This third volume of the Collected Works of M.M. Bakhtin completes the publication of the Collection, which began fifteen years ago, in 1996. This volume contains Bakhtin’s theory of the novel, which was created in the 1930s. During this central decade in the creative life of the thinker, his theoretical thought traveled from questions of the stylistics of the novel (the theme “The Word in the Novel”) to the main problems of the philosophy of the genre; a book was written about the novel of education (unpreserved) and the chronotope theory was developed. But not a single line of what was created over the years made it into print, and Bakhtin’s theory of the novel began to come to light only in the late 1960s. At the beginning of this decade, the final classical formulations of Bakhtin's novel theory were obtained; therefore the volume has a broad chronology: 1930-1961. Like all previous volumes of the Collection, this volume is thoroughly commented on and is also accompanied by facsimile reproductions of sheets of M. M. Bakhtin’s manuscripts.