In the 1920s, when Bakhtin was lying the conceptual foundations for the development of his thought, the mainstream of Russian literary theory was dominated by the Russian Formalists. Like the structuralists after him Bhakhtin agreed with the Formalists' emphasis on language, but he disagreed with two positions fundamental to the Formalists view of literature. First that the text is merely the sum of its devices, and object crafted by the artist; and, second, that a literary work is to be assessed strictly on its own terms, without reference
While the Soviet Marxists condemned the Formalists for ignoring the ideological aspects of literature, Bakhtin in turn, resisted the Marxist, tendency to reduce literature to ideology. "The study of the verbal art", he insists in 'Dialogic Imagination", "can and must overcome the divorce between an abstract 'formal' approach and equally abstract 'ideological' approach". In Bakhtin's view, form and idea are of a piece. The formal aspects of literature are part of its message, and the nature of its message determines the form it assumes. Further, according to Bakhtin, the ideological atmosphere or the historical milieu in which the work arises has a bearing on its form and content.
Such a view is grounded in Bakhtin's dialogic concept of language and literature. A novel, for example, is neither an isolated artifact nor a static "structured on an uninterrupted mutual interaction with the discourse of life". The novel, in other words, not only reflects the forces of dialogic exchange but also is itself such a force. As the embodiment of the forces of interaction, discourse in the novel revolves around encounters between various voices or ideas. "The idea begins to live", says Bakhtin in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics "only when it enters into genuine dialogic relationships with other ideas.