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Abstract: The article raises the question of the unique nature of the toponymic system of I. A. Bunin’s poetry. The presented review of linguistic studies, dealing with the onomastic code of the writer, clearly shows that this issue is an unfilled lacuna in the study of the lexical level of his works of fiction. The object of the study conprises the toponyms functioning in the poems of 1888–1952. The aim of this study is to describe the taxonomy of the toponymic system based on the object-denotative feature and to identify the peculiarities of their intra-textual interaction. Intersectoral methods and methods of onomasiological research were used in the article to systematize and interpret the material: descriptive, comparative, etymological, linguostatistical, contextual and component analyses. The analysis of the author’s card index of examples allows concluding that Bunin’s toponymic system is represented by two sectors – the real sector and the mythological sector. The real sector includes the names of existing geographical objects or geographical objects of the past (Atmeidan, Egypt, Cairo, Judea, Trapezond, Etna, Java, etc.). The fictional names (Alatyr, Atlantis, Buyan, Irem, Kovseri, etc.) that appear in archaic myths, folklore, and religious texts belong to the mythological sector. The study highlights the writer’s desire to improve the auditory aspect of poetic speech organization, certain changes in the graphic and phonetic composition of toponyms, the presence of occasional units, and the creation of stable contextual-associative links between the toponyms. It has been found that at the level of micro- and macro-contexts, the toponyms of both sectors are connected by different types of relations: similarity, contrast, “composition scheme”, juxtaposition and relations of empirical associations. The author concludes that Bunin’s toponymic system is organized as a continuum in which real and mythological names are closely related to each other due to the realization of intra-textual and intertextual connections and the interaction between extralinguistic and linguistic contexts. The obtained results and the conclusions drawn can be used in university and school practice in the philological text analysis, in courses on the problems of literary onomastics, linguopoetics and linguistic personality of writers as well as in modern lexicographical practice when creating an onomastic dictionary of Bunin’s literary heritage.

About the author(s) :

Olga A. Selemeneva

Bunin Yelets State University (Yelets, Russia)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0488-8428

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 13.09.2024; date of publication: 30.06.2025

References:

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