Textual connections of the mythonyms in I.A. Bunin’s poetry

Abstract

The question of the textual functioning of mythonyms in the poetic heritage of I.A. Bunin is raised. The relevance of the topic is due to the interest of linguists in the problem of artistic text-building, in particular the author’s preference in vocabulary selection, as well as the unresolved issue of modeling Bunin’s onomasticon. The purpose of the study is to describe the textual connections of mythological names, through which meaningful and conceptual information is explicated and a subtext is formed. The research material included the scientific edition (by Professor T.M. Dvinyatina) of I.A. Bunin’s poetry, from which 272 units were extracted by continuous sampling. The factual material was systematized and interpreted with the descriptive, taxonomic, quantitative methods, contextual analysis, modeling. Standing out against the background of different layers of the Bunin’s vocabulary, mythological names interact with each other, with other semantic subgroups of onyms, appellatives, attributive and verbal vocabulary. The author notes that mythoanthroponyms and theonyms have the richest syntagmatic connections. Contextual synonymy is found in demononyms, mythoanthroponyms, mythopersonyms, mythoponyms and theonyms; and contextual antonymy is found in mythoponyms and mythopersonyms. The intertextual nature and the precedent level determine the associative connections of Bunin’s mythonymicon units. It is concluded that the textual functioning of mythonyms is determined by I.A. Bunin’s intention to overcome the particularization of cultural worlds and create such an individual author’s mythopoetic space where images and plots already familiar to readers are constantly enriched with new meanings. The prospects of the work include the study of Bunin’s prose mythonymicon and the textual connections of mythonyms in it, which will allow to create a consistent onomastic model of Bunin-writer.