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discourse in dostoevsky

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«We have entitled our chapter "Discourse in Dostoyevsky," for we have
in mind discourse, that is, language in its concrete living totality,
and not language as the specific object of linguistics, something
arrived at through a completely legitimate and necessary abstraction
from various aspects of the concrete life of the word. But precisely
those aspects in the life of the word that linguistics makes abstract
are, for our purposes, of primary importance. Therefore the analyses
that follow are not linguistic in the strict sense of the term. They
belong rather to metalinguistics, if we understand by that term the
study of those aspects in the life of the word, not yet shaped into
separate and specific disciplines, that exceed -- and completely
legitimately -- the boundaries of linguistics. Of course,
metalinguistic research cannot ignore linguistics and must make use of
its results. Lingustics and metalinguistics study one and the same
concrete, highly complex, and multi-faceted phenomenon, namely, the
word -- but they study it from various sides and various points of
view. They must complement one another, but they must not be
confused. In practice, the boundaries between them are very often
violated.»

M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, p. 181

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