Lukacs and Bakhtin in Soviet Cultural History and Consciousness

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895–1975) and György Lukács (1885–1971) were contemporaries in life and in the history of ideas. Both thinkers were not at ease in their relationships with the governments whose shade and shadows they lived under. Both were forced to be in exile: Bakhtin in internal exile in the Soviet Union and Lukács, away from his native Hungary in several European countries, including the Soviet Union (from 1929 to 1931 and 1933 to 1945). Both were ‘lucky’, to use Lukács’ term to describe his situation in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 40s, in that they escaped execution, although Bakhtin was exiled in 1929 and Lukács was arrested in 1941 for two months. Bakhtin, initially condemned to serve time in the harsh Solovki camp, was given a lesser sentence because of his fragile health.