Bakhtin and Kirpotin: on a page from the Russian history of the reception of M.M. Bakhtin’s personality and ideas

The reconstruction of the domestic reception of M.M. Bakhtin’s personality and ideas is an important part of modern Bakhtin Studies. One of its components is the construction of individual trajectories of Bakhtinian reception. The purpose of this article is to investigate the perception of M.M. Bakhtin’s personality and ideas by the famous Soviet literary scholar V.Ya. Kirpotin. Using material from the scholar’s archive, his memoirs and epistolary, and his works of the 1960s and 1970s, the authors identify the specifics of Kirpotin’s views on the polyphonic novel, reproduce his private statements, and recall the role of the literary scholar in the Bakhtin defense. The correspondence between Kirpotin and Kozhinov reconstructs an episode related to the publication of M.M. Bakhtin's biography essay in the collection “Problems of Poetics and History of Literature” (Saransk, 1973).