Hoffmann’s works continued to be influential in Russia before and after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, both for writers and cultural figures who were officially acceptable in the USSR, and for Soviet and Russian dissidents from the 1920s to the present. In 1921, a group of writers called Serapionovy Brat’ia (The Serapion Brothers) was formed in Petrograd, named after Die Serapionsbrűder (The Serapion Brethren), a literary and social circle formed in Berlin in 1818 by Hoffmann and some of his friends, and after which he named a four-volume collection of stories (1819, 1820, and 1821). In works first published in the 1920s and the 1960s, the prominent literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) developed the concepts of ‘Menippean satire’51 and ‘carnival’, characterizing Hoffmann as bel
