Ономастическая метафора в «Былом и думах» А. И. Герцена*

Abstract

The present paper comprises a comprehensive study of the metaphoric use of proper names in a prominent piece of Russian memoirs – My Past and Thoughts by Alexander Herzen. Having been established as a regular semantic phenomenon in the Russian literary language by the middle of the 19th century, the onomastic allusive metaphor was fully accepted by Herzen with the whole spectrum of its conceptual, syntactic, evocative, and cognitive capabilities. Aligned with Herzen’s “explanatory metaphor”, his proper name allusions also play a noticeable part in both structuring the writer’s worldview and in the evolution of the text. Other peculiarities of Herzen’s onomastic allusive metaphor include a wide extension of the corpus of proper names used and the enrichment of their contextual representation. The findings presented in the paper are supported by a thorough analysis of vast linguistic material.