This article is about the menippeah and how Mikhail Bakhtin understood it, considering this carnivalesque literary genre as one of the main ancient sources of the polyphonic novel. In his book about Dostoevsky’s poetics, the great literary theorist analyzed some of the works written by this famous genius of the Russian literature, trying to demonstrate that they can be called genuine menippeahs. Following Bakhtin’s analysis, and speaking about some Romanian prose writers of the 19th century, the author of this article considers Mihai Eminescu and Ion Creangă to be those whose works Empty Genius and Ivan Turbincă can be treated as outstanding examples of menippeahs. The two writers mentioned in this article that illustrated the Russian and the Romanian menippeah of the 20th century are Mikhail Bulgakov and Pavel Dan.