Anthroponyms in the poetry of Pavel Vasiliev: From identifying function to artistic and stylistic one

Abstract

Anthroponyms are conceptually and aesthetically significant elements of the idiostyle of Pavel Nikolaevich Vasiliev, a Russian Soviet poet. The onyms that function in poetic texts perform, in addition to identifying, an artistic and stylistic role, i.e. become poetonyms. We offer a typology of onyms based on the correlation of the name with the referent, objective reality and the author. The first type includes anthroponyms, the referent of which is real persons, chronologically relevant for the author  — relatives, friends, acquaintances. The second type includes onyms, the referent of which are real-life persons, chronologically separated from the author, but relevant in his po etic world picture. Onyms of the third and fourth type have a fictitious referent, these are the names of characters in fiction, folklore, or the names of characters in the works of the author. The artistic and stylistic function in the poetic texts of P. Vasiliev is most characteristic of anthroponyms of the second and third types. They function as allusive-precedent names based on associations with a certain cultural text and on the symbolic interpretation of the onym. It is these types of anthroponyms that can be qualified as poetonyms that perform in a literary text, in addition to identification, a stylistic, characterizing function. This is due to the diachronic remoteness of the onym from the author, the long “life” of the onym in culture allows it to acquire different meanings. Anthroponyms of the first and fourth types mainly perform the function of identification, the artistic and stylistic function in them is most often limited to character typing. Among the names of the characters in Vasiliev’s texts, there are Kazakh names, which reflects the transcultural nature of his poetry as part of the literature of the Kazakh-Russian borderlands.