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 reinterpre-tation 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.

J.K. Rowling, A.A. Fet, M.I. Tsvetaeva, etc.) becomes a promising direction of scientific research in the field of literary onomastics. This is due to the fact that mythonyms in any genre of artistic style text are not only easily verifiable operational language units, but also cultural signs with a rich aesthetic and axiological potential and associative connections that reveal the "algorithm for forming a mythopoetic tradition" (Vladimirova, 2020: 161). Being placed in a prose or poetic text, they act as the key lexemes that ensure the global coherence of the text, become its symbolic core, generate semantic diversity.
A characteristic feature of I. A. Bunin's artistic and aesthetic system is the use of mythological motifs, plots and images. Domestic and foreign philologists note the presence of key themes of the oldest Eastern legends and parables, archaic, Slavic folklore code, value-semantic ideas of Buddhism, Judaism, Islam in Bunin's lyrics and prose point to religious and aesthetic syncretism in the poetization of the sacred (Woodward, 1970;Artz, 1988;Marullo, 1998;Dorokhina, 2008;Balanovskii, 2010;Berdnikova, 2012;Sayapova, Karimiriabi, 2014;Dvinyatina, 2015;Dudareva et al., 2019). We agree with the opinion of the Russian scholar D.I. Richards, who pointed out that I.A. Bunin found those feelings, poetic language and imagery close to him in spirit in the Bible, the Koran, the Talmud, the Sanskrit sutras, Greek and Egyptian myths (Richards, 1972: 159).
Despite the undoubted interest of literary critics in the mythological motifs and images of I. A. Bunin's artistic picture of the world, from a linguistic point of view, the mythonymicon in his texts is unexplored. The presence of exotic names of ancient gods and mythological characters in Bunin's lyrical texts is mentioned by S.I. Shashkova and S.M. Pronchenko (Shashkova, 2009: 343;Pronchenko, 2015: 262-263); the biblionym Rachel as a precedent name in the poems of I.A. Bunin and A.A. Akhmatova is considered by Yu.N. Goiko (Goiko, 2020: 140-142). It is obvious that the inventory and systematization of the mythonyms in I.A. Bunin's prose or poetic heritage has not yet been carried out, their potential as linguistic units reflecting the originality of the author's world perception has not been studied.
The purpose of our work is to consider the philosophical-axiological, artistic-aesthetic potential of significant different-structured mythological names in Bunin's mythonymicon and to identify the connotative components in their semantics.

Methods and materials
The actual material of the study includes the poetic texts of I.A. Bunin of 1888-1952, included the two-volume collection of works prepared by T.M. Dvinyatina in 2014 and which is a complete scientific edition of his lyrics 1 . The author's index of examples is formed with the primary analysis of more than 700 contexts, from which 152 mythological names were extracted by a continuous sampling method.
The nature of the material under study led to the use of a set of paradigmatic and non-paradigmatic methods in its processing: descriptive and etymological methods, as well as contextual, semantic and structural analyses.

Results
The mythonymicon of I.A. Bunin's poems is a well-ordered and integral system of mythological names from various sources: texts of cosmogonic, anthropogonic, solar, heroic and other types of myths of different nations (ancient Iranians, Indians, Egyptians, Slavs, Scandinavians, etc.), religious and philosophical teachings (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism), folklore (mainly texts of Slavic fairy-tales, epics and folk ritual songs).
Due to the "volume" of their meaning, most of the mythonyms in the "verbal fabric" of one or more I.A. Bunin's poetic texts interacting with their semantic context, carry additional meanings and actualize certain stable associations in the reader's mind.

Discussion
In the semantics of personal names, connotations are a linguistic phenomenon with syncretism of extralinguistic and intralinguistic nature, including emotionality, expressiveness, additional information decoded by a native speaker depending on his age, mental, social, educational level (Bushtyan, 1983: 57). In our opinion, the connotations of mythonyms are a phenomenon that is structurally more complex than the connotations of other groups of onomastic units. After all, acting as elements of an artistic picture of the world, secondary forms, which, on the one hand, reflect the picture of the world of the author of the text, and on the other -a national-specific picture of the world, mythonyms accumulate not only expressive or emotional-sensual meanings, but also information-historical, cultural-symbolic, ideological.
The core of Bunin's poetic mythonymicon is simple (or one-word) otonymic theonyms -the names of the gods of various ethnic cultures: Set (Egyptian Stẖ, in Egyptian mythology, the god of "foreign countries" (deserts), the killer of Osiris) 2 ; Nereus (Ancient Greek vηρεύς, in ancient Greek mythology, the deity of the sea, "the sea elder") 3 ; Perun (Ancient Rus. Perun, in Slavic mythology, the god of thunderstorms); Istara (Akkadian d Ištar, also d Eštar, d 'aštar, in Akkadian myths, the central female deity, whose main aspects are fertility, love, as well as war and conflicts) 4 ; Balder (Ancient Islandic Baldr, in German-Norse mythology, the young god of spring and light) 5 , etc. The cultural-symbolic, emotionalevaluative connotations of such theonyms in I.A. Bunin's poetic texts are based not only on the connection of the images produced with the plot of a particular myth, but also on the individual author's rethinking of the primary sources, taking into account his own system of views, assessments, ideas about the world and his place in it, attitude to the surrounding reality.
Thus, in the Indo-Iranian pantheon, there is the deity as Mithra (Mifra) (from Avestan MiθRa, literally meaning 'contract', 'consent'). The oldest information about her is recorded in the sacred texts of the Persians "Avesta", which contain the religious dogmas of Zoroastrianism. In Iranian mythology, Mithra was traditionally associated with the idea of mediation, exchange, contract, peace, friendship 6 . The theonym with a simple structure Mithra, used in Bunin's poem "Elburs. The Iranian myth" demonstrates the qualitative variability of the connotative content: positive connotations are not associated with the contractual function of Mithra as an organizer of social life ('consent', 'sympathy'), but with the solar function, which was secondary for Avestan mythology ('light', 'life'). In the individual author's concept, theonym Mithra embodies the triumph of light as a source of life in the endless ice and organically fits into the "I.A. Bunin's mythopoetic concept of 'beauty, perfection of the world as a whole' " (Sayapova, Karimiriabi, 2014: 117).
The evidence of I.A. Bunin's deep knowledge of mythological plots and images of different peoples of the world are composite theonyms with a wide range of stable associations such as Ra-Osiris, Hawk-Horus, Jackal-Anubis (poems "Ra-Osiris, the god of day and light..." 7 , "Beyond the Grave" 8 ). a composite way as a result of the author's combination of two components represented by deonymic units (Ra and Osiris) or a postpositive deonymic unit (Horus and Anubis) and a prepositive unit ascending to the appellative (Hawk and Jackal). These composite theonyms refer to the mythology of Ancient Egypt, which is reconstructed on the basis of the "Texts of the Pyramids", "The Book of the Dead", the religious text "Amduat", magical texts, the works of Herodotus and Plutarch, and other sources. In the mythological system of the Egyptians, which began to form in the 60 000-4000 BC, the pantheons and images of the gods had specific features and underwent regular transformations 9 . The combination of zoomorphic and anthropomorphic features in Egyptian deities is reflected in the composite theonyms Hawk-Horus, Jackal-Anubis, and the convergence of the divine cults of Ra and Osiris is reflected in the mythonym Ra-Osiris. However, Bunin, the poet, never sought factual accuracy in reproducing mythological plots and images. He transformed the plots and modernized the images in accordance with the peculiarities of his own worldview. As a result, the semantics of these composite derivatives of mythonyms is not at all identical to the semantics of motivating components. In ancient Egyptian myths Ra is the personification of the good, the god of the sun, and Osiris is the god of the dead, then I.A. Bunin's theonym Ra-Osiris is called "the lord of day and light", which indicates an incomplete motivation of the composite mythological name. The complexity of motivational relations between the derivative and t he producing names contributes to an increase in the connotative potential of the latter, in particular, the realization of the meanings of 'the power of time', 'oblivion', 'destruction'. The categorical components in the composite mythological names Hawk-Horus, Jackal-Anubis create emotional and evaluative connotations in semantics. After all, the hawk is traditionally associated with the sky, flight and freedom, and the jackal -with stench and death.
In general, the rich connotative potential of simple and compound theonyms allows Bunin-poet to use them as markers of one of the main in his artistic, aesthetic and philosophical system binary axiological oppositions "light-darkness". At the same time, the means of explication of the first spiritual principle are the mythonyms Agni, Mithra, Ra-Osiris, Flame, Ormuzd, Balder, Sin, and the second -Set, Loki. The existential-ontological meanings of some I.A. Bunin's poems are connected with the listed mythonyms: "Ormuzd" 10 , "Agni" 11 , "Elburs. The Iranian myth" 12 , "Ra-Osiris, the lord of day and light..." 13 , "Balder" 14 , etc.
Haeckel's "misotheism" as a characteristic feature of Bunin's picture of the world explains the coexistence in his poetic contexts a number of names of the philosophical and mythological texts of the Abrahamic monotheistic religions: demononym Eblis (Arab. ‫;ﺇﺑﻠﻴﺲ‬ the devil) 15 ; theonym Jesus Christ (Greek Ἰησοῦς Χριστός; the God-man in the unity of his divine nature as God the son and the entire specificity of human nature as a Jew) 16 ; mythomyms Abraham (Hebr. ‫ם‬ ‫הָ‬ ‫רָ‬ ‫בְ‬ ‫,אַ‬ Avrȃhȃm, "father of a multitude" and ancient Greek. Ἀβραάμ; the elect of Yahweh, the ancestor of the Jews) 17 , Hagar (Hebrew Hagar, i.e., "wanderer"; an Egyptian slave who was a concubine of Abraham) 18 , Isaac (Hebrew literally "he will laugh"; the son of Abraham and Sarah, the father of Jacob) 19 and many others. The concentration of the meanings of such mythonyms ensures not only the dialogue of Bunin's poetic texts with texts of different epochs and cultures, but also the emergence of new combinations of meanings within the individual author's artistic system. For example, the image of Rachel as the foremother of the whole house of Israel traditionally acted for Jews as a "symbol of high love" and embodied prayer, and the name Rachel was not only the sweetest name of the beloved, but also the name of the native country (Goiko, 2020: 140-141).
In the poetic contexts of the emigrant poet, the mytho-anthroponym Rachel acquires a special meaning due to such semantic components as 'sorrow' and 'hope' (the poem "Rachel's Tomb" 20 ).
Through the prism of numerous mythological names from the Bible and the Koran (Abraham, Hagar, Adam, the Great Throne (the Throne of Allah), Gabriel, Jannat, Jacob, Jeremiah, Israfil, Isa, John, Isaac, Cain, Kovser, Sakar, Sarah, Yahweh, etc.), the key themes and problems in Bunin's poems are comprehended: the value of the "flow of life", its tragedy and spirituality, universal human kinship, the short-term life, the immortality in man.
A notable group of I. A. Bunin's poetic texts consists of mythopersonyms of the two types: 1) characters of East Slavic mythology and folklore (Baba Yaga, Koshchei); 2) contextual names with the seme 'person' (Frost, Death, Spring, Autumn, Night, Love, etc.), formed in a lexical and semantic way through the onymization of appellatives and as a result of the mechanism of anthropomorphic metaphorization.
Referring to the common images from Slavic fairy-tales (the first type), I.A. Bunin fills them with new content, which affects the connotative component of the corresponding mythonym. Thus, the composite mythopersonym Baba-Yaga is used in the title of the poem "Baba-Yaga" 21 . The etymology of the mythopersonym is obviously deonymic: as E.I. Aleshchenko notes, it goes back to the names of the Slavic deity (Baba) and the gatekeeper in the world of the dead (Yaga) (Aleshchenko, 2008: 90). Traditionally, the image of Baba Yaga is ambivalent, receiving a negative or positive assessment depending on the fairy-tale plot: on the one hand, she is a cannibal who is "dangerous for a person", on the other -"a giver, an assistant to a good hero" (Aleshchenko, 2008: 91). I.A. Bunin fills mythopersonym Baba Yaga with special connotations that are not at all connected with her malicious deeds or protective functions. After all, Bunin's Baba Yaga is related to the well-known mythological plots: she lives in a forest, in a cold log house, and has been protecting the casket with Koshchey's death for "ten hundred years". The Baba Yaga of Bunin appears not in the image of a black witch or an assistant and giver, but a very lonely old woman, exhausted and suffering. The hopelessness of the situation is also emphasized by the reflexive form of the intransitive verb izbolet'sya ('be tortured by grief'), indicating the high level of torment, the imperative ne smey ('do not dare'), which prohibits the actions of the verbs topit' ('to drown') and vzdut' ('to swell'), the transformed phraseological unit chert velel ('the devil ordered') (instead of chert dernul lit. 'devil pulled'), the synecdochic substitution of the mythonym with the lexeme shlyk ('headdress of a married Russian peasant woman'), which serves for the "figurative nomination of the heroine" and is associated with the idea of humility (Borodina, 2019: 62). Therefore, the mythopersonym Baba Yaga is full of tragic connotations: 'loneliness', 'hopelessness', 'suffering', 'longing'.
The contextual simple (one-word) mythopersonyms of the second type are also rich in various connotations. For example, Night is a simple appelative mythopersonym derived from the common noun night. In the Eastern Slavs' traditional picture of the world, night was perceived as "a marked time of day associated with the greatest number of prescriptions and prohibitions" (Tolstaya, 2011: 163) and, accordingly, the meaning of the lexeme night included negative connotations such as 'danger', 'evil', 'harm', 'darkness', 'death'. In Bunin's poems "Twilight" 22 , "The Slope of the Mountains" 23 , "Ascend, oh Night, to your high throne..." 24 , the peremptory mythopersonym Night refers to a powerful female being sitting on a high throne and possessing healing power. The mythonym Night in the individual author's linguistic picture of the world acquires positive connotations of 'healing', 'peace', 'greatness', which are not characteristic of Slavic mythology and time axiology. It is obvious that the influence of Christian religious and philosophical motifs can be traced here, thanks to which the personified image is associated with one of the "existential constants of the first creation" preserving the memory of the Creator, with the "time of self-knowledge and Knowledge of God" (Berdnikova, 2012: 318).
In the artistic system of Bunin's poems, the contextual apellative mythopersonym Autumn functions as a key unit in the poems "Leaf Fall" 25 , "The forest silence is mysteriously noisy..." 26 . The image of Autumn -a widow, dating back to Slavic folklore traditions (Usmanova, 2014: 150), in I.A. Bunin's poems acquires specific features: "pale face", "ermine shugai" (shugai is a peasant wo-man's jerkin). Due to this, not only the "Russianness" of Autumn is emphasized, but also her high social position, true nobility of the character -the initiator of annual changes in nature. The semantic environment of the mythopersonym Autumn contains category of states words and verbs meaning emotions, the physical state of nature, mental and speech activity, actions -movements, auditory, visual, tactile perception, phrases connecting different sensory images or perceptual impressions and emotions (shine, wander, sad, yellow, hold, knows, creepy, silence, frosty silver, sings, purple, desert silence, darkening gloomily, amber, stupor, cold smoke, sullen howl, frosty fire, etc.). These words actualize such connotations of the contextual name as 'perfect beauty', 'fleetness', 'sorrow', 'memory', 'loneliness'. Thus, the mythopersonym Autumn is organically included in the circle of linguistic means that explicate Bunin's aesthetic and philosophical concept of the value and uniqueness of every moment of nature and man's life.
The artistic system of I.A. Bunin -the poet also contains special individual author's names that are used to construct his own mythological system and have very distant connections with well-known plots. Such a unit is the mythoornithonym Vir'. This name serves as a designation for a fantastic bird that lives in a gloomy spruce forest (the poem "Vir' " 27 ). The etymology of the name in the Russian language is obscure: the search for matches in the Explanatory dictionaries and the dictionary database "National Corpus of the Russian Language" does not give results. However, the alleged by T.M. Dvinyatina connection of the bird Vir' "with the character from Mordovian mythology Vir-ava" allows us to raise the analyzed mythopersonym to the appellative vir, which is fixed in the Moksha and Erzya languages with the meaning 'forest' (cf.: vi'rne -'forest', vi'ryu -'wooded', virbu'la -'the outskirts of the forest').
T.M. Pavlyuchenkova notes the negative connotations of the lexeme Vir', referring to the use of "the component -aspid in the original author's wordformation" (Pavlyuchenkova, 2011: 54). Cf.: Her headdress / Is all gray-aspid color, / The head is in a tuft, and the look / Is filled with mournful greetings. In our opinion, the expressive, emotional and evaluative connotations of the mythoornithonym Vir' are more diverse than the negative connotation noted by the researcher, since the image of the sweet-voiced bird itself is complex and ambiguous. We believe that he was not so much influenced by Mordovian mythology (the image of Vira-ava already mentioned above, lit. "the forest woman"), but by many other sources: Greek mythology, Russian spiritual poems and even paintings by the representative of the "neo-Russian style" V.M. Vasnetsov, in particular, his original interpretation in 1896 of the traditional plot -the image of the sweet-voiced birds Sirin and Alkonost as the light and dark sides of life. Bunin's bird accumulates the features of literary, mythological and pictorial images of Alkonost and Sirin. It took from Vasnetsov's Alkonost gray-asp plumage, mournful eyes, a tuft like a crown on the head of the artist's virgin bird, and from the Sirin from Greek myths and Russian spiritual poems -a gentle singing full of mournful power, but this also fascinates travelers, beckoning, dragging them into the dark darkness of the forest and ruining there. Thus, the connotative content of the mythoornithonym includes the elements 'transience', 'obedience', 'loneliness', 'mournful beauty', 'suffering'. Despite the fact that the analyzed lexical unit functions only in one poem "Vir' ", it, along with other mythoornithonyms (raven Hugin, Firebird), becomes a full-fledged means of expressing the "ornithological myth" of Bunin's prose and poetry, associated with the motiаs of memory and loneliness, the idea of the predestination of fate, the unity of the moment and eternity, the incorruptibility of beauty and the sweetness of suffering.
The expansion of traditional ideas about the key images of mythological plots, biblical, Quranic legends, folklore texts in I.A. Bunin's poems contributes to significant quantitative and qualitative changes in the connotative content of mythonyms. Especially indicative in this regard are the composite units constructed according on the model "word (adjective, rarely -participle) + word (noun)". Being structurally identical, they belong to different semantic types: Diamond River (mythohydron), Steppe Night (mythopersonym), White Deer (mythozoonym), Great Throne (mythohrematonym), Resurrected Light (theonym), Judgment Day (mythohoronym), Desert Angel (demononym), etc. Such onymic units turn out to be both reproducible and produced by the artistic and aesthetic system of Bunin-the poet. As an example, let us consider the connotative potential of the mythopersonym Steppe Night and the mythohydron Diamond River.
In the poem by I.A. Bunin "Graves, windmills, roads and mounds...", the contextual mythopersonym Steppe Night refers to a female being with a mysterious and sad look, full of "great meekness and age-old thought" 28 . Adjectives in the mythonym or its substitute (she) denote the emotional state of the animated subject (sad, lonely), verbs of movement and perception (walking, listening), qualitative adverbs (thoughtfully) concretize the image. The components of the semantics of the analyzed mythopersonym include 'calmness', 'memory', 'timelessness'. The mythopersonym Steppe Night is one of the expressive linguistic means in I.A. Bunin's artistic picture of the world. It expresses the epic motif of the steppe, plain space and vastitude, which always triggers deep emotions in the soul of the traveler.
The two-word mythohydron Diamond River, which appears in the poem "The Night of Al-Qadr", refers to the Quranic texts -to the image of the heavenly river, the "water of life", which has the throne of Allah as its source: Before the Great Throne / The Diamond River is already flowing, smoking 29 . Each of the units included in the structure of the mythonym contributes to the realization of the connotative potential of the word. The adjective diamond, derived from the boub diamond, which stands for the hardest natural mineral, and the appellative river, which names a water stream moving in a natural channel, provide the appearance of the following connotations: 'constancy', 'indestructibility'.
Thus, in Bunin's aesthetic-philosophical system, the mythohydron becomes a symbol of eternity and a means of explicating the eternal problems of being, the cognitive opposition "life -death".

Conclusion
The constant thirst for discoveries, inexhaustible interest in the languages, history, culture of other countries and nations formed the multi-mythologism of I.A. Bunin's poems. The author's poetic texts reveal an extensive system of mythological names from Muslim, Judaistic, Christian, Buddhist religious and philosophical literature, German-Scandinavian, Ancient Greek, Iranian, Ancient Egyptian, Sumero-Akkadian mythological systems, Slavic epic, fairy-tales and other sources. I.A. Bunin's system of mythological names organically fits into the context of the writer's aesthetic and philosophical views, his unique philosophy of life, which was dominated not by an intellectual and logical, but by an emotional approach (Richards, 1972: 156). Acting as units of the onomastic code of literary texts, different-structured mythonyms are associated with the key motifs and themes, archetypal images and axiological oppositions of I.A. Bunin.
The emergence of new combinations of meanings, qualitative and quantitative changes in the connotative content of mythonyms of various groups (theonyms, mythopersonyms, mythohydronyms, mythoornithonyms, etc.) is provided by an individual author's rethinking of the primary sources and contamination of traditional plots, the complexity of motivational relations between generating units and derivatives, the semantic environment of a particular mythonym.