Abstract

This chapter presents an attempt to come to terms with one of the key issues of Mikhail Bakhtin’s work, which could be expressed in the form of the following question: What was the event or the events of thinking, in the twentieth-century philosophy and humanities, which this Russian philosopher and humanistic scholar participated in and responded to, according to his own concepts of “participative thinking” and an “actively responsive understanding.” My essay responds to this question by laying out an access to these major Bakhtinian concepts, with the help of the category of “historicity”, a term used here in its hermeneutical or “dialogic” sense of open-endedness of both some cultural past and an interpretive “outsideness” to that past, or vnenakhodimost’, to use Bakhtin’s well-known term. Within the contexts of the so-called Bakhtin studies, in both Russia and the West, the subject of the present essay would be the “in-between,” that is, some meaningful distance between this author’s heritage and the “first hundred years” of Bakhtin’s reception history.