Situated on the borderline between a religious and an aggressively secularized culture, straddling both territories, Bakhtin— like Dostoevsky, his hero—is not at home in either of them. It is precisely this liminal position and the symptomatic tensions it produces, which enables him to engage with the Mobius strip of ethics and subjectivity. Keywords: Bakhtin’s early works; Kristeva; subject (self); meta-physics; Dostoevsky; modernity; answerability