On M.M. Bakhtin’s marginalia in the pages of O.M. Freidenberg’s “Poetics of plot and genre”. Part 1

The article is devoted to the analysis of M.M. Bakhtin's notes in O.M. Freidenberg's “Poetics of Plot and Genre”. The authors examine a copy of the book, which is held in the Scientific Library of Mordovian State University. According to the authentic book form this is the copy that the scholar read in the fall of 1936, immediately upon his arrival in Saransk, and it was in the course of his work with it that Bakhtin drew up the notes preserved in his archive. The aim of our article is to explore the totality of Bakhtin's marginalia in the pages of Poetics of Plot and Genre in the context of Bakhtin's topical issues of the late 1930s - 1960s, identifying and presenting the most telling examples. The authors emphasize that the study of Bakhtin's marginalia in recent years has aroused considerable research interest and has acquired special significance, since it allows us not only to record the range of real sources of Bakhtin's ideas and writings, but also to partially reconstruct the process of the scholar's work on certain publications, to visualize and present the degree of attention and the nature of comprehension of a particular fragment, i.e. to look into the thinker's laboratory. In the first part of the paper, the authors focus on analyzing Bakhtin's notes in the first two sections of the book (“The Problem of the Work and its Literature” and “The Pre-Literary Period of Plot and Genre”). Bakhtin's focus includes specific plots, quotations from scholarly literature, and examples from Greek and Roman folklore and literary sources. However, the greatest interest of the scholar (which is confirmed by the number of strikethroughs) is aroused by the fragments of Freidenberg's book that directly echo the problematics of Bakhtin's works of this time - the emergence and development of verbal genres, the relationship between the hero and his word, including the one directed at himself, the problems of laughter and the associated transformation of folklore comics in the ancient novel.