presents six short works from Bakhtin's published in Moscow in 1979. This is the last of Bakhtin's extant manuscripts published in the Soviet Union. All but one of these essays (the one on the ) were written in Bakhtin's later years and thus they bear the stamp of a thinker who has accumulated a huge storehouse of factual material, to which he has devoted a lifetime of analysis, reflection, and reconsideration.