Many cultural and artistic figures are sometimes in the "shadow" of their more famous relatives and friends, and this makes it difficult to assess their work objectively (one might for example recall the fate of Alexander Pavlovich Chekhov, Vladimir and Nikolai Burlyukov, P.N. Medvedev and V.N. Voloshinov). This is precisely the situation around Nikolai Mikhailovich Bakhtin, the elder brother of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin. The study of his work is further complicated by the fact that it was extremely multigenre and multidimensional, including philosophical essay writing, works in the field of the study of fiction, poetic experiments, and linguistic research on the history of the Greek language. In addition, gaps in our knowledge about Nikolai Bakhtin's personality and work impede a full-fledged understanding of his biography: very little evidence has survived from the pre-revolutionary period of his older brother, M.M. Bakhtin, and his archive, which is now in the UK (N.M. Bakhtin spent the last twenty years of his life there), and has still remained largely unstudied. The article considers the stylistic peculiarities of N.M. Bakhtin's essay writing which was published in the Parisian ?migr? journals in the second half of the 1920s. It also provides some parallels and similarities which on the one hand link it to the early works of M.M. Bakhtin (Art and Responsibility, Towards the Philosophy of Action, The Author and the Hero in Aesthetic Activity), as well as to the Neocantinian philosophy. The article also reveals rhetorical devices in N.M. Bakhtin's writings 123 which foreshadowed his move to leftist-radical positions and which finally took place in the late 1930s
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