Russian Name-Giving of the New Time: Socio-Cultural and Political Ideological Mechanisms of Anthroponymic Shifts

• Published in: Voprosy onomastiki Vol. 16; no. 2; pp. 129 - 144
• Main Author: Warditz, Vladislava V.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English; Russian
• Published: Izdatelstvo Uralskogo Universiteta 01.01.2019
• Subjects: archaization; causes of anthroponymic shifts; cultural paradigm; Europeization; identity; New Time; Russian name giving
• ISSN: 1994-2400; 1994-2451
• DOI: 10.15826/vopr_onom.2019.16.2.018

The author stems from the premise that modern anthroponymy effectively incorporates data from related fields of knowledge, primarily those of cultural and political history, thus getting enlarged through interdisciplinary research. An integrated approach allows one to deduce the extra-linguistic mechanisms which lay behind anthroponymic changes. In the same vein, the present paper focuses on the dynamics within the Russian anthroponymic paradigm caused by the changing vectors of political, ideological, cultural, and religious identity in the historical perspective of the New Time (1700–1920s). The study aims to establish the connection between specific trends in naming and the precedent names, events, and texts of political, cultural, and religious life. The mechanisms of anthroponymic shifts are illustrated by the cases of individual names becoming socially significant in a particular historical context. Using interdisciplinary methods of cultural anthropology, the study builds on textual sources, primarily name indexes to the collections of works by outstanding cultural figures and scholars, and biographical dictionaries. Some examples of pragmatic naming strategies in works of art (literature, opera, cinema) are also provided. Preliminary findings reveal some major trends in the Russian anthroponymic system of the New Age such as Europeization vs. Russification, modernization vs. archaization, as well as their synthesis. These tendencies remain key up to the present day and can be traced and characteristically defined within a set (or corpus) of names relating to the particular epoch, in terms of their frequency and the parameters of the sociolinguistic distribution. The diachronic perspective of the study also supports the sociolinguistic observation that the newly introduced names, which are currently in use, have a pronounced social resonance, which is getting neutralized as their frequency increases. Further development of the topic implies, among other things, statistical verification of preliminary findings.