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Abstract:

The article poses and examines the problem of commenting drafts and unfinished texts. Practice of archive publications involves the presentation of notes not developed into a whole text. Study and commenting of notes (if the text they relate to is unknown, not found or lost) want special research or hermeneutic methods. The article covers the practice of study, publishing and commenting of materials to Menippean theory that is one of the most debatable research topics in M.M. Bakhtin’s works. “Menippean plot” can be found in the draft manuscripts of 1940-s resulting from the unfulfilled project “Menippean satire and its meaning in the history of the novel; it was partly opened in 1960-s while preparing the fourth chapter of “Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics”. There is a wide range of hermeneutic methods to study and comment the large amount of draft notes of various years. Studying the history of ideas in the context of the history of manuscripts allows following, step by step, the development of the Menippean theory, genesis and meaning of the main concepts and the range of ideas that were involved into Bakhtin’s conception on the different stages of its formation.