BAKHTIN IN HIS OWN VOICE: INTERVIEW BY VICTOR DUVAKIN

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION On March 15, 2013, Radio Svoboda (Radio Liberty) broadcast a recording of selections from a series of interviews with Mikhail Bakhtin conducted in 1973 by philologist and dissident Victor Duvakin (Komardenkov 1972, 18).1 At this key moment in the Soviet era, Professor Duvakin, who had been dismissed from his position at Moscow State University, decided to create a phono-history of the epoch (Timofeev-Resovsky 1995, 384). Brief notes are included to identify important Russian literary figures and historical events in order to help Western readers contextualize Bakhtin's observations.3 BAKHTIN ON FYODOR SOLOGUB4 "I would say that of all poets who were decadents and symbolists, including those like [Valery] Br yusov5 and Viatcheslav Ivanov,6 Sologub was the least decadent, and from him it was not possible to expect anything extravagant.