1. For a pioneering Soviet statement, see Iu. N. Davidov, “U ustokov sotsial'noi fllosofii M. M. Bakhtina,” Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia 2 (1986): 170-181, where Bakhtin is seen as a Russian response to Nietzscheanism and an alternative to the “aesthetic fatalism of (Oswald) Spengler,” the “idealistic theoreticism of the neo-Kantians,” and the depersonalization of Husserl; in English, see Nina Perlina, “Funny Things are Happening on the Way to the Bakhtin Forum,” Kennan Institute Occasional Paper no. 231 (1989). Alexandar Mihailovic is currently at work on a study of Bakhtin's intellectual roots in Russian theology and bogoiskatel'stvo. A good example of a Russian source is Bakhtin's relationship with Russian Orthodox Christianity. Some students of his thought have declared Orthodox theology and “encoded Christology” to be central to his writings of the 1920s (although concrete evidence of Bakhtin's religious convictions and activity is slim); others claim that Bakhtin was not engaged in a naive or proselytizing “believer's theology” but contributing to the perfectly conventional German academic discipline of Religionsphilosophie.

2. Bakhtin, M. M., “Avtor i geroi v esteticheskoi deiatel'nosti,” in Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1979), 109.Google Scholar

3. Bakhtin, M. M., “K filosofii postupka,” in Filosofiia i sotsiologiia nauki i tekhniki (Moscow: Nauka, 1986), 116–117; 128-130.Google Scholar

4. For an excellent expansion of the issues Bakhtin raises here only in passing, see Stephen Toulmin, “The Tyranny of Principles,” The Hastings Center Report (December 1981): 31-39, esp 34-35 on the domination in legal studies of an “Ethics of Strangers.” See also Toulmin, “The Recovery of Practical Philosophy,” in The American Scholar (Summer 1988): 377-452; and Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), esp. part 1.

5. Significantly, there is also nothing sentimental (or erotic) about Bakhtin's approach to sexual love. In striking contrast to Solov'ev's rapture but in a peculiar overall harmony with Solov'ev's ultimate ethical stance on sexual matters (see below), Bakhtin's tone on the issue in “Avtor i geroi” is almost clinical: The sexual approach to the body is an absolutely special one. It is incapable of developing on its own any form-shaping, plastic, or pictorial energies, that is, it is incapable of creating a body as an external, finalized, and self-contained artistic definitiveness. Under these conditions the external body of the other disintegrates, becoming merely one aspect of my inner body; it becomes valuable only in connection with those inner-bodily possibilities—carnal desire, physical pleasure, gratification—that it promises me, and these inner possibilities flood and overwhelm the other body's stubborn external finalizedness. During a sexual approach to another person's body, my body and the other's body fuse into one flesh, but this single flesh can be only internal. To be sure, this fusion into a single internal flesh is the outer limit toward which my sexual relation strives in all its purity; in reality, however, it is always complicated by aesthetic components resulting from an admiration of the external body, and consequently by form-shaping and creating energies as well. But the creation of artistic value by these components and energies is here only a means, and does not achieve autonomy or fullness ( “Avtor i geroi,” 47-48).

6. After this paper was completed, an essay by Boris Groys came to my attention: “Problema avtorstva u Bakhtina i russkaia filosofskaia traditsiia,” in Russian Literature 26 (1989): 113-130. Groys also seeks traces of the “Russian philosophical tradition” in Bakhtin's early ideas, and points to Solov'ev as a major, if hidden, source. According to Groys, the central role Solov'ev assigns to the “philosopher” in any culture is assigned by Bakhtin to the “novelist.” In neither case could the figure be reduced to a “theorizer” (115), for both Bakhtin and Solov'ev reject any notion of “psychically neutral” consciousness in the world; thus both reject the authoritative models of the Cartesian “I,” the Kantian transcendental “I,” and the phenomenological “I” of German idealism (122-124).

7. For a sensible survey of the Tolstoi-Solov'ev relationship that suggests Tolstoi's interest in the philosopher (always ambivalent) was in fact limited almost entirely to the latter's adoption of what appeared to Tolstoi to be “Tolstoyan” positions, see Z. G. Mints, “Iz istorii polemiki vokrug L'va Tolstogo (L. Tolstoi i VI. Solov'ev),” Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii 9: Literaturovedenie (Tartu, 1966): 89-110.

8. See Peter Ulf Moller, Postlude to the Kreutzer Sonata: Tolstoj and the Debate on Sexual Morality in Russian Literature in the 1890s, trans. John Kendal (Copenhagen: E. J. Brill, 1988), esp. chap. 10, “Solov'ev and the Meaning of Love. “

9. For more on this question, see Judith Deutsch Kornblatt (currently at work on Solov'ev's aesthetics), who addressed the issue in her 1988 AATSEEL presentation “The Transfiguration of Plato in the Erotic Philosophy of Vladimir Solov'ev.” Comparing the images of light in Platonic and Solov'evian philosophies of love, she ably demonstrates how Solov'ev “rewrites Plato” into the language of Orthodox liturgy by replacing Platonic principles of dualism and reflection by mediation and penetration.

10. In his 1889 essay “Krasota v prirode,” Solov'ev defines the positive content of beauty in nature as an active transformation of material by some extramaterial principle: the transformation of matter from a passive sign [znak] to active power [sila] to spiritual-bodily power [dukhovno-telesnaia sila]. See “Krasota v prirode,” inS.M. Solov'ev andG. Rachinskii, eds., Sobranie sochinenii Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’ eva, vol. 6 (St. Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia pol'za, 1901 —1907): 30—68. The diamond example is discussed on 36-37. This idea is expanded to the human realm in “Obshchii smysl iskusstva,” where ideal content partakes of beauty only if it gains external bodily expression, only if it ceases to “remain solely the inner property of the spirit. “

11. “The Meaning of Love,” in A Solovyov Anthology, comp. S. L. Frank, trans. Natalie Duddington (New York: Scribner's, 1950), 150-179, esp. 164-165 on erotic idealization.

12. In his expansion of this idea in part 2, chap. 1 of Opravdanie dobra, Solov'ev concludes: “It is unworthy of man to be merely a means or an instrument of the natural process by which the blind life-force perpetuates itself at the expense of the separate entities that are born and perish and replace one another in turn. Man as a moral being does not want to obey this natural law of replacement of generations, the law of eternal death.” Vladmir Solovyof, The Justification of the Good: An Essay on Moral Philosophy, trans. Natalie Duddington (London: Constable and Company Ltd., 1918), 138. Henceforth referred to in the body of the text as OD.

13. It might be noted—although this is not the place to develop the point—that here, over the question of erotic energy, we have one of several critical confrontations between Bakhtin and Sigmund Freud. The case is put well by Gerald Pirog in his “Bakhtin and Freud on the ego: (Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, ed., Russian Literature and Psychoanalysis [Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1989], 401-415, esp. 409-410): “[In place of monadic and self-contained models of consciousness, among which he would inelude Freud, Bakhtin proposes] the author's artistic reaction to the hero and his life. This reaction is aesthetic love, a relationship sui generis of a lover to his beloved, in which sexuality is eliminated, and which is not motivated by the object itself, but is an active response to the beloved's need. “

14. For Solov'ev's most concise analyses of shame, and in particular sexual shame (polevoi styd), see Opravdanie dobra, part 1, chap. 1 (25-40); part 2, chap. 1 (135-150).

15. It should be stressed that Solov'ev's defense of eros does not carry with it any special defense of an active sexual life. In fact, Opravdanie dobra devotes chapters to condemning “abstract hedonism” (chap. 6) and to advocating “the ascetic principle in morality” based on altruism and self-control (chap. 2). Solov'ev, and to a certain extent the early Bakhtin as well, appears to approach love in the spirit of some erotic mystics and non-Christian Hellenistic theologians, for whom knowledge, not sensation or union, is the goal, But both Solov'ev and Bakhtin insist that the knowledge love makes possible is always intersubjective; it cannot be directed toward an “Unmoved Mover” but must be specifically reciprocal and reciprocated.

16. Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You, trans. Leo Wiener (New York: Noonday Press, 1961), 90-95.

17. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevski's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 97–98.Google Scholar

18. In his “Afterword to The Kreutzer Sonata” Tolstoi distinguishes between two kinds of moral guidance: external rules, which are simple to follow and unsatisfactory, and then “pointing out to a man an unattainable perfection “: “A man who professes an external law is like someone standing in the light of a lantern fixed to a post. It is light all around him, but there is nowhere further for him to walk. A man who professes the teaching of Christ is like a man carrying a lantern before him on a long, or not so long, pole: the light is in front of him … always encouraging him to walk further.” In A. N. Wilson, The Lion and the Honeycomb: The Religious Writings of Tolstoy (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 69.

19. It is worth noting that the most vital Mikhail Gorbachev-era reception of Bakhtin in the Soviet Union centers precisely on these early manuscripts and their discussions of human singularity over the claims of system or social class. See esp. V. A. Panpurin, “M. M. Bakhtin o prirode tsennosti” and G. A. Brandt, “Eticheskaia dominanta kul'tury v filosofii M. Bakhtina,” in A. F. Eremeev et al., Estetika M. M. Bakhtina i sovremennost’ (Saransk: Mordovskii gos. univ-tet, 1989), 27-30 and 22-24.

20. Andrzej Walicki, Legal Philosophies of Russian Liberalism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 3: “Vladimir Soloviev: Religious Philosophy and the Emergence of the ‘New Liberalism, '” esp. 176-212. Walicki provides a welcome corrective to the familiar mystic and symbolist image of Solov'ev by demonstrating, with his customary lucidity, that Solov'ev “himself came to the conclusion that the entire sphere of ethics, including law defined as a ‘compulsory minimum of morality, ’ should be completely divorced from religion and metaphysics” (166-167).

21. Walicki notes an important difference between Solov'ev and Tolstoi on this issue of institutionalized social life (Legal Philosophies, 186-187): Where Tolstoi endorsed only the “quasi-natural institution of the family,” Solov'ev, more wary of the dangers of “abstract moralism,” accepted both the law and the state, although within careful limits. It is no wonder, Walicki remarks, that Solov'ev found law insufficient; “we should rather wonder how it was possible that such a sharp contrast between juridical laws and the law of love did not push [Solov'ev] in the direction of Christian anarchism. His formula of the morality of love fits perfcectly in to Tolstoy's writings. And yet nothing was more alien to Soloviev than the violent and intransigent legal nihilism of the great writer” (Legal Philosophies, 18.