Russian names in English are often confusing and you do not always know how to spell them correctly. But even if you do, others might not and this is equally frustrating because you never know whether you are talking about the same person or not. Or you simply cannot find the name if you search for it because people spell it wrong.
For example, should you spell Tolstoy or Tolstoi? Is it Leo Tolstoi, Lev Tolstoi, Leo Tolstoy or Lev Tolstoy? All of them are common ways of writing the name and for someone who is not familiar with the Russian script and Russian language in general this is one hell of a mess.
Names of Tolstoi in some of his English editions: Lyof N. Tolstoi, Leo Tolstoy, Lev N. Tolstoy, Leo Tolstoy.
Needless to say, all this comes from the transliteration of Cyrillic into English. Russian names in Russian are written the same, that is, their orthography is quite stable. But when people try to write these names using the Latin alphabet, problems arise. There are a number of letters in Cyrillic which do not have equivalents in the Latin alphabet. But even those that do are sometimes, mainly for historical reasons, written in a different way. For example, the surname of the Romanov family is also commonly written in English as Romanoff. In Russian, it is definitely written as Romanov but the common Russian "-ov" ending in the 19th century was often transliterated into English as "-off." With time, these names became widely known in English and changing them now is difficult, even if this conforms to the modern rules of Russian transliteration.
The name of Nikolai Przhevalsky, the greatest Russian explorer, is another telling example to the overall confusion. His name is of Polish origin but he worked for the Russian Imperial Staff and thus his name was customarily transliterated into Russian. The Russian spelling already feels both strange and difficult and Russian children have to make an effort to learn how to write it. Now when the name is written in English, a number of variants are used, depending on the way of transliteration. Prjevalsky is the name used by Przhevalsky himself in French publications. A close variant of this is Prejevalsky which is how his name is actually pronounced. Then there is the modern rendering of Przhevalsky where the letter "j" is changed into a "zh," both standing for the same sound of "j" in "deja vu." Another variant is Prezhevalsky which inserts an "e" into the first syllable, following the actual pronunciation of the name. And this is still only the first half of the name. The "-sky" ending is also written as "-ski" according to the modern rules of transliteration. But his name was Polish and thus was originally written in the Latin script, which always uses the "-sky" ending.
As you can see, this can get somewhat confusing. After having to deal with variants such as Dostoievsky, Dostoyevsky, Dostoyevski, Dostoievski, etc. one truly welcomes people like Putin, whose names are rendered in English without problem.
Keywords: Russian names, English, transliteration
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