Mikhail Bakhtin (born February 7, 1899, died April 25, 1975) was a Russian literary theorist and philosopher, known for his work in the context of structuralism and post-structuralism. He is also well known for having introduced the concept of the dialogic principle to the English language. Bakhtain was the son of a wealthy family. His father, Nikolai Mikhailovich Bakhtin, was an architect and an officer in the Imperial Russian Navy
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His mother, Ekaterina Dmitrievna Maksheyeva, was descended from an old noble Pskovian family tracing its line back to the sixteenth century. Because of his father's career as an officer, Mikhail Bakhtin spent most of his childhood years in St. Petersburg and Moscow.
He attended school at Neskuchnyi Dvor (private school) and later St. Petersburg Gymnasium. He also attended St.
Petersburg University from which he graduated with a degree in philosophy in 1923. He continued his studies at University of Leipzig where he received a Ph.D degree in 1925 for a thesis on "The Problem of Dostoevsky's Poetics." That same year he published a critical edition of Fyodor Dostoevsky's works that included a map of Russia based on descriptions from these novels along with annotations that aided readers' understanding of how each character fits into the spatial scheme of Russia as a whole. In 1927 he published another work on Dostoevsky called "The Problem of Dostoevsky's Poetics." The following year he published "Dialogic Imagination," a book that presented an elaborate system for analyzing literature built on the dialogic principle by which any text necessarily contains more than one viewpoint or point of view along with multiple voices within these viewpoints.
In 1930 he published "Cultural Mythology," a book that looked at recurring themes in Russian folk tales and popular literature from ancient times to the present day to reveal the underlying patterns that give these stories their meaning by showing how they repeat across cultures and time periods. In 1932 he published "Notes Toward a Methodology for the Study of Dostoevsky," which offered his own interpretation of Dostoevsky's works along with reasons why they can be understood through dialogic analysis instead of psychological analysis but also explained why he believed psychology could still be used to interpret works like this one by saying: "Psychology can and ought to study