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The Sound of Whispering and Silence in Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago

Departing from the thesis that sounds and silence are physical states, but also an aesthetic and cultural devices, the aim of this presentation is to answer the following questions. What are the meanings of sounds, silence, and whispering as metaphors of violence, war, and revolution in Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago? Especially in relation to “paradoxical materiality” (Miller 2007) of silence, where this state of complete muteness and stillness represents at the same time emptiness – but also plentitude, weightlessness – but also heaviness, and therefore, as Miller further elaborates, “can (…) be seen as a simultaneous weightlessness (a dissolution of corporeal limits) and kinetic plenitude, ” the paper analyzes the symbolism of moments of silence in Pasternak’s novel. Is Pasternak’s profound “rhetoric of silence” (C. Glenn) signifier of an amputation of Doctor Zhivago’s protagonists from the world of violent revolutionary Russia into their own, private, intimate worlds of introspection, or it is rather a signifier of their powerful resistance against general misrepresentation of revolution as universal political and cultural project of emancipation and freedom? In other words, can Pasternak’s “rhetoric of silence” in Doctor Zhivago be understood as a state of plentitude and knowing (S. Sontag), i.e. as a method of radical speech of silenced and whispering protagonists rather than of their muteness as a consequence of their (bourgeois) laid-backness and passivity?

Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, sound, silence, revolution

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