Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) - a boundary crosser between philosophy, philology, and linguistics - is one of the most inspiring thinkers of the 20th century. His theoretical concepts on the polyphony and dialogism of the word, the chronotope of the novel, and the carnivalesque as counterculture have shaped intellectual debates since the late 1970s. However, during his lifetime, Bakhtin was hardly read, and only a few of his writings were published under his name in the Soviet Union. In Soviet intellectual life, he was marginalized by official sources and isolated in exile. The introduction presents Bakhtin's well-known and lesser-known works from the early 1920s and situates them within the cultural and historical context of their creation and delayed reception.