“I Desire to Live and Live... Thousands of Other Lives”: Multimythologism in I. A. Bunin’s Onomastic Code

The article considers the manifestation of multimythologism as a characteristic feature of I. A. Bunin’s artistic worldview at the level of the individual author’s poetic mythonymicon. The paper identifies lexical units referring to the characters (gods, wizards, heroes, fantastic birds and animals), places, magic objects of the mythologies of the ancient Greeks and Romans, Sumerians and Akkadians, Indians and Iranians, as well as Egyptians, Scandinavians and. It is noted that the organization of the sound system of I. A. Bunin’s poetic speech is provided by regular graphic-phonetic transformations of mythonyms, and the uniqueness of the onomastic code of his lyrical texts is created by the inclusion of special mythonyms-bilexemes, onymized appellatives and mythological names with a low level of precedent and occasional units. It is established that for explication of philosophical and symbolic subtexts, representation of key motives and binary oppositions I. A. Bunin subordinates traditional sacral genealogies to the author’s individual picture of the world, matches and simultaneously uses mythonyms belonging to different national mythological onomasticons. The author comes to the conclusion that all the lexical units of Bunin’s poetic mythonymicon are connected by a single ideological attitude, aimed, on the one hand, at overcoming the autonomy of cultural worlds, and on the other hand, at preserving cultural pluralism.