Bakhtin and the Russian Avant Garde in Vitebsk: Creative Understanding and the Collective Dialogue

This paper locates its genesis in a small town called Vitebsk in Belorussia which experienced a flowering of creativity and artistic energy that led to significant modernist experimentation in the years 1917-1921. Marc Chagall, returning from the October Revolution took up the position of art commissioner and developed an academy of art that became the laboratory for Russian modernism. Chagall's Academy, Bakhtin's Circle (and associated animations with other intellectuals of tis era), and Malevich's experiments, artistic group UNOVIS--all in fierce dialogue with one another--made the town of Vitebsk into an artistic crucible in the early twentieth century. We argue that this creative collective transformed creative energies of Russian drama, music, theatre, art, and philosophy in a distinctive contribution to modernism, structuralism and formalism that contributed richly to the social understanding of creativity itself that is so evident across Mikhail Bakhtin's subsequent body of work, and elsewhere across the world. This paper argues that a consideration of such interplay has much potential for twenty-first century educational philosophy.