The (presumed) author of books on Dostoevsky and Rabelais, Mikhail Bakhtin was elevated to the rank of “the greatest theoretician of literature in the twentieth century” by a two-pronged process: the publication of a number of his old manuscripts, and the assertion that he was also the true author of most of the texts published in the 1920s under the names of his “friends” P.N. Medvedev and V.N. Voloshinov, who both died at an early age. Even though the theory of authorial substitution res...