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This article considers the relationship between two opposing views of literary study: one intuitive, philosophical, synthesizing and personalistic (Mixail Baxtin); the other scientistic, quantitative, analytic and impersonalistic (the Russian formalists). Its prism is a brief private judgment made by Baxtin in his working notebooks at the end of the 1960s: “My attitude toward Formalism” and “My attitude toward Structuralism.” This attitude remained remarkably consistent. Baxtin wrote his first critique of formalism in 1924 and pursued it in some lesser-known fragments between 1943 and 1945. The wartime notes focus on several concepts earlier associated with Russian Formalism — “specifisation,” “reification,” the role of cognition in “material aesthetics.” In his wartime texts, Baxtin comes to associate love and freedom with open-ended time, and violence and lack of freedom with bounded space. The draft essay concludes with a discussion of Baxtin’s fragment on Flaubert (1944), where the analyzing and synthesizing capacities of modernism are shown to be in a sort of paralyzing gridlock in the post-carnival world.