Russian-Chinese Interaction in the Toponymy of Harbin (Based on the Material of V. P. Petrov’s book “The City on Sungari”)

Aim. To study the toponymy of Harbin city founded in 1898 as a result of the construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway (CER), which reflects the specifics of the linguistic and cultural space of the Russian-Chinese border area.

Methodology. Based on a complete selection from the texts of books and short stories of Russian-American writer V. P. Petrov’s “The City on Sungari” of toponyms, urbanonyms and other units, the unique onomastic landscape of the city is determined, in which Russian and Chinese onyms are intertwined in a historical perspective. The descriptive method with its system of procedures for collecting data, primary analysis and presentation of data and their characteristics, quantitative calculations, etc. is used as the main method of analysis. When studying the functioning of Chinese toponyms in the Russian text, elements of a comparative method are used, which allows us to identify common and distinctive properties and signs in different structured languages.

Results. The analysis of toponyms of the book of essays and short stories by the Russian-American writer V. P. Petrov “The City on Sungari” allowed us to establish their important role in the construction of the text: the names of Chinese cities, their parts and objects standing out in them orient the reader in the artistic space. Russian Russians and Russian–speaking people living in China at the end of the XIX – first third of the XX century, not only create their own urbanonymic system in “Russian Harbin”, but also use Chinese toponyms to designate geographical objects existing here. Russian names of cities are becoming an integral part of the usage of Russian people living in China, reflecting the Russian-Chinese interaction in toponymy, the peculiarities of the functioning of proper names in the Russian-Chinese border area.

Research implications. Russian-Chinese borderland toponymic space is being studied for the first time in the article, which creates prerequisites for conducting a frontier analysis of other similar territories; the results can be used in the study of Chinese and Russian onomastics by students, as well as in the study of the work of writers from Russian abroad.

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