Visualizing Theatrical and Novelistic Discourse with Bakhtin

A constant vision in Mikhail Bakhtin’s works: polyphonic dialogue, this above all in the novel, but his love for theatre should not be neglected. Consequently, a central focus in Bakhtin’s reflections is the polyphonic novel which he first identifies in Dostoevsky’s novels. Bakhtin establishes a close relation between the novel, popular culture and carnival, evidencing the carnival component of novelistic discourse, therefore of life. Moreover, as he recounts in his 1973 conversations with Victor Duvakin, his interest in the novel overlapped with theatre, in particular the Moscow Art Theatre. In Bakhtin and Theatre, Dick McCaw relates Bakhtin’s vision of art and life to theatre as visualized by Stanislavksy, Meyerhold and Grotowski, each of whom operated a “revolution” in their own original terms comparable to the so-called “Bakhtinian revolution” in philosophy of language and literary criticism. With the difficult socio-political events of the time on the background, this essay explores important aspects of the real dialogue between these three masters of the theatre and of the ideal dialogue established between the latter and Bakhtin, thereby creating a special perspective on theatre with special reference to the Bakhtinian concepts of “polyphony” and “dramatization”. Overall are evidenced, for the quality of life, the importance of such values as dialogism, otherness, participative unindifference, creativity which also emerge as characteristics that specify the artwork, whether novelistic or theatrical, thereby showing how art and life are vitally interrelated and capable of enhancing each other.