Bakhtin extracted the radical kernel of a flourishing Russian modernism, tore off the mystifying shell of formalist aesthetics and art, and reminded this new practice of its social origins and purpose. This theory grew and matured in the atmosphere of social change, intellectual polemic and artistic experimentation which pervaded the 1920s and early 1930s. It is surely no accident, then, that BakhtinвЂ™s commitment should provide us with a brilliant corpus of socialist cultural theory. Even Marx was not immune to the tempting idea of a direct passage from peasant communitarianism to socialism. But this Populism was the forebear of Russian Marxism and an enemy of Russian liberalism. Bakhtin stood in a tradition of Russian Populism which vividly demonstrated its political flaws throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.

It is true that this faith in the people was anarchistic and utopian, and lacked the most rudimentary respect for political organization and strategy.

Bakhtin is perhaps the only major contributor to Marxist cultural theory for whom popular culture is the privileged bearer of democratic and progressive values. The popular culture which he championed and theorized was a drama in which power was forced out of the wings and onto the stage where it could be displayed, mocked, contested and transformed. But he also realized that the democracy which opposed this was not a matter of inviting the people to play a part in Western liberalismвЂ™s comedy of manners. When Socialist Realism had its opening night in 1934, Mikhail Bakhtin, an internally exiled critic, saw the festive energy of the masses reduced to the vicarious pathos of the spectator. R evolution is a festival of the oppressed and exploited, not a stage show put on for them by a party bureaucracy. Carnival has a universal character it is a special condition of the whole world-its regeneration and renewal in which all participate. During carnival time it is possible to live only according to its laws, that is, to the laws of carnivalesque freedom. There is no escape from it, for it knows no spatial boundaries. While carnival takes place, there is no other life beyond it. Carnival is not seen by the people they live in it and everyone lives in it, because by its very definition it involves all the people.

Bakhtin chronotope definition