The article deals with the role of the heading as a symbol in the characterization of the hero of the story by Gazdanov «Black Swans". The author of the article describes the actualization of the heading and the character's characteristics by taking into account the artistic psychologism. The frequency of repetition of the heading close to the end of the text is one of the individual style features of the writer's linguopoetics ("The Flight", "The Bombay", "The Iron Lord", etc.). There is a comparison between the vocabulary and text fields of the heading associative stimulus presented in the article. The psychological autobiography of the story hero is depicted by the textual interaction of the components of the heading. The black color corresponds to the refugee implication, suicide and uniqueness of the main character. The image of swans denotes Pavlov's longing for freedom, for the search of illusions as an attempt to get rid of courageous loneliness, as well as his desire to unravel the existential mystery. The use of the syntactic lexeme "black swans" denotes the intertextual key message of the works by Gazdanov - that is "the inner journey", which is associated with the confessional narrative and the self-analysis of the hero-narrator