The First Hundred Years of Mikhail BakhtinAmong Western critics, Mikhail Bakhtin (1895 1975) needs no introduction. His name has been invoked in literary and cultural studies across the ideological spectrum, from old fashioned humanist to structuralist to postmodernist. In this candid assessment of his place in Russian and Western thought, Caryl Emerson brings to light what might be unfamiliar to the non Russian reader: Bakhtin's foundational ideas, forged in the early revolutionary years,