The role of ethnonyms in the ethnic consciousness of the author of “The Song of Igor's Campaign”

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to identify specific ways of expressing author’s ethnic consciousness by analysing the ethno-cultural information contained in “The Song of Igor’s Campaign”, basing on the idea that the contents of this information depend on person’s socio-cultural and ethnic origins. In the article we considered  main  types  of  ethnonyms  according  to  their  origin,  grammatical  characteristic,  and  frequency of use in the work. On the basis of this analysis a conclusion about the ethnical attitude of the author to the described events is made. Ethnic differences are realized by comparing different ethnic groups, for this reason the literary analysis of the contrasting notions “Russian - Cumans”, “we - they”, “christians - pagans” performed at different levels of the text lies in the centre of the study carried out in the article.