Abstract: The subject of the research is Bakhtin heritage reception in Russian literary studies of the late 1980s - 1990s. That was the period when researchers came close to the problem of so called 'disputed texts' using new approaches of literary studies and other humanities. The object of the research is the polemics about the authorship of Medvedev-Voloshinov corpus of texts. The authors of the article analyze arguments of protagonists and opponents of the point of view that the texts were written by Mikhail Bakhtin. Based on the traditions of academic literary studies, experience in textual analysis, and case studies technique, the authors offer a complex method of viewing the aforesaid problem in the historico-literary and sociocultural terms. Keeping in mind that for many decades there has been a tradition to think of Bakhtin as the author of 'the disputed texts', memoirs published in 1990 and a great number of researches including those that were not so famous allow the authors of the article to conclude that already in late 1990s a Russian expert in Bakhtin studies N. Nikolaev offered a model and text analysis methods that proved the authorship of Mikhail Bakhtin.