The Creativity of François Rabelais and the Folk Culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance

In the book presented for readers’ attention by the outstanding Russian philologist and thinker M. M. Bakhtin, the novel by François Rabelais "Gargantua and Pantagruel" becomes the starting point for the author’s reflections on the nature of the comic and... its embodiments in various genres and styles of speech, as well as on the forms and functions of corporeality characteristic of the folk culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The author develops the theory of the lowly culture of laughter, which in the mentioned epochs opposed the "serious" official culture, was imbued with the carnival "pathos of changes and renewals", the "consciousness of the cheerful relativity of dominant truths and powers", and reflected the popular belief in the continuous renewal of life, allowing a person to feel a connection to the universe (the concept of the "grotesque collective body"). Completed in 1940 and published a quarter of a century later, in 1965, Bakhtin's monograph defined the development of world literary science for decades to come. Its publication in this edition is accompanied by the article "Rabelais and Gogol", which was not included in the main text of the study and sheds additional light on its key ideas.