Conversations with Bakhtin

In the summer of 1961, three brilliant young scholars at the Institute of World Literature of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow set out by train to see Bakhtin for the first time, in the far-off provincial town of Saransk, where he taught Russian and foreign literatures at the University of Mordovia (until declining health forced him to retire in August 1961). The three devoted admirers were Sergey Georgyevich Bocharov (the author of the following article), Georgy Dmitryevich Gachev, and Vadim Valeryanovich Kozhinov (the enterprising and resourceful leader of the group).