The third chapter of this study drew attention to and analysed the Christian motifs which organise the discourse on aesthetics in ‘Author and Hero’. These motifs were seen to gravitate towards the most indispensable aspects of the Christian credo: the absolute transcendence and primacy of God the Creator humankind created in His image and likeness, existing separately from God but not autonomously, dependent upon Him for its continuing existence and value; the fallen state of humankind, and with it the whole of being, its denial of God and destructive bid for autonomy; the grace and condescension of God in His work of forgiveness (justification) and restoration to eternal life, above all manifest in the literal, sacrificial condescension of the Incarnation; finally, the love of God and the responsive emotional range of His subjects in their relationship with Him: repentance, humility, faith, hope, love, peace and joy. The consistency and coherency of this Christian framework compelled the question as to what happens to Bakhtin's Christian world-view in the following phases of his intellectual development, when for concrete political reasons any overt expression of earlier motifs became impossible, and when there would have been every good reason for him to abandon his beliefs.

Subsequent chapters dealt with different aspects of this issue. Chapter 4 posed the unavoidable question about the extent and nature of Bakhtin's Marxist convictions as they were supposedly formulated during the first decade of Soviet power, based on the publications, under his own name and others', of the 1920s.