became recognized as a genre through the first century B.C.E. Roman scholar Varro. According to Bakhtin, the roots of the genre "reach directly back into carnivalized folklore, whose decisive influence is here even more significant than it is in the Socratic dialogue." Its characteristics include intensified comicality, freedom from established constraints, bold use of fantastic situations for the testing of truth, abrupt changes, inappropriate behaviour, abnormal or psychopathological mental states, inserted genres and multi-tonality, parodies, oxymorons, scandal scenes, and a sharp satirical focus on contemporary ideas and issues. Despite the apparent heterogeneity of these elements, Bakhtin emphasizes the internal integrity of the genre and its thorough grounding in a carnival sense of the world. He notes its unparalleled capacity for reflecting the social and philosophical ethos of its historical setting – principally the epoch of the decline of national legend, which brought with it the gradual dissolution of long-established ethical norms and a concomitant rise in free interaction and argumentation over all manner of "ultimate questions". The internal dialogical freedom of the genre is coupled with an equally free external capacity for the absorption of other genres, for example the diatribe, the soliloquy and the symposium. Dostoevsky and polyphony The tradition of Menippean satire reached its summit in the nineteenth century, according to Bakhtin, in the work of Dostoevsky. Menippean satire was the fertile ground on which Dostoevsky was able to grow his entirely new carnivalized genre—the polyphonic novel. According to Bakhtin, Dostoevsky was familiar with works by Lucian (such as Dialogues of the Dead and Menippus, or The Descent Into Hades), Seneca (Apocolocyntosis), Petronius (The Satyricon), Apuleius (The Golden Ass), and possibly also the satires of Varro. He was also probably influenced by modern European manifestations of the genre in authors such as Goethe, Fénelon, Diderot and Voltaire. Bakhtin observes that although Dostoevsky may not have consciously recognized his place as the heir of the tradition, he undoubtedly instinctively adopted many of its carnivalistic forms, as well as its liberated approach to the use of those forms, and adapted them to his own artistic purposes. The dialogic sense of truth, the device of the extraordinary situation, the unencumbered frankness of speech, the clash of extreme positions and embodied ideas over ultimate questions, the technique of anacrisis, "threshold" dialogues in extreme or fantastic situations: present in Menippean satire, these qualities are given a new and more profound life in Dostoevsky's