
McCaw comes appreciatively to Bakhtin after decades of professional work with,
and on, actors’ bodies. Bakhtin came to acting, and to theater more generally, as a
spectator, with metaphysical interests and an ailing, immobilized body. Granted that
Bakhtin was a technophobe. Against the grain of his accelerated era, he did not
especially value speed or high-velocity encounters—except, perhaps, in his
visionary state of carnival. As a phenomenologist of theater, Bakhtin nevertheless
provokes us to new thought despite himself. Two provocative ideas in the
Shakespeare notes deserve attention: one on the formal art of acting, the other,
Bakhtin’s eccentric history of European theater.
What sort of stage do we need? Where do we go when we lose it?
The first idea comes from a single passage at the beginning of the notes. Bakhtin is
discussing the wonderful fact that a carnival image is forever spinning and whirling:
you cannot tell front from back, face from buttocks. This spinning is the spatial
equivalence of semantic ‘‘ambivalence.’’ But when the world begins to grow
serious, praise is separated from abuse, life from death: ‘‘the fusing of face and
rump’’ comes to an end.45 Death ceases to be what it is under carnival conditions:
contingent, transitory, reversible.46 And now the provocation: to make an image
serious, Bakhtin writes, is ‘‘to stop its twirling, its rises and falls, and to place it
firmly on its feet with its face to the audience’’ (684/526) [postavit’ na nogi licom k
publike]. Which is to say: the image must become a responsible actor on the
proscenium stage, dutifully memorize its part, and learn to face one way.
44 Quotes and conclusions taken from the final typescript draft of McCaw (2016) Bakhtin and Theatre (in
press), Chapter 3, ‘‘Psycho-physical Acting,’’ subsection ‘‘Conclusion: A Body that Learns.’’.
45 Bakhtin (1944a, p. 684, 2014, p. 526). The larger context of the passage suggests the emergence of
disciplined actor out of carnival clown: ‘‘To make an image serious means to remove its ambivalence and
ambiguousness, its unresolvedness, its readiness to change its meaning, to turn itself inside out, its
mystifying carnival essence—it means to stop the turning of cartwheels, its tumbling, to separate front
from rear (to stop it at a moment in which the face is up front), to separate praise from invective…’’.
46 In a series of brief paradoxes, Bakhtin addresses death: ‘‘The arbitrariness [slucˇajnost’], the
insignificance [nicˇtozˇnost’] of annihilation and death;…death is something transitory that essentially says
nothing; there are no grounds for viewing it as absolute; viewing it as absolute, we turn non-being into
bad being, absence into bad presence [nebytie v durnoe bytie, otsutstvie—v durnoe prisutstvie]… we
know [death’s] effect only on the tiniest segment of time and space’’ (Bakhtin 1944a, p. 684, 2014, p. 525,
transl. adjusted). Death in Shakespeare is a ‘‘catastrophe of individuality,’’ experienced either as a
‘‘violent or arbitrary change/shift [smena] coming before its proper time,’’ or as a ‘‘doubts about death,’’
existence understood as ‘‘an uninterrupted circle of becomings, becomings without end and consequently
without purpose or sense’’ (889). In this context, Bakhtin notes, Hamlet’s ‘‘doubts about death’’ as a final
threshold are shattering: constant change without purpose is no more satisfying than an arbitrary absolute
end.
Bakhtin and the actor 199
123
To stop a twirling torso so that the ‘‘I’’ is at the center facing front: this is to
‘‘declare it stable and unchangeable’’ and thus to introduce death irreversibly into
life. Such a worldview is, among other things, a mark of tragedy. But Bakhtin has a
larger complaint to lodge against European drama, and against the sort of acting
required to carry it off. His 1944 notes include a brief ‘‘chronotopic’’ account of the
evolution of modern drama (Bakhtin 1944a, p. 688, 2014, p. 528). It suggests an
inspired debt to Sigmund Freud and Ernst Cassirer. Bakhtin values in drama what he
calls ‘‘topography’’—symbolic spaces and distinct physical gestures that speak
graphically of First and Last things. Up is heaven, down is hell, and the performing
human body contains all the options of the universe.
Shakespearean tragedy is great because, like the mystery and morality plays that
precede it, it is ‘‘cosmic, liminal, topographic.’’ It deals with ‘‘fundamental images
and tones’’ of the first level: deep, unpacified and violent. Realistically motivated
dialogue—the stuff of novels—is inappropriate for actors at this level, even when
engaged in modest everyday tasks. But Shakespeare also works with second-level
images, destined to become the stuff of bourgeois drama, those ‘‘bridled and tamed’’
plays that patiently wait out the death of the father and weep for it. Since this second
level is timid and fearful of the law, it is externally polite and normalized. Thirdlevel
images are the weakest and the worst. They are purely ornamental, softened,
veiled, fictitious, made up of ‘‘bas-relief’’ columns that bear no weight at all.
Bakhtin’s example of third-level drama is the topical, cluttered, realistic stage of
Henrik Ibsen. This clutter is everywhere, from props to stage dialogue to
performance style. (‘‘Our stage’’—Bakhtin remarks with disdain—has become
‘‘an empty box [or crate: pustoj jasˇcˇik] without topography or accents, a neutral
box.’’) True, actors who work with third-level images are capable of ‘‘expressive
psychological gestures.’’ But what trivia do those gestures express! The current
issues of the day, transient events, the bustling of bodies living a ‘‘petty, diluted
life.’’ (Bakhtin’s example is ‘‘the quivering of the hand opening a cigarette box and
taking out a cigarette [papirosa: the crude, hand-rolled kind]: 700/534.) Merely
personal gestures in the theater erase all traces of dignity and transcendence. We
lose whatever chance we had to measure our puny death against the greatness of
cosmic Being. The tragic sense degenerates and ‘‘begins to sound almost comical’’
(696/532). We live in a time when ‘‘the topographic coordinates of action, word,
and gesture have faded and rubbed off’’ (699/534).
At the end of this disheartening survey of contemporary European theater,
Bakhtin acknowledges the beneficial side effects of such semiotic trivialization.
Because the stage had ceased to communicate symbolically, signs that used to be
read extensively in space began to be read intensively, inwardly, in their full depth
and individualized contour. The loss of topographical movement made possible,
even necessary, the birth of an inner soul and refined means for its expression (700/
533)—the greatest of which is the polyphonic novel. Thus does Bakhtin motivate
his bridge to Dostoevsky. He then attends to the final phase in the break-out of the
tragic criminal personality: Raskolnikov, a consciousness of extreme innerness that
has wholly lost its topographic bearings.
The epigraph to this essay might now be revisited in light of this chronology.
‘‘Speaking your terminology, carnival is a tragedy… only here, tragedy is not the
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final word.’’ The laughing Rabelais represents the corporeal principle of the French
Renaissance, the bigger-than-life body strutting the world’s stage with its appetites
and sensations joyfully displayed. But this body (with its vanities and carnal drives)
has tragic potential that will be privatized by Shakespeare. The ‘‘I’’ will solidify,
cease to trust in simple or lucid acts of communication, oppose its meaning to
others, begin to cultivate a jealously protective inner self. The tragic Shakespeare
with its incomparable monologues is a magnificent stepping-stone to the soul
speaking to itself. In a Shakespearean world of privatized vanities and lusts, tragedy
is a ‘‘final word.’’ We have arrived at the terrain of the dark Bakhtin circa
1943–1944, whose concept of criminal individuation approaches George Steiner’s
definition of absolute tragedy: ‘‘the crime of man is that he exists.’’47
For the novel, an interiorization of individual consciousness is indispensible. For
theater, Bakhtin intimates, it is an impoverishment. On the stage, Bakhtin hungers
for the ancient masks. And just as he argues, in his introduction to the Rabelais
book, that over the last 1000 years laughter has gotten thinner and worse, so he
insists that the art of the dramatic actor, from ancient Greek amphitheaters to Henrik
Ibsen, has been made flatter, less richly signifying, more cluttered with prosaic
detail. In a sense, of course, Bakhtin is correct. But he ignores the fact that the great
naturalist-illusionist movement in European theater of the 1890s, which he
considers so trivializing, was itself a revolution, a daring break with millennia of
theatrical tradition throughout the world. This naturalist revolution was immediately
contested. Symbolist and Modernist theater rebelled and returned to the conventionally
stylized stage—precisely what Bakhtin so valued. Thus we can only regret
that Bakhtin, with his medieval, proto-modernist theatrical preferences, left no trace
of interest in Meyerhold, Brecht, Nikolai Evreinov, Edward Gordon Craig, or the
Chinese master-actor and Moscow box-office hit in the mid-1930s, Mei Lanfang.
Perhaps Bakhtin sensed in these modernist experiments by daring directors an
unwholesome fascination with the ontological void, the modernist Absurd, which he
did not consider stageworthy. In matters of drama, Bakhtin thirsts after wholes, the
fitting of the human being into the symbolic order. This order was not existentially
disorienting but stable, serious, and authoritative in a positive way.
Concluding remarks
Bakhtinian thought has theatrical potential in two directions. The first is the more
secular and mainstream, those theorists and directors who utilize Bakhtinian ideas
long canonized in scholarship on the novel: double-voiced discourse, the varidirectional
word, polyphony, speech zones, speech genres, language images, the
notion of re-accentuation. A pioneer in this realm has been the post-Stanislavskian
director Anatoly Vasiliev of Moscow’s School of Dramatic Art, founded in 1987.
47 See Steiner (1996, p. 129), opening paragraph: ‘‘Absolute tragedy is very rare. It is a piece of dramatic
literature (or art or music) founded rigorously on the postulate that human life is a fatality…. Original sin,
be it Adamic or Promethean, is not a tragic category. It is charged with possibilities both of motivation
and of eventual redemption. In the absolutely tragic, it is the crime of man that he is, that he exists. His
naked presence and identity are transgressions’’.
Bakhtin and the actor 201
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Vasiliev’s concern is to perform not a whole human being but a ‘‘voice zone.’’ His
actors investigate unexpected intonations and exaggerated oral gestures as aural
alternatives to embodiment. As Susanna Weygandt has shown in her work on this
theater, Vasiliev designs his alternative to the ‘‘physical mimesis’’ of Stanislavsky’s
sort (an actor inhabiting the role) to highlight precisely the difference between
‘‘building a character’’ and performing a character’s ‘‘acoustic image.’’48 Acoustic
images are capricious, full of estranged syllables, deformed rhythms, surprising
information. As in Samuel Beckett’s late plays, the potentials of language as such
are foregrounded. ‘‘It is for this reason that Vasiliev’s technique takes the name
igrovoi teatr, a ‘theater of play,’’’ Weygandt writes. ‘‘The playing nature of the
igrovoi method stems from this ability to move to the edge—to move outside of the
uni-perspective on the role—and peer over the text’s varied styles of syntax.’’
In 2008, Vasiliev staged Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin as Onegin’s Journeys. With
its non-coincident voice zones that fragment the speaking subject and its occasional
overt operatizations of the text, it anticipates the present-day resurgence of interest
in the spoken word and multimedia projection in the New Russian Drama. In these
post-Soviet experiments, personality is often outsourced to props or material things.
When the body (or the deed) defaults—and this is pretty much all the time in New
Drama—plain talk takes over. Against this rising corpus of talking plays, Bakhtin’s
comment in 1929 that ‘‘in drama, the world must be made of a single solid piece’’
sounds singularly old-fashioned. Practice shows that not only epics and lyric poetry
but drama too can be creatively ‘‘novelized.’’ Bakhtin’s the thing wherein to catch
the conscience of Bakhtin.
There is a snag, however. Bakhtin does indeed have a great deal to say about the
word as its own best resource, shorn of three-dimensional scenarios. But everywhere
Bakhtin remains a personalist. The ‘‘outsourced voice,’’ the irresponsible or nonresponsive
body, cannot be made deeply relevant to his core values. So now we turn
to the second direction in which Bakhtin’s theatrical imagination leads us. Its terrain
is not the familiar Bakhtinian canon (secular formal devices for analyzing the novel
and the material carnival grotesque), but the lesser-known writings from the more
obscure years covered in this essay (1920s, 1944). Here the focus is on innerness
versus outwardness, private versus cosmic, and—think Ibsen’s domesticated
bourgeois stage—the given world of material clutter versus a posited world that
is ontological and spiritually robust. Bakhtin’s philosophical concerns turn out to be
very distant from the practical matters of theater.
We saw that Bakhtin was attracted by the austerity and stylized gestural
vocabulary of the Greek and early medieval stage. We might speculate why. One
possible reason has run like a thread through this essay: that inwardness is
unreliable, isolating, trivializing, potentially futile, perhaps even nihilistic. Larger
48 See Susanna Weygandt, ‘‘Embodiment in Postdramatic, Post-Somatic Russian New Drama and
Theater,’’ Ph.D. dissertation in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University,
defended June (2015), Ch. 2, ‘‘The paradigmatic shift from Konstantin Stanislavsky’s ‘Language of
Gesture’ to Anatoly Vasiliev’s ‘Intonation as Gesture’,’’ especially subsections ‘‘The postdramatic theater
of Anatoly Vasiliev’’ and ‘‘Performing a voice zone versus building a character.’’ Although Vasiliev does
not explicitly cite Bakhtin in his interviews, Weygandt’s on-site research has confirmed his deliberate use
of Bakhtinian categories.
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shared coordinates—those of cosmic Being—must be supplied to anchor the
creature and bestow wholeness. For Bakhtin is not ‘‘ethical’’ in the sense of Leo
Tolstoy’s Kingdom of God is Within You, or even of Kant’s categorical imperative,
both tied to morally correct behavior in a normative or deed-centered world. As
recent work by Sergeiy Sandler has suggested, Bakhtin’s ontological position more
closely resembles that of Kierkegaard, a mandate to be in a certain way in the
presence of higher Being.49 The end of Bakhtin’s discussion of ‘‘the creative work
of the actor’’ suddenly resonates with high religious intonation. He writes:
… for the event of lived life as a whole is without any ultimate issue out of
itself. From within itself, a lived life can express itself in the form of an act, a
confession-as-penitence, an outcry; absolution and grace descend upon it from
the Author.50
How might we understand this interface of art, life, and grace at the end of a
digression on the actor? The hero—which on stage is the character, or role—is a
creature. The actor is the Creator. The dialogue between them is maximally intimate
because the speaking parties, while distinct, are technically inseparable. If Vasiliev,
his Moscow School for Dramatic Art, and the New Dramatists, draw on Bakhtin to
estrange the word, fragment the subject, foreground the potential of often violent
disconnection, then a religious-ontological lens on Bakhtin’s theatrical imagination
does the opposite. It encourages us to seek ligatures between disparate parts of a
whole; perhaps even to seek a liturgy.
Such an invitation summons another category of interlocutor. If an embodied
hero on the formal stage must stand still, look out front, and be fixed in his own
death by the horizontal gaze of spectators across footlights, then ultimate
significance must be allowed to leap out along a vertical (or topographical)
dimension.51 Quest for the proper balance between these two potencies is what links
Bakhtin’s early writings with current discussions of theater and incarnation. In his
2011 study Theater and Integrity. Emptying Selves in Drama, Ethics, and Religion
(2011), Larry Bouchard makes two points that resonate with Bakhtin on the staged
49 See Sandler (2015). Sandler does not discuss Kierkegaard’s views on theater (sacred or profane) in
connection with the early Bakhtin, but the theme is promising. In the first two stages of Kierkegaard’s
life’s way (the aesthetic and the ethical), I can see only what presents itself to the ‘‘horizon,’’ krugozor, of
my eyes—which means that I cannot see very much, and nothing in its full context. For that fuller picture,
a third perspective, the religious, is required. Here again I am indebted to Denis Zhernokleyev.
50 See Bakhtin (1922–1926, p. 79, 1990b, pp. 152–53): the A is capitalized in the Russian text, both in its
1979 original publication and in the Collected Works.
51 Bakhtinian readings in medieval perspective have begun to supplement the secular, formalist cast of
the Dostoevsky book. For one such revision of Bakhtin’s polyphony from a musicologist’s perspective,
see Maxov (2005, pp. 119–21). Maxov argues that Bakhtin’s novelistic polyphony, with its medieval
roots, has been severed by a secular readership from the two other values that Bakhtin ascribes to
Dostoevsky’s world: simultaneity [odnovremennost’] and eternity [vecˇnost’]. Both are in some tension
with the forward-moving polyphonic line, but essential to it. Sacred polyphony was a musical equivalent
to allegory, understood as mystical simultaneity. The horizontal movement of the plot (linear, responsive,
contingent, open-ended) is thus but one component of Dostoevskian structure; vertical leaps and reinstantiations
of eternal truths are equally necessary. This argument about the real, reminiscent of Erich
Auerbach’s in Mimesis, has yet to be integrated into studies of Bakhtinian polyphony.
Bakhtin and the actor 203
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arts.52 First, authentic theater is a type of bodily kenosis. It entails the emptying of
selves along three paths: into others (the role), with others (the acting ensemble),
and for others (the audience). And second, against Plato but in the spirit of Aristotle,
Bouchard would make integrity, or wholeness, a developing and moving thing
rather than a static quality. As a voice in our discussion of the actor’s art, Bouchard
(along with McCaw) nudges Bakhtin toward a more mobile appreciation of
theatrical processes, one not limited to abstract corporeal seeing. The central values
here are all kinetic: transformation, community, and living presence. But theological
categories or doctrinal belief are certainly not required for an appreciation of the
dynamics involved.53
Bakhtin Studies still lacks an appropriate term for our subject’s intimations of the
divine. There will never be a consensus on how central that spiritual dimension is to
his larger vision. But one thing we can probably agree upon: that in Bakhtin’s view,
professional actors, to justify their art, must be responsive and grateful creatures in a
perpetual state of incompleteness. And this means they must cultivate every
possible outside perspective available to them, in order to compensate for the mortal
loss of that spinning, twirling carnival body.
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