BAKHTIN, Mikhail, (1895-1975) Russian linguist and critic who revolutionised de Saussure's linguistics inspiring Valentin Volosinov and Roman Jakobson. He was educated at Petersburg University and worked at Leningrad's Historical Institute (1924), before teaching at the Mordovian Pedagogical Institute (1936) at Saransk, where he was made Head of the department of Russian and World Literature when the institute was made a University in 1957. Bakhtin retired in 1961. He was author of The Dialogical Imagination, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Rabelais and His World, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays
Functionalists and Structuralists