ABSTRACT
The Russian language has two different words for what is called ‘silence’ in English, each with a distinct meaning. The Russian word tishina denotes a neutral absence of sound, such as one might experience in a library, or in a forest. The Russian word molchanie, by contrast, indicates a deliberate choice not to speak and could be described, borrowing Jay Winter’s words, as a ‘focused, directed and purposeful silence’ (2010: 4). Tishina can be said to describe a state within the natural world, while molchanie belongs to the human world (Arutiunova 2000: 431). Mikhail Bakhtin observes that the ‘disturbance of quietude [tishina] by sound is mechanical and physiological [. . .]; the disturbance of silence [molchanie] by the word is personalistic and intelligible’ (1987: 133). Tishina is impersonal, always without a gram - matical subject and object (Arutiunova 2000: 431). Molchanie, by contrast, presupposes a subject with the capacity for speech who consciously abstains from using it. It thus potentially raises ethical questions about who remains silent, about what, and why. As Jay Winter points out, despite a general tendency to view speech and silence alike as ‘morally neutral’, both ‘can be deployed in morally defensible and in morally deplorable ways’ (2010: 10).
