Mikhail Bakhtin writes about the Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel in 1937 - 1938. The study transcends, despite its title, the boundaries of the novel — however, it also discusses the prehistory of the genre, the primitive culture of all peoples, the epics of Homer, the Platonic dialogues, the Attic tragedy, the Latin writers, Dante...
All these, from the perspective of the specific subject, which is the chronotope: a concept he defines as the inseparable unity of time with space and studies, as the subtitle warns, historically, emphasizing above all the eternal becoming of the novelistic art.
Rather an original subject for the literature studies of the time, as the author himself senses when he invokes in the preface of the book time as the fourth dimension of space, as expressed in Einstein's theory of relativity.
And yet, the chronotopic approach seems self-evident to us, if not commonplace, considering the shared experience of humanity. The empirical verification of the undivided unity of time and space is sufficient to show that this study concerns not only specialists but also interests every reader who feels the need to understand literary works more deeply.
