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Библиогр.: 21 назв.

Studying associative and cultural background of proper nouns became especially topical in early 21 century, in conditions of sweepingly developing globalization, resulting in gradual leveling of national and cultural uniqueness of a language-speaking nation. The other side of the globalist process is an enhanced feeling of ethnic, national and cultural distinctiveness, as any proper noun is adapted to such reflection by its own nature of a unique denomination of a single object. Any name accumulates in its content a large volume of historical and cultural information, and, thus, it is one of the basic units in the background knowledge of the cultural heritage, maintaining a link betwixt generations within an ethnocultural community. Nationwide cultural space (in particular, national onomasticon) is formed by an aggregate of regional subsystems; in this connection, studying and description of a regional material facilitate further structuring and description of the national material. The Smolensk land holds a special place in the nationwide cultural space. Its millennium-long history is represented by the names of outstanding people and reflected in the names of numerous architectural and cultural memorials, being the national heritage of Russia. In this regard, studying associative and cultural background of the Smolensk region toponym will considerably enrich linguistic and culturological explorations. We used a large-scale associative experiment as a basic method to detect associative and cultural background of the capital regional onym of Smolensk. This article presents results of one of the experiment's stages attended by 826 students of various universities of Moscow. Generally, according to the experiment results, reactions of the respondents quite fully and exactly reflect linguistic-cultural realia related to the Smolensk region toponym. The obtained results indicate that the considerable part of Smolensk regional background knowledge (in particular, onomastic ones) is associated with the nationwide level, thus forming a significant part of national cultural space. The described approach to detect and analyze associative and cultural background of capital regional onyms can be used by researches in other regions of Russia.