«…thereof one must be silent» (Nabokov’s «Ultima Thule» and the Philosophy of Silence)

Abstract

The article discusses the possibility to read Nabokov’s story “Ultima Thule” in the light of Heidegger and early Wittgenstein’s concepts of silence. The story touched different kinds of hermeneutical topics and it is in accordance with both Heidegger’s understanding of silence as the most important ontological experience and the basic idea of the “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” expressed in its final aphorism: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”. Since these authors approached the problem of word and silence with a completely different positions and did not take into account each other’s experiences, meanings, which are revealed during the analysis, are considered as being in relation of cultural co-beingness with each other, overlapping, but not borrowing each other’s arguments and not quoting each other. Refs 10.