M. Bakhtin's biography as an object of cultural memory

The study of M.M. Bakhtin's biography is still an urgent problem of twenty-first-century Bakhtinology, not only in Russia, but also abroad, since there are many problems with the extant biographies of Bakhtin. We use the theory of cultural memory to examine this issue because we are convinced that the study of a scholar's biography is more a problem of cultural memory than of history. Memory has an inescapable subjectivity, and what kind of biography we can write depends on the cultural structures of our time. The introduction of the category of cultural memory is not intended to abolish the possibility of writing a scholarly biography, but only to provide a more critical perspective on biographical description.