This article tries to redefine and re-evaluate literary onomastics; it starts starts with the discussion of the distinction between proper and general names and then moves on to examine the specific nature of the names in literature and the approaches that may be used to analyse them. Among other things, the article argues that literature creates a space different from reality, and hence the task of literary onomastics is not to uncover the truth about the character of a certain text, but to read the name as an intertextual fragment and analyse the associations – linguistic and literary – in order to understand the system of that fragment.