Short answers, pulled from the story.
Mikhail Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher and literary critic born in Oryol, Russia, who lived from 1895 to 1975. He is known for developing the concepts of dialogism, the carnivalesque, heteroglossia, and the chronotope, which influenced literary criticism, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and communication studies.
Bakhtin was arrested by the Soviet secret police, the OGPU, on the 8th of December 1928, along with others connected to the Voskresenie religious society. His original sentence to the labor camps of Solovki was commuted to exile in Kazakhstan on health grounds, and he spent six years with his wife in Kustanai (now Kostanay).
Polyphony, as Bakhtin developed it in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, refers to a narrative form in which each character participates on their own terms in their own independent voice, rather than existing within a single authorial reality. Bakhtin identified Dostoevsky as the creator of the polyphonic novel and described it as a fundamentally new genre.
Heteroglossia, introduced in his essay "Discourse in the Novel" (1934-1935), refers to the extralinguistic qualities present in all languages - including perspective, evaluation, and ideological positioning - that make true neutrality impossible in any utterance. Bakhtin described it as "the base condition governing the operation of meaning in any utterance."
The State Accrediting Bureau denied Bakhtin the higher degree of Doctor of Sciences after his dissertation on Francois Rabelais divided Moscow scholars in 1946 and 1949. The manuscript's earthy and anarchic content generated prolonged controversy, and the government eventually intervened; Bakhtin was granted the lesser Candidate of Sciences degree instead.
Bakhtin began to be rediscovered by Russian scholars in 1963. International recognition came after his death in 1975, when Julia Kristeva and Tzvetan Todorov introduced his work to the Francophone world. His popularity in the United States, the United Kingdom, and many other countries surged in the late 1980s.