The work produced by Bakhtin in the first decade of his exile shows two marked departures from the methodology, or general philosophical approach, of the work written and published under his own name in the 1910s and 20s. Firstly, human thought, human relations, indeed all of human culture, is no longer portrayed as the interaction of responsible consciousnesses but in semiotic terms, as realised through the medium of sign systems, in particular in discourse. Secondly, Bakhtin now abandons the synchronic phenomenological analysis practised hitherto and reapplies his ideas on a full historical and social scale; the previously intricate and intimate description of creative activity as an event taking place between persons is exchanged for its other extreme, an understanding of each act of writing as a particular participation in ancient and global conflicts of language. Taken together, these developments have a considerable impact on the religious motifs I have been examining so far, involving the rethinking of truth, especially personal truth, of individuality and creativity. This chapter attempts to trace the changes and examine the consequences for the author in exile, in the essays on the novel and beyond.

Much of the chapter will be concerned with the essays ‘Discourse in the Novel’ (1934–5), ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’ (1940), and ‘Epic and Novel’ (1941). These essays elaborate the primary features of Bakhtin's revolutionary theory of the novel, in which many of the major traits of his earlier philosophy are manifested.