Metaphorical actualization of literary onyms Fox Alice and Cat Basilio in Russian media

The article deals with the features of the metaphorical use of the onyms Fox Alice and Cat Basilio in modern Russian media discourse. The material for this study is constituted by metaphorical contexts from the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper of the period of 2010–2025. The research methodology is based on the postulates of the cognitive and discourse paradigm, which interprets metaphor as a cognitive mechanism for transferring content from the source domain to the target domain based on analogy in an extralinguistic context. The methods applied are as follows: analysis of conceptual features, metaphorical modeling, sampling, description, classification. The analysis showed that the images of Fox Alice and Cat Basilio are frequently referred to in modern Russian media, though these onyms do not have one prototypical meaning, but represent a multitude of conceptual features that serve as a source of information for metaphorical transfer: "Fraudsters", "Thieves", "A well-organized criminal group", "Malicious advisers", "Unwillingness to work", "Promise of future troubles", "Teachers of financial literacy", "Unfair division", "Inefficiency", "Dark glasses", "Keeping money in the ground", "Imaginary invalid".