f Stalin and the Soviet system led him to distrust the morality of reason,
and inspired a different view of the culture and politics of the late medieval and early modern
world. Where Habermas offers a view of triumphant rationality, Bakhtin—a literary critic and
cultural theorist—presents a different view of the same cultural conditions. Bakhtin, author of
such important works as Rabelais and His World and The Dialogic Imagination, advocates for
the power of non-rationality. This power takes the form of what he famously called “the
carnivalesque” in Rabelais and His World.
Bahktin saw in the Russian peasantry, lionized in the official proletarian culture created by
Stalin’s propaganda bureau, an enduring source of anti-authoritarian potential. Unable to
address Stalin’s crimes directly for fear of further punishment, Bahktin projected his interest in
the power of ordinary people onto the French peasantry of the late medieval era. Rabelais
(1494-1553), author of the medieval classic Gargantua and Pantagruel, celebrated the lives of
medieval French serfs and their culture of festival, music, and storytelling. Bakhtin, in his study
of Rabelais, found a means to subversively address the lives of Russian peasants under Stalin
while ostensibly writing about the lives of historical French villagers.
Our view of the middle ages is often the one we receive from the medieval elite of nobility and
church: a world of religious art, a rich life 英语论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.org】at court, castles, royal parades, and serfs toiling hard
for their masters, fearing God, and waiting to die so that they could get their reward in the
afterlife. Ours is a view of the medieval as Camelot and Chartres surrounded by god-fearing
and hard-working peasants. But behind the scenes, the peasants had developed a culture all
their own, vulgar and profane by the official standards, in which the images and ideas on which
the official culture was built were mocked and trampled on. This sacrilegious peasant culture
was rarely allowed to express itself, except in special holidays like the “Feast of Fools” (recall
the scene from Disney’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”), when church and state alike was
mocked, and the medieval social order was relaxed for a brief while. Bakhtin writes:
“It could be said... that a person of the Middle Ages lived, as it were, two lives: one that
was the official life, monolithically serious and gloomy, subjugated to a strict
hierarchical order, full of terror, dogmatism, reverence and piety. The other was the life
of the carnival square, free and unrestricted, full of ambivalent laughter, blasphemy, the
profanation of everything sacred, full of debasing and obscenities, familiar contact with
everyone and everything. Both these lives were legitimate, but separated by strict
temporal boundaries.”
What the peasants attacked through their rituals of inversion, and especially their mockery of
church and s
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