Summary: Bakhtin was not exactly a Marxist, but a theorist writing in Soviet Union starting in the 1920s, and thus he was very much aware of Marxist theories and doctrines, and how they were being implemented. He was also associated with the school known as Russian Formalism, a kind of precursor to our own American movement (in the 1940s and 50s) called New Criticism.

Summary: "There is also M. M. Bakhtin, the Russian critic and literary philosopher. During the German invasion of Russia in World War 2, he smoked the only copy of one of his manuscripts, a book-length study of German fiction that had taken him years to write. One by one, he took the pages of his manuscript and used the paper to roll his cigarettes, each day smoking a little more of the book until it was gone."

Summary: The Bakhtin Circle was a contemporary school of Russian thought which centered on the work of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975). The circle addressed the social and cultural issues posed by the Russian Revolution and its degeneration into the Stalin dictatorship in philosophical terms.