Bakhtin’s concept of an event and its impact on modern narratology

This article traces the reception of the philosophical and philological ideas of the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin in modern narratology. The general context for the formation of such seemingly dissimilar humanitarian paradigms as Russian phenomenology and Western poststructuralist semiotics are revealed. There is an aberration in the use of Bakhtin terminology (chronotope, dualistic concept of authorship), which sometimes leads to far-fetched attempts to put Bakhtin among the “precursors of postmodernism”. The continuity of the French philosopher Paul Ricreur (the founder of philosophical, hermeneutic narratology) in relation to Bakhtin has been established. The reasons for Bakhtin's unexpected popularity in the West in the 1960s and 1970s (interest in the avant-garde and formalism of the 1920s, rethinking Dostoevsky’s work, the emergence of the theory of informal culture and its modifications) has been analyzed. The central position of the event concept in Bakhtin's incomplete philosophical system is revealed, an immanent attribution of this concept is given, and its fundamental importance for the rest of the philosopher's terms (dialogue, carnival, chronotope) is established. Bakhtin's priority interest in the eventfulness of the “aesthetics of verbal creativity” and the importance of the philosopher's ideas for overcoming structuralist dogmatism by narratology and its integration with various initially rejected methods and trends (psychologism, historicism, philosophical hermeneutics) are argued.