This article is centred upon the outstanding contribution of the Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin to the research concerning the masterpiece of the great French humanist Fr. Rabelais. In his analysis of this writer’s famous work Gargantua and Pantagruel, M. Bakhtin emphasizes the importance of the folklore tradition and especially of the chronotop defi ning it for the world outlook of the Fr. Rabelais who developed a carnivalesque philosophy. The main idea of this one concerns the dynamism of human life. It is worth mentioning that a specifi c feature of this folk culture is that it places much emphasis on the so-called „ambivalence”. By focusing on the communal body in which birth and death are intimately intertwined, Bakhtin’s carnival is able to evade the fears of life and to celebrate the „cheerful death” of an individual.