I.A. Bunin’s poetic mythonymicon: connotative aspect

The article studies the system of mythological names in I.A. Bunin’s poetic heritage. The relevance of the topic is due to the unexplored problems of word-formation motivation, semantics, structure, and the role of mythological names in I.A. Bunin’s prose and poetic texts. The aim of the paper is to analyze the connotative potential of different-structured mythological names which are significant for the artistic system of I.A. Bunin. The actual material of the study contains I.A. Bunin’s poetic texts written in 1888-1952. The main research methods are descriptive, etymological, contextual, semantic methods, and structural analysis. The inventory of more than 700 poetic contexts of I.A. Bunin made it possible to identify 152 mythological names from various sources. The selected units were systematized on four features: semantics, etymology, structure, and frequency of use. The analysis of the connotative potential of some simple, composite and complex mythological names allowed to come to the conclusion that they accumulate additional emotional-evaluative, symbolic meanings. New combinations of meanings, qualitative and quantitative changes in the connotative content of mythological names are provided by the individual author’s reinterpretation of primary sources, the complexity of motivational relations between producing units and derivatives, and the semantic environment of a particular unit. Mythological names are associated with the key motifs, themes, ideas, and value oppositions of I.A. Bunin’s picture of the world. The study of the features of the system of I.A. Bunin’s mythological names with the tools of linguistics and literary studies, philosophy, and cultural studies is one of the undoubted prospects of research.