Toponymic worldview of the Orientalist Bunin

The paper is devoted to the study of the onomastic code of I. A. Bunin’s literary texts. The aim of the research is to describe real and mythological proper names that explicate the toponymic worldview of the East in the writer’s prose. The paper analyses semantic groups of toponyms as the text-forming units of a literary work, examines their functional potential. 22 subgroups of real onyms (macrotoponyms, choronyms, oeconyms, urbanonyms, hydronyms, ecclesionyms, etc.) and 5 subgroups of unreal ones (mythological macrotoponyms, mythological astionyms, mythological drymonyms, mythological choronyms and mythological oronyms) were identified; cases of contextual synonymy and antonymy at the level of the author’s individual onomasticon were noted. The research is original in that it is the first to systematise the onyms involved in the modelling of the toponymic worldview of the Orientalist Bunin and to identify the characteristic features of this worldview. As a result of the research, it has been proved that the toponymic worldview of the East in I. A. Bunin’s literary heritage represented by a complex system of units of different semantics is characterised by detail, continuity, scale, universalism, timelessness and horizontal-vertical construction.