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The article is devoted to one of the problems of literary onomastics — an inventory of onomastic units of literary texts as an integral part of the vocabulary of the language of a particular writer. The relevance of the chosen topic is due to the poorly studied issue of the mythonymicon of poetry and prose by I. A. Bunin. The novelty of the work is associated with the description of the mythological names of Bunin the poet as an integral system. The classification of mythonyms is based on five principles: the source from which the name was used (there were three such sources: etiological, anthropogonic, heroic, cult and other types of myths; religious and philosophical literature; multi-genre works of Slavic folklore); the nominated image of a fantastic object (eleven semantic groups are recorded: mythoanthroponyms, theonyms, demononyms, mythotonyms, mythohydronyms, mythoornithonyms, etc.); etymology (otonymic, otapellative and special contextual mythological names are marked); structural type (simple or oneword mythonyms, complex, represented by a bilexeme, and compound mythonyms, two-word and three-word ones are fixed); the presence of connotations in semantics (names with negative and positive connotative backgrounds were found). The author comes to the conclusion that mythonyms in I.A.Bunin's poetry become those stable linguistic signs that carry a huge amount of historical and cultural information and have a rich associative potential, accumulating the specifics of the writer's worldview, they contribute to the modeling of the text space.

The results of a comparative analysis of female demonic characters that exist in the myths and folklore of the peoples of Western Siberia are presented. It is noted that the total assimilation and leveling of the peculiarities of distinctive cultures did not occur, despite the fact that the rituals and myths of the West Siberian peoples were subjected to processes of mutual influence, flow and adaptation for centuries. The relevance of the study is due to the need to study the existing picture both in its integrity and in individual fragments. It is reported that the image of a female witch, a malicious old woman, is found in the myths and tales of most of the peoples living in Western Siberia. The article analyzes the etymology of the names and attributes of female demonic characters: Porne in Khanty mythology, Parne in Nenets mythology, Forest old woman and Albasty among Siberian Tatars, Baba Yaga among Slavs. The authors pay special attention to the commonality of mythological motifs, the similar structure of fairy tales, arising on the basis of demonic images of the feminine type. The possible relationship of these images with totemic representations, common in ancient cultures, is indicated. The question of the correlation of the folklore plot “the boy and the witch” with the ritualism of the West Siberian peoples, in particular, with the rites of birth, initiation, and fire worship, is examined. By comparing the traditions of neighboring cultures, the archetypal nature of the initiation scenario while maintaining its ethnospatial specificity is proved.

The monograph under review is dedicated to the study of devil names used in various Lithuanian dialects, fixed expressions (phraseological units), and small genres of folklore. The devil names are analyzed from a word-formation perspective, taking into account the motivating characteristics: the habitat of the mythological character, features of appearance, its actions and functions, character traits, behavior and psychological characteristics. The lexical group, which consists of 482 names of the devil, is thoroughly studied from an ethnolinguistic perspective, including a wide context of ethnic culture, i.e., mythological and folklore contexts. It is significant that the author supports their research not only based on the Lithuanian tradition, but also on the basis of the cultural traditions of other peoples, especially the Slavs (Russians, Belarusians, and Poles), including different folklore and mythological materials of a number of peoples of Eastern and Western Europe including in their research. The reviewed book may be useful to Lithuanian researchers, such as linguists, ethnolinguists, ethnographers, mythologists, folklorists, etc., as well as to researchers from other countries interested in the same issue.