Russia Naming Customs: Difference between revisions

Russian names, as should be apparent, underwent a large number of transformations. The most important lesson to learn from this assertion is that for every rule, there is an exception and many of the so-called "rules" of Russian grammar need to be unlearned. In this section, I will provide about a half dozen naming practices that are documentably medieval. Among other things, we will see that the popular Given Name-Patronymic-Surname (or G-P-S, for short) construction, while in use during the Middle Ages, is from the late medieval period and was certainly not the common naming construction for a majority of medieval Russians. Many other surprises await....

In Russian, linguists tend to differentiate between so-called "Christian" or "Canonical" names (khristianskii or kanonicheskii) and "Old Russian" (drevnerusskii) given names. The former are usually Biblical (like Ivan, Konstantin, and Pavel) while the others are traced to the Vikings or to earlier inhabitants of the steppes (like Oleg, Igor', and Ol'ga). From the adoption of Christianity in 988 onward, most Russians used Christian names, but many also had a Russian name (e.g., Ivan Guba Ivanov syn Kuneev [1518] [Tup 121]). The result was an apparent double given name. Tupikov (1903: 18) argues that the second given name may in fact have been a nickname and may have been used more commonly in everyday conversation than the first given name. In such cases, the first element in the Russian's name was usually the "Christian" (i.e., baptismal) name and the second was the "Russian" one. Semenova (1969: 88-9) notes that there are exceptions to this pattern, with both names being Christian in origin or both Russian, or with the order simply reversed (i.e., Russian -- Christian). While double Christian names may have occurred in period, they make little logical sense. The Russian name, if it existed, had been received at birth. The "Christian" name came at baptism. If the child had been given a Christian name by his/her parents at birth, the Church would merely baptize the child by that name (and the child would then have only one given name).

A Dictionary of Period Russian Names http://www.sca.org/heraldry/paul/