This publication is the first scientific collection of the works of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin. The fifth volume collects his works from the 1940s to the early 1960s, the most little-known period of the thinker’s activity to readers. Many of the works are published in this volume for the first time, but those studies that have already been published are given in new texts and a new composition, having been newly prepared from manuscripts stored in the author’s archive. In general, the volume can be called entirely archival. The volume's materials contain the main themes of Bakhtin's work - his philosophical anthropology and philosophical linguistics, the philosophical foundations of the humanities, the concept of text, the theory of speech genres, the poetics of Dostoevsky and Rabelais, as well as Shakespeare, Gogol, Flaubert, Mayakovsky, the problems of sentimentalism and satire. The volume is thoroughly commented on.