Mikhail Bakhtin

“All future studies of Bakhtin will start here. Clark and Holquist succeed in portraying a man of immense versatility all of whose ideas nevertheless cohere around a central set of concerns which are fundamental to the thought of this century. The philosophical substance of the book is beautifully enmeshed with the biographical.”—The Times Higher Education Supplement

“This book…is the indispensable guide. It undertakes not only to explicate all of the major works, but also to set them in historical perspective (which requires a daunting breadth of erudition)… We have finally reached the core of Bakhtin’s thought, his ideas about language and literature and their implications for human life in general; and it is a consistently absorbing intellectual adventure.”—The New Republic

“The authors have produced a brilliant combination of literary biography, intellectual history, and scholarly detection.”—Hayden White

“Clark and Holquist have transformed our understanding of Bakhtin… This is an indispensable book.”—Stephen J. Greenblatt