Russian Urbanonymy in the Spatial and Temporal Dimensions Review of the book: Razumov, R. V. (2022). Russkaia urbanonimiia: polevaia organizatsiia, modeli nominatsii, sotsiolingvisticheskie osobennosti funktsionirovaniia [Russian Urbanonymy: Field Organization, Naming Patterns, Sociolinguistic Peculiarities of Functioning]. Yaroslavl: Yaroslavl State Pedagogical University. 387 p.

Abstract

The review presents an analysis of Roman Razumov’s monograph which is a comprehensive study of Russian urbanonymy in its synchronic and diachronic aspects. The first chapter of the monograph provides a critical overview of Russian studies on urbanonymy and specifies the onomastic terminology related to the theoretical foundations of this research. In the second chapter, the field approach is applied to a selection of urban names of different types. The structure suggested by the author includes the units of the core (names of streets, squares, and urban districts), near-core (names of buildings and churches), and periphery (names of bridges, parks and green spaces, monuments, fountains). The third chapter describes Russian urbanonymy in synchronic aspect: the author defines the naming patterns typical to Russian urbanonymic system (descriptive, memorial, symbolic, and eusemantic (suggesting positive connotations), and proceeds with comparing their implementation in capital cities, big and small provincial towns, monolingual and polylingual cities. The fourth chapter presents Russian urbanonymy in diachrony. Here, the author explores the tendencies in urban naming in different periods of Russian history: including the naming processes in modern Russian urbanonymy of late 20th — early 21st c. The reviewer’s remarks concern the debatable issues of the use of some terms in the monograph and the typology of the naming patterns. The reviewer also notes a huge impact of this work in generalizing and systematizing such extensive material (urbanonyms of 60 large and small cities of Russia, from the 18th c. to the present), the development of comprehensive methods of analysis of intracity names, both in spatial and temporal aspects, in drawing attention to the problems of urbanonymic terminology and the identification of systemic relationships in urbanonymy.