Serge Aleksandrovich Konovalov (1899-1982)
was not yet thirty years old but already he had been elected to the Chair of Russian
at Birmingham University. Although, it seems his main qualification was
actually being Russian. His father, a businessman who had served as Minister of
Trade and Industry in the Provisional Government under Alexander Kerensky, had moved
his family to England in the wake of the October Revolution, allowing Serge the
opportunity to study economics and politics at Oxford.
He was of imposing appearance, discreetly
elegant in manners and dress. Dignity, courtesy, and great personal charm are
among the qualities attributed to him. He was very tall and powerfully built. A
man of natural caution and reserve, he sometimes gave the impression of being
aloof, but this was probably due to shyness and a natural reserve. [Slavonic
Studies at Oxford: a Brief History, p18]
Konovalov had a reputation for
‘formidable’ diplomacy, and it was a shrewd decision
to ask the secretary of the Slavonic Society to accompany him to Paris to
rescue ‘the most brilliant man of the Russian émigration’. Not only could she speak both French and Russian, but her
style of approach might just be what was needed to entice an antagonized philosopher
out from the shadows of a dilapidated Parisian tenement.
 |
| Francesca M. Wilson |
His interlocutor was Francesca M. Wilson
who, it can be said, was formidable in her own right. E.R. Dodds referred to
her as an ‘untiring worker for the unfortunate’. After putting
her teaching career on hold, she had worked with the Society of Friends helping
victims of the violent upheavals of history in France, Corsica, North Africa
and Serbia during the First World War and then in Vienna during its aftermath.
In September 1922 Wilson travelled eastwards to administrate a relief outpost
of the Society of Friends in the village of Pasmorowka, a small corner of the
Russian Empire in present-day Kazakhstan. She later published a memoir of her humanitarian
work, In the Margins of Chaos (1944) in which her colleague Marjorie
Rackstraw explains the background to the Russian famine:
In 1920 there was a
poor harvest, and in 1921 there was no rain at all. Most of the seed never
germinated. The blades that struggled up were burnt by the sun. The peasants
have a proverb that you must never see the floor of your granary. But during
the years of war and revolution all the reserves were used up. The Red Army had
to be fed, and the towns too, and requisitions had depleted all stocks.
Transport difficulties aggravated the situation. The railways are in a shocking
state. Food got held up for weeks and the people fleeing the famine died by the
thousands waiting for trains at the railway stations. And it takes days to get
food out to country districts by ox-wagon or sleigh. Then there was our
intervention and blockade - that made everything twenty times worse.
By 1922 the peasants had become too weak
to plough the fields, and yet again the harvest was a poor one. Without doctors
there was no distinction between dying of starvation or disease. It was
estimated that three million had died of typhus alone. Wilson's work in the
field was being hampered by an unpleasant translator who aggravated the people
whom she was trying to help, so Francesca immersed herself in learning enough
Russian to function on her own. Combined with her capabilities in French, these
skills would later prove useful in her journey to Paris with Konovalov. Perhaps
he was being cynical by using Francesca Wilson to lure his prey out into the
light. The man in question was no straightforward victim of the Revolution, and
he was desperate, hungry and prone to violent outbursts. However, the man who
appeared from the darkened staircase was not at all what Wilson had been
expecting:
I made myself a
picture of an elderly Russian with a pointed beard, pale, studious, remote and
grave... Though at that time he was pale and thin, his broad shoulders and
massive frame made him look more a man of action than of thought.
 |
| Nikolai Bakhtin in 1935 |
Wilson's first impression of Nikolai Bakhtin
as a man of action was essentially correct. In 1916 Bakhtin had abandoned his
studies in Petrograd to become an Uhlan Lancer in the Tsar's forces 'when
someone told him he would look dashing in the uniform's jodphurs', but after the Bolshevik revolution he was forced to seek refuge
in the Crimea where he encountered his former commanding officer who persuaded
him to take up arms once again, this time as a White Guard in the Civil War, a
decision he would come to regret. In 1920, he was forced once more to flee as
the White Army retreated south. Briefly he became a sailor in the
Mediterranean, then, while drunk one night in Constantinople, he joined the
French Foreign Legion. After three and a half years of fighting in North Africa,
Bakhtin was invalided out with severe wounds to his right arm and hand.
In 1924 Bakhtin settled in Paris where he
became part of the substantial émigré intelligentsia. French regulations regarding work and
accommodation made it a hard experience, though he did not make it any easier
for himself. After walking out or being sacked from several minor jobs, he kept
starvation at bay with contributions to The Link, a literary supplement to The Latest News, a Russian
émigré newspaper. Edited by his friend from St Petersburg, Georgy Adamovitch, The Link was published for just five
years from 1923 to 1928. Later he contributed to Numbers which first appeared
in 1930 and existed for only four years.
Born in
1894 in Orel, Nikolai Bakhtin was the oldest of five children. His younger
siblings included his brother Mikhail, and his sisters Ekaterina, Maria and
Natalya. Their parents were liberal-minded and interested in culture. His
father was manager in a bank established by their grandfather, accordingly the
children were given the best education affordable. To say the young Nikolai was
precocious would be an understatement. He read Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy
at the age of eleven, and frequently he would wake in the small hours of the
morning to absorb Kant and Hegel. At school he became the leading figure of an
intellectual circle under the influence of the Russian Symbolists, and this
circle had itself evolved from a group who would assemble in the toilets to
sing revolutionary songs. His schooling was conducted in Vilnius where the
family had moved to in 1905, and when they moved again to Odessa in 1911
Nikolai remained to complete his education. It was around this time that he
began writing poetry and became interested in Dmitri Merezhkovski's trilogy of
historical novels concerning the conflict between paganism and Christianity.
Merezhkovski and his
wife, the poet Zinaida Gippius, were living in Paris as exiles from Tsarist
Russia and ran a salon called the Green Lamp. Although regarded as conservative
and decadent by the exiles of Bolshevik Russia, these symbolist writers were
part of an earlier generation who had established a Russian cultural base and
influence in the fin de siècle Paris
of Diaghilev and Stravinsky. So when Bakhtin found himself in the same city, he
became a regular visitor to the Green Lamp. Merezhkovski and Gippius admired
Bakhtin greatly, regarding him as ‘a kind of prophet announcing a new
conception of life’. Certainly, Bakhtin
impressed those who heard his lectures and they included the most famous names
of the émigré intellectuals. Despite giving this positive impression on his
audiences, Nikolai Bakhtin was destined to remain in obscurity throughout his
life and beyond. Where Nikolai had the freedom and possibilities of the West
including studies at the Sorbonne and Cambridge, it was his younger brother
Mikhail, working in the difficult circumstances of internal exile within the
Soviet Union, who became the famous philosopher.
Because Russia Abroad was entirely formed
by its awareness of the other Russia left behind it became by far the more
traumatized of two unhappy twins split at birth. Unable to accept the forced
break with Russia, many of the exiles and émigrés suffered nightmares of
disinheritance and dangerous thoughts of reconciliation and self-sacrifice. A
striking feature of memoirs and stories from between the wars is the recurrent
sense of Soviet Russia and Russia Abroad as always aware of the other and
thinking similar thoughts, whether or not they were actively watching over or
intervening in each other’s lives. [CHAMBERLAIN, p250]
Despite their
separation, Nikolai and Mikhail came to remarkably similar conclusions
philosophically; both made the journey from classicism to the philosophy of
language. Together as young students they had paid for tutoring in Ancient
Greek which was not taught at their school. Their German governess had given
them their passion for the myths of Greece. They were intense intellectual
sparring partners and this was the source of the importance of dialogism in both
of their philosophies.
One day in a
Parisian bookshop, Nikolai came across a copy of a work by Mikhail on
Dostoevsky. He had not heard from him since the early 1920s. During the Second
World War, Nikolai learnt of Mikhail’s arrest in 1929 and assumed he had
perished during Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, but Mikhail had actually survived.
In the 1970s, he received a package from Birmingham, it was a collection of
Nikolai’s papers assembled by his friends.
Francesca Wilson and
Nikolai Bakhtin’s initial meeting did not go well. It acquainted her with
Bakhtin's periodic gruffness. Nevertheless, she persuaded him to come to Birmingham,
and when he arrived Francecsa got to know the warmer side of his character. Soon,
in fact, they became lovers. Until the end of his life Francesca and Nikolai
were very close. So in May 1928 Bakhtin arrived at the door of 35 Duchess Road,
Edgbaston, with his worldly possessions, mostly books, wrapped in newspapers.
He was by no means the only Russian staying at Francesca’s house. She had
adopted several boys and girls, all Russians who had been living in exile in
Paris, and then there was the housekeeper and the odd lodger here and there.
During
the first months of Bachtin’s stay in Birmingham we were a trio, as a Russian
schoolboy, Sim, was living in my house at the time. Sim was as greedy for
knowledge and experience as Bachtin had been at his age and questioned him
endlessly on his philosophy and his adventures. We often went little walking
tours in Shropshire and Wales and Bachtin told us about the Foreign Legion… Sim
and I realised that in Morocco Bachtin had relived the days of the Iliad and
Odyssey.
[Francesca M Wilson in BACHTIN, p12]
Bakhtin
stayed for five months before he returned to Paris to study at the Sorbonne and
the Ecole des Langues Orientales. His decision in 1916 to seek adventure in the
army had curtailed his studies before he could take his degree. Life in Paris
was made easier when, in 1929, Francesca decided to buy a flat at 2 rue Rubens
in the 13th Arrondissement. By 1931 their romance had ended, but they
remained intensely close over the years. Nikolai met Constance Pantling who was
teaching in Paris. They married in 1935, but it was not destined to be a happy
marriage. Francesca later described it as a ‘shipwreck’. However, when
Constance was dying in 1959 she exclaimed that it had been Francesca’s
influence over Nikolai which had made it so difficult.
By 1932
Nikolai had completed his studies in Paris and was able to move to Cambridge to
undertake a Ph.D. in classics. His thesis was ‘on the origins of the
Centaur-Lapithai myth in thirteenth century B.C. Thessaly.’
In Terry
Eagleton's novel Saints and Scholars, the philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein retreats to Ireland with none other than Nikolai Bakhtin. Together
they take up residence in a remote cottage in a thwarted attempt to live the
simple life. They are unexpectedly joined by an injured James Connolly, who has eluded his executioners through authorial intervention. Like Connolly, Wittgenstein is also on the
run. However the great philosopher wishes to escape the parasites who feed off
his work, and the obliging Bakhtin has joined him because he is 'ready to go
anywhere with anyone.'
Although
Wittgenstein did indeed live for a time in Ireland, he was not joined by
Bakhtin, nor of course by Connolly. Nevertheless the novel does illuminate a friendship
between Bakhtin and Wittgenstein which did exist. Their pairing in Connolly's
eyes resembles 'a monk and a clown.' Later the fantasy is extended when
they are joined by Leopold Bloom, who has wandered off in despair as Molly has
left him for Stephen Dedalus. Connolly and his lieutenant, Molloy, keep the
party in stasis as they await the reinforcements who, like Beckett's Godot,
never come. There is more of the shadow of Beckett cast over Saints and
Scholars. As the situation ends, Connolly's final thoughts include, 'You
must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.’
Bakhtin had met
Wittgenstein at Cambridge and the two became good friends. In Katerina Clark
and Michael Holquist's biography of his younger brother, Mikhail, they make it
clear that 'Nikolai was the most significant "other" whom Mikhail
ever encountered.' They were intellectual equals, and Wittgenstein filled the
absence of Mikhail in this respect.
 |
| Ludwig Wittgenstein |
What I do know and what in itself would
call for attention to the friendship is that Wittgenstein indeed loved Bakhtin,
was unusually happy and gay in his presence, and never dropped him as he easily
did others. His was the rare case of Wittgenstein taking a person as he found
him. All this in spite of the fact that they were poles apart in outlook and
character. Bakhtin was given to extremes of passion and an uncontrolled
exuberance of feeling and expression. He always seemed on the verge of
erupting, like a volcano. He suffered from many irrational fears and
obsessions, loved expansiveness, was a great gourmet. Unlike Wittgenstein,
Bakhtin, though childless, could take delight in children, even in cats. They
did however share a kind of childlike innocence, and lacked everything
commonplace.
[Fania Pascal in LUCKHARDT, p25]
Nikolai Bakhtin left Cambridge in 1935
to take up an appointment at Southampton University where he worked for three
years, and was then offered a similar role at Birmingham University by George
Thomson (1903-1987), who had succeeded E.R. Dodds as Professor of Greek.
Thomson was known as a brilliant and serious man. He had been a member of
Maurice Dobb's communist circle at Cambridge, joined the Party in 1933, and while
others moderated their views under the light of the purges, Thomson was known
as a Stalinist. He could be severe with those who did not share his outlook but
charming to those who managed to breach the ideological wall around him.
Despite this, he too was a friend of Wittgenstein.
 |
| George and Katharine Thomson in 1946 |
Thomson married Katharine Stewart, a
distinguished musician, in October 1934. With Thomson’s new wife, Wittgenstein
reprised the musical technique which he had developed with his close friend,
David Pinsent, back in 1913, of whistling Schubert’s Lieder to piano
accompaniment. Pinsent and Wittgenstein had last performed this at Lordswood
House the night before they parted, never to see each other again. With
Katharine it became a regular Thursday evening ritual.
Dobb himself was not a stranger to
Birmingham. He was known to have been a guest at Highfield, the bohemian home
of Lella and Philip Sargant Florence. Thomson moved nearby to the Florences at
84 Oakfield Road in 1940, but at the time of Wittgenstein’s visit to the Bakhtins
in 1938, he was living in Goodby Road, Moseley.
Nikolai and Constance moved into their
flat on Wheeleys Road in April, and Wittgenstein visited in the autumn. It was
the first of a handful of visits to the Bakhtins in Birmingham which we know
about. The existence of this particular one is established in a letter to
George Thomson's mother-in-law dated 28th October 1938, reproduced in Ray Monk's
biography, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty
of Genius:
Dear Mrs Stewart,
I must apologise for an untruth I told
you today in Miss Pate's office. I said that I had seen Mrs Thomson recently in
Birmingham; & only when I came home this evening it occurred to me that
this wasn't true at all. I stayed with the Bakhtin's a few weeks ago in
Birmingham & I tried to see
Mrs Thomson & we had a talk on the phone; but I wasn't able to see her.
When I talked to you this afternoon what was in my head was that I had seen Mrs
Thomson at your house before she went to Birmingham. Please forgive my
stupidity.
Yours
Sincerely,
L.
Wittgenstein
Around
this time Wittgenstein was experiencing 'great nervous strain' brought about by the situation at home in Vienna. The Wittgenstein family were
under great pressure from the Nazis to hand over their foreign currency in
exchange for an acceptance of their racial status as non-Jews. This was an
attempt to guarantee the safety of Ludwig’s sisters, Hermine and Gretl who had
chosen to stay in Vienna. The trip to see Bakhtin was perhaps some relief from
the stress he was under. It was also his first stay in Birmingham since he said
farewell to David Pinsent in 1913.
 |
| Fania Pascal |
Some of Wittgenstein's other visits to
the Bakhtins in Birmingham can be pieced together from Fania Pascal's Wittgenstein:
A Personal Memoir.
Fania and her husband Roy Pascal had moved from Cambridge to Birmingham in 1939
when Roy was appointed the Chair of German at the university. Their home was at
17 Rotton Park Road, Edgbaston. The Pascals had both known Wittgenstein at Cambridge
where Roy, like George Thomson, had been a member of Maurice Dobb's circle. Fania
Polyanowska had studied literature and philosophy at the University of Berlin where,
in 1925, she befriended Rudolf Peierls, the future pioneer of nuclear physics
at Birmingham University. Fania married the charming and gentle Roy Pascal in Cambridge
in 1931.
 |
| The Pascals' home on Rotton Park Road |
Fania gave private tuition in Russian to
Wittgenstein and Francis Skinner who often accompanied him to Birmingham. The
lessons had ceased in 1935 when Wittgenstein travelled to the Soviet Union
looking for a new life for Skinner and himself. He returned shortly afterwards
having changed his mind. It would seem that the Soviet Union was always seen as
somewhere to escape to, be accepted and start again, but it lost its appeal
when the possibility approached reality.
In her memoir Fania recalls a letter
written to her by Skinner from the Bakhtin household. This was August 1940.
Unfortunately the Pascals had not been in Birmingham when Skinner and
Wittgenstein were visiting Nikolai and Constance. They were picking fruit in
Pershore, a very practical activity in wartime. As Fania writes of knowing
Wittgenstein up to 1941 and recalls a visit to their house when he 'was an
orderly in a hospital' (Wittgenstein worked first as dispensary porter then a
technician from October 1941 to April 1943), it would suggest that
Wittgenstein's last visit to Birmingham in which he saw the Pascals was in late
1941. Whether it was during this visit or a later one to the city in 1943,
Wittgenstein spent time with Nikolai Bakhtin which played a part in the
development of the Philosophical Investigations. They had many
discussions over the years, often late into the night and often
"interminable" according to Constance.
G.H. von Wright, in his 1982 book on
Wittgenstein, points out an error in the printed preface to the Philosophical Investigations which
differs from the original typescript. It is a reference to a time with Bakhtin
when they read the Tractatus
together. In the printed version it would seem to have been 1941, but according
to von Wright, it was really 1943. In Fania Pascal’s recollections of
Wittgenstein she admits to not being good with dates, so perhaps his last visit
to the Pascal household when he was an orderly in a hospital, was later.
Perhaps the original typescript was wrong and the printed version was correct
and Bakhtin’s and Wittgenstein’s reading of the Tractatus had been in late 1941 when he saw the Pascals for the
last time.
The two phases of Wittgenstein’s
philosophy, or his two distinctly different philosophies, which culminate in
the publication of the Tractatus and
the posthumous Philosophical
Investigations, coincided with the two periods in which he made visits to
Birmingham. In 1912 and 1913 he was studying under Russell, exploring the
nature of logical propositions, then in the later period of 1938 to 1943 he was
concerned with mathematics and the philosophy of language. When he dictated his
Notes on Logic, he was sowing the
seeds for the Picture Theory of Language which would become central to the Tractatus. Then came the First World War
and the death of his ‘first and only friend’, David Pinsent, and when the Tractatus was eventually published in
1921:
He
thought he had got all the answers right, so at that point he gave up the
subject. For a number of years in the 1920s he was an elementary school
teacher; then he worked as a monastery gardener; then he helped design a house
for his sister; and it was not until the end of the 1920s that he took up
philosophy again… In this period he produced a completely different philosophy
which… approaches language as a natural human phenomenon, something that we
find going on all around us, a complicated, overlapping array of human
practices.
[Anthony Quinton in
MAGEE, p109]
A noticeable difference between the two
philosophies is the social function of language. In the first period, language
analyses the world, and the possibility of language analysing itself is
considered. In the second, language breaks out of these purely rational
constraints and consists of social games whose rules define community but are
also ever changing as communities change.
[Language] can function only if there are rules that
are accepted by more than one person, so that any one person’s use of the rules
which guide him in speaking is open to correction and improvement by another
person’s observations.
[Anthony Quinton in MAGEE, p109]
The apparent reductionism of his earlier
work is abandoned to embrace the evolving complexity of the social functions of
language. It is therefore worthwhile considering Wittgenstein’s own sociability
as his second period of philosophy develops. His network of friends in
Birmingham gives us some idea of this, and his relationship with Nikolai
Bakhtin is particularly telling.
The ‘interminable’ discussions between
Bakhtin and Wittgenstein were not just about Wittgenstein’s philosophy.
Together they would also read Pushkin in Russian. For Bakhtin, Pushkin’s work
is ‘a poetry that can reveal itself only through direct experience, defying
translation and imitation and remaining for ever circumscribed by its own perfection.’ For Wittgenstein it was also an opportunity to utilise his Russian.
 |
| Nikolai Bakhtin's home on George Road |
The old road from
Birmingham to Worcester, thence the new world, remains in fragments. Bakhtin's flat at 27 Wheeleys Road lay on the
wrong side of the Edgbaston Conservation Area. The border was the boundary
wall. Only the gateposts frozen in redevelopment cement give any clue to the
existence of the boarding house. Of his other residences in Birmingham, two
still exist – 37 George Road and 36 Frederick Road. However his final home in
Cambridge Cresent has disappeared. He died there suddenly of a heart attack in
1950, in the middle of a heatwave and having just returned from a holiday in
the Southern France. There is no grave for Nikolai Bakhtin in Birmingham. His
body was cremated, and no flowers were requested. His wife Constance survived
him for another nine years; housebound with multiple sclerosis in a foreign
city. Bakhtin never published his great on-going work on the nature of language
nor his incomplete autobiography. His essays and lectures were compiled by his
friends for publication by the University of Birmingham in 1963, and his work
sank into the shadows of obscurity while that of his brother, Mikhail, and his
close friend, Ludwig Wittgenstein, formed those very shadows.
I know that when people talk of death of
senseless, they are not speaking of the one who has just died but of external
things: of all that he might have done and attained, that he has left undone
and unattained.
But at such times as I have felt in myself
the power to force my way through the external chance and meaninglessness of
events I have realised that death is not something alien, exterior and violent:
that an end, annihilation coming by chance from without, is only possible for
inanimate objects. For the living it is not simply an end but always a
fulfilment. It does not come to him from outside but grows within him; all his
life it is maturing in him, nourishing and strengthening itself on his joy, his
wisdom, his pain and ascending slowly like the sun from the depths within him.
[from In Praise of Death
(BACHTIN, 1963)]
 |
| This blogger outside Nikolai Bakhtin's home on George Rd. |
Bibliography
BACHTIN,
Nicholas, Lectures and Essays
(University of Birmingham, 1963)
CHAMBERLAIN,
Lesley, The Philosophy Steamer: Lenin and
the Exile of the Intelligentsia (Atlantic, London, 2006)
CLARK,
Katerina & HOLQUIST, Michael, Mikhail
Bakhtin (Harvard, 1984)
DODDS,
E.R., Missing Persons (Oxford, 1977)
EAGLETON,
Terry, Saints and Scholars (Verso,
1987)
MAGEE,
Bryan, Men of Ideas (BBC, 1978)
MONK,
Ray, Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (Vintage, 1991)
PASCAL, Fania, Wittgenstein: A
Personal Memoir in Wittgenstein:
Sources and Perspectives edited by C.G. Luckhardt (Harvester, Hassocks,
1979)
ROBERTS,
Sian Lliwen, Place, Life Histories and
the Politics of Relief: Episodes in the Life of Francesca Wilson, Humanitarian
Educator Activist (Doctoral thesis submitted to the University of
Birmingham, April 2010)
VON
WRIGHT, Georg Henrik, Wittgenstein
(Blackwell, 1982)
WILSON,
Francesca M, introduction to BACHTIN, Nicholas, Lectures and Essays (University of Birmingham, 1963)
WILSON,
Francesca M, In the Margins of Chaos,
(Murray, 1944)
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