The Silence of the Author: The Author and the Text, Speech and Writing, Discourse and Understanding

Abstract

The problem of the author and creativity is classical not only in philology, but also in philosophy and the humanities, it involves considering the materialization of the author's creativity in cultural texts (written, oral, visual). In Russian literature, this paradox was recorded in the work of L.N. Tolstoy, the 195th anniversary of whose birth is celebrated in 2023. L.N. Tolstoy is credited with calling on the author to be silent and not to write, but his revolutionary appeal "I cannot be silent" is also known. Modern philosophers and cultural scientists have tried to solve this dilemma by introducing the concept of "discourse", broader than the concepts of "text" and "context". However, until now, this paradoxical position of the "silent author", when the text itself and the discourse begin to "speak" instead of the author, remains a mystery and an intellectual puzzle. Using the methods of hermeneutics and discourse analysis, a new reading of this classical problem is obtained, when the author's silence itself acts not only as the context of the work in the discourse of a specific situation and cultural event, but also as the author's position, including ideological, ideological and philosophical.