The reception of the philosophy of the 20th century German philosopher M. Heidegger in Russia cannot be imagined without the work of V. Bibikhin, who not only translated his texts, but created the basis for a dialogue between European modern thought and the Russian philosophical tradition of the 20th century. By combining the ideas of these two schools of thought, he developed his original ontological hermeneutics, in the context of which he examined the problems of Russian culture and Russian religiously oriented philosophy from a new angle. This paper focuses on a little-studied topic of the phenomenon of silence in culture, which the philosopher dealt with under the influence of the works of Heidegger. In this regard, the paper presents a comparative analysis of semantic content of the concept of silence in the philosophy of M. Heidegger and V. Bibikhin, as well as the results of a study of the meaning of Bibikhin's concept of silence for understanding the a priori foundations of Russian culture. The object of the study was Heidegger's texts on the functioning of language and silence in culture, and Bibikhin's workss on this topic, written on the basis of materials from lectures he gave and published in collections of different years. During the analysis of Heidegger's works, the authors used the works of A.V. Mikhailovsky, E.Yu. Talalaeva, E.Yu. Fedotova, S.S. Horuzhy, M.S. Sasa. When interpreting certain provisions of Bibikhin's philosophy, they resorted to the texts of A.V. Akhutin, A.V. Magun, A.V. Mikhailovsky, S.S. Khoruzhy. The study comes to the following conclusions. Heidegger's phenomenon of silence expresses the fullness of meaning, and the language of poetry is the way of the presence of human existence in culture. Bibikhin's concept of "silence" means a condition of meaning, that is, pointing to the mystical feeling of the invisible and unknowable God in culture. The language of religious philosophy is interpreted by him as a method of meaning-making, demiurgy, and the creativity of an unbiased living culture, through which the deification of man occurs. From Bibikhin's point of view, the metaphysics of Russian culture lies in a special way of declaring transcendental meaning. Russian consciousness defines itself out of intentional relationship to the Other. Affection of the Other in Russian culture is presented in the form of contemplation of God in hesychasm and in the form of contemplation of the world as a whole, reflected in the language of Russian religious philosophy through the concepts of symbol, sobor- nost, and pan-unity.
