Who is the author?

Formulated in the late 20s and the early 30s Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of “dialogic words”, renamed in the late 60s by Julia Kristeva as “intertextuality”, formed the basis of French post structural theories of the text − palimpsest (Barthes, Genette, Derrida), and also, which is less obvious, of postmodern notions of the author. Those concepts are, however, usually linked to Focault and Derrida, Ricoeur and Taylor and not to the Russian philosopher of verbal activities. Also, it is primarily used in the context of authors of literary and artistic texts. But Bakhtin’s notion of subjectivity does not apply to literature only. It includes also an intriguing concept of the subject of a scholarly expression (cognitive, precisely referential) multi voiced and voiced by a stranger, quoted or verbalized by the other, in true sense “heteroglossial”. And it is not only included, but also represented in its full form. My study is an attempt at reconstruction of the notion, which I call dramaturgical (or staged) theory of scholarly expression and its subject. On the basis of selected, so called “questionable” texts by Bakhtin and (not) his concepts (especially chronotope and heteroglassia, inner and outer speech), situated in the context of other texts of his times I attempt to answer the question who Bakhtin’s author is − the one suggested in his theory, and he himself as an author of (not) his works: texts that survived in residual pieces, destroyed by the author himself (as famous, burned with a cigarette Vospitatelnyi Roman), mutilated by the Great History (censored and autocensored), edited many times by great and small people, sometimes available only in the form of notes of his audience. He himself, imprecisely, but not without a cause, used to say that this author always remains anonymous, but at the same time − in a polemic with Kant − he tied him with “a person”, unifying the subject of the text with the empirical subject