SEMANTICS OF SILENCE IN POETICS OF O. F. BERGHOLZ

Abstract

The phenomenon of silence in the creative heritage of O. F. Bergholz has not been studied to date. The category of silence is considered in the article as a nonverbal communicative act, a nonverbal form of spiritual experience and a behavioral strategy. In the center of attention is the poem “Except” (“Reached mute despair…”), written by Bergholz after a trip to the construction site of the Volga-Don Canal. The text mentions the icon of the Savior “Good Silence,” thanks to which the category of silence acquires axiological characteristics: forced silence is a strategic means and is realized as salvation from lies (good silence). At the same time, the lexeme silence rhyming with despair in a socio-political context means that the cowardly silencing of the people’s suffering deserves censure. In the poem “Except” with an allusion to Tyutchev’s “Silentium!” and in direct reference to true knowledge (“He knew”), the limitations of the verbal capabilities of language are noted (“no consonance/what he saw cannot be conveyed”). In the poem “February Diary,” silence is actualized as “the identity of speaker, the listener and the topic,” the expressiveness of silence as highest point of communication is emphasized, its conventionality is noted. In the poem “No, not from our meager books…,” the semantics of silence goes back to the author’s religious memory: in the final scene, the chain of generations closes in Christian silence/reconciliation. Silence as a special communicative behavior acquires a ritual character in a number of other texts: the heroine’s meeting with her father in the story “Day Stars” (chapter “The Secret of the Earth”) is saturated with silentium vocabulary; the call to silence on the eve of mortal battles in the poem “The hand pulls to the heart of the Motherland…” determines the normative behavior of a person in a borderline situation. Silence as conscious and effective resistance to the actions of the authorities (an act of disagreement) is manifested in the diary discourse of the poetess and the late cycle “Anna Akhmatova.” An extensive semantic palette of silence is revealed on the basis of Bergholz’s poetic, prose and diary texts.