A proper name, functioning in a literary text, becomes a kind of marker that determines both the ideological and artistic originality of the work and the structure of the literary personage. The author chooses a name for his heroes not accidentally: the anthroponym helps to characterize the hero's age, his class and social status. Anthroponyms have a certain stylistic coloring that helps to express the author's emotional attitude both to the hero and to the situation in which this or that character acts. The etymological meaning of the name carries some kind of information, the meaning of which helps to comprehend the idea of a work of art at all semantic levels, including the ontological one. This article analyzes the stories "Dagger" and "Bronze Bird" by A. Rybakov, as well as "Green Van" by A. Kozachinsky. The general scientific methods and the study of the onomastic series of these stories allows us to come to the following conclusions: a proper name in a literary text carries certain informative, emotional-stylistic and ideological-artistic meanings, the understanding and comprehension of which contributes to a deeper reading of the work.