The nickname as an anthroponymic category in Shukshin’s stories

Abstract

Nicknames, as the most expressive exponent of the environmental aspect of rural prose, occupy an important place in the onomastic layer of V. M. Shukshin’s stories, constituting an important element of the namesake presentation of the protagonists, even more important than official names, which in the analysed works often play the role of a complementary means of nomination. Thanks to this procedure, the writer draws attention to the tradition of nicknames and their use in everyday life by small, closed communities, which identify their members by means of anthroponyms created in accordance with the generally applicable norm, a particular feature of their spoken language. The purpose of this article is to describe the specific functioning of nickname anthroponyms in Shukshin’s work and to show the impact that these particular types of personal names have on the interpretation of a literary text. This requires reading the narrative perspective in the analysed stories, as well as going beyond traditional approaches to onomastics and reaching for interdisciplinary research tools specific to stylistics and cultural linguistics. The analysis shows that nicknames, as a means of the characterisation of characters in general, appearing in the material studied also in the title-forming function, have a specific semantic and cultural potential. On the one hand, the anthroponym used in the title is closely correlated with the semantic structure of the work bearing it (it creates new meanings thanks to the contexts in which it appears and the words with which it is combined), and on the other hand, it may function outside it, as a component of the cultural heritage of a given linguistic community. The linguistic and cultural knowledge of the recipient of the text is crucial in the process of deciphering the meaning of a given name.