Lenin’s Name as a Play on Language in Prose of Leonid Dobychin

The relevance of this study stems from its focus on the onomastic discourse surrounding Lenin in the fiction of L. Dobychin. The article investigates the mechanisms of linguistic play with Lenin’s name as deployed in the author’s short stories. The research draws upon Dobychin’s collected works, his correspondence, and a wide range of literary and linguistic scholarship on the cult of Lenin and the phenomenon of language games. Special attention is given to the ironic and often subversive insertion of the Lenin myth into traditional Christian imagery and cultural memory. The paper presents a comparative analysis of various techniques of semanticized, original, and sacralizing-profanizing wordplay. It demonstrates how Lenin’s name operates as a textual sign that structures multiple narrative levels. The analysis reveals that puns — including phonetic plays, paronomasia, anagrams, and intertextual allusions — serve to subtly deconstruct the official cult of the leader. The study establishes that the recurrence of the name across different narratives contributes to the formation of a distinctive ritualistic language characteristic of the epoch. The authors conclude that in Dobychin’s prose, the Lenin anthroponym loses its sacred status and is transformed into an element of ritualistic “speech noise.” The novelty of this research lies in its comprehensive and detailed description of the system of linguistic play with Lenin’s name as a defining feature of Dobychin’s individual literary style.

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