Onomastics and multiculturalism in the novel Fraţii Jderi by Mihail Sadoveanu

Abstract

Mihail Sadoveanu’s work capitalizes on the expressive dimensions of name-giving and depicts a world whose laws are articulated or disarticulated as regards the onomastic level of writing. The novel Fraţii Jderi most often observes the norms of onomastic conventions. It reflects an archaic world, an interweaving of social classes, nations and customs which highlight the multicultural character of the society and age described. The paper approaches the names of the characters in Fraţii Jderi from a threefold perspective: 1) etymological, in view of reconstructing the semantic traces in the anthroponyms investigated; 2) symbolic, making use of the information provided by lexicographic sources; 3) contextually connotative, decoding the possible “meaning” that the text assigns to the names (discursive meaning). In this analysis, we use the methodological precepts of anthroponymy, linguistics, theory of literary text and literary theory.