The semantic and pragmatic potential of statements of refusal to communicate allows shedding light on the peculiarities of the phenomenon of silence, identifying its varieties, the specifics of manifestation in the Russian linguistic picture of the world and analyzing the functionality as part of a literary text. The concept of “refusal to communicate” is a broader phenomenon than the actual speech genre of refusal, since refusal as such implies a negative reaction only to initial motivational responses, while refusal of communication can become both a reaction to any statement or not be reactive at all, that is, to be the initial remark in the dialogue. The peculiarity of statements with the semantics of silence is manifested in the fact that their illocutionary goal is the impossibility or unwillingness to continue communication and is achieved using various linguistic means, first of all, lexemes denoting the speaking process, as well as modal modifiers expressing the reason for such speech behavior. The differences between speech genres, which are based on rejection, lie in the very object of rejection, in what the speaker rejects. In the Russian linguistic picture of the world, silence is characterized by the fact that it is a communicative action, it consists not in the absence of speech, but in the transmission of information in a non-verbal way. In this case, it is called communicatively meaningful silence. The analysis of the lexical structure of E. Vodolazkin’s novel “Laure” made it possible to identify important fragments of the text associated with silence, to obtain information about the author’s worldview and his attitude to the phenomenon of silence.