The following Essay appeared in a British Anarchist Magazine in July 2001

I am no expert scholar of Bakhtin and do not want to be by desire, intention, and personal commitment. I only know one book relatively well by him and that is Rabelais and His World.

One consistent point throughout the book that he repeats time and time again is that though superficially he is writing a 'respectable' and 'scholarly' 'literary study' which is the only thing he could write and live considering what he wanted to say within the horror of life under Stalin or even Brezhnev for that matter, what he wants to communicate is an ideology - an ideology with the intensity and apocalyptic immediacy of the ideologies of Marx and Lenin themselves.

And it is probably due to the laziness and stupidity of the censors under Brezhnev that they thought Bakhtin was doing a proper obeisance to the Party. Rather, he was doing something much closer to what Dimitri Shostakovitch did with music. He too seemed to glorify the aesthetics and philosophy of the Party by using patriotic themes, which he did feel intensely but wholly tragically and filled with hatred for Communism.

While Shostakovitch was alive, this could be seen foremost in the bitterness of his resolve in the emotional themes of his music. The Party considered music that stated a Russian should bare any burden and die with gladness for his country a strong demonstration of Russian patriotism. Indeed Shostakovitch demonstrated this courage personally. As a fireman in the streets of Leningrad during the siege Stalin had to order him to evacuate the city.

But the bitterness in the music is as thick as blood and is never resolved. He wrote many light pieces, but their lightness is extremely obvious and stands in stark contrast to his darker statement. When he thought censorship was relaxed under Brezhnev and he had enough public respectability to save him, he did so immediately with his 13th Symphony "Babi Yar". He survived but learned the old censorship was still very much in place.

Shostakovitch was eventually cornered and forced to accept an honorary membership in the Communist Party. As he came to the conclusion of an otherwise typical and grateful speech of acceptance where he was obligated to say that he owed everything to the Communist party, he said instead he owed everything to his mother. That did not make the Party officials happy at all, but how could they possibly attack mother- love?

Now that the true story about Shostakovitch is slowly but finally being accepted by establishment Party sympathisers in the West, people are starting to realise why such a prominent figure in the Soviet establishment always said the things he was told to say without the slightest hesitation, why otherwise he hardly ever spoke even to friends, why he incessantly chain-smoked and chewed his fingernails, and why he acted around loud-mouthed Party official- composers like Kabelevsky as if he were their personal servant and ass-kisser.

Many of the people he had known throughout his life had either suffered intensely under the political establishment or had died violently. Volsky writes that Shostakovitch once told him about the time Stalin called the three most prominent composers in the Soviet Union into his office and started screaming at the top of his voice that he was going to have them all shot. It seems he loved to watch people shit in their pants in fear of him. Prokofiev was not one of the three because Stalin knew his temper and respected his courage.

Now, this is exactly the same situation Bakhtin was in. He does the double talk of pleasing the Party censors while not having much respect for their intelligence. Bakhtin is espousing a revolutionary and violent ideology intent on political overthrow aimed at the official values of the church and capitalist states of the West - but it is REALLY a "folk" ideology, that has always been and still is around in an underground fashion. It is an ideology of the REAL common man totally disgusting to anyone with official values of any sort which would necessarily and most prominently mean the Communist Party and the Soviet State with its idiotic ideology of hypocritical values and pompous self-interest.

Bakhtin could freely 'attack' the Catholic Church within the USSR. But, note the obvious - who he uses to portray this 'attack' - Francois Rabelais. A Franciscan priest (a theme in itself), a trained theologian, a prominent humanist corresponding with Erasmus and Bude and denounced by John Calvin, well read necessarily in Aristotle but by free choice in Plato, an evangelical deeply interested in Martin Luther's writings (another theme of great importance) not only because of Luther's theology - but he was, next only the Rabelais himself, the most foul-minded writer in Europe in an age noted for profane intellectuals.

Saint Thomas More in a pamphlet denouncing Luther's profanity uses the word "beshitted" time and time again ON HIS OWN, not illustrating what Luther says -- who Bakhtin clearly demonstrates has a real ideology of carnivalism commending everything vulgar and folkish on the lowest level, a world of violence, death, and shit where the only world-cycle of time is that death comes out of life and life in turn comes out of death.

In other words, Bakhtin has turned many of the traditional and fundamental notions of official 'bourgeois' state Communism in the USSR in deadly earnest against that state itself. He too, like Shostakovitch, is the nerdy intellectual meekly standing in the shadows of much more important persons that he, but also filled with hate and loathing.

In other words, THIS book is in no way a 'literary study' unless you entirely mis-read it OR if you believe as both Nietzsche and Heidegger did, that art is the ABSOLUTELY ONLY valid form and meaning of life. And that one must understand that revolutionary violence in great literature is to overthrow or undermine everything while NOT REPLACING it, necessarily, with anything - certainly anything 'official'.

When the Soviet Union fell and Russian intellectuals finally sorted out what was going on philosophically in the West, they were horribly shocked by its utter triviality and its total lack of relevance to the real lives they had just got through living. They had risked everything to live their lives of hidden thoughts while we in the West, in the midst of our ludicrous 'freedom' merely pissed it off. They understood, like Nietzsche and Heidegger, the nature of tragedy has absolutely nothing to do with winning or losing anything. And like Luther they understood his rejection of the theologica gloria for the theologica crucis, the theology of shame, humiliation, and weakness AS God itself