Even though Russian is written pretty much phonetically, the transliteration of Cyrillic Russian into Roman-alphabet English is a notoriously chaotic business. There are several competing systems of romanization, some preferred by academics, others by scientists, others by journalists, and anyone who tries to stick to one prescribed system inevitably comes up against someone else’s long-established usage, which is at odds with their own particular convention. The surname that I would spell Dostoyevsky in English, as it is pronounced, can also be found with alternate transliterations ranging from Dostoevsky to Dostoevskii or Dostoevskyi to Dostoevskij.
If you add to that uncertainty the extra puzzlement caused when a Russian leaving his country makes his first foreign home outside the English-speaking world, acquiring a new Latin-letter name pre-transliterated in, say, the German or French style, before moving on to the Anglosphere with a first name that, while now fixed with the spelling ‘Jascha’ or ‘Iacha’ is pronounced as ‘Yasha’, it is easy to understand why foreigners have come to think Russian is an impossibly complicated language. Thus I have ‘Troubetskoi’ as the family name of one Russian prince who settled in France, sharing the aristocratic estate of Clamart with his poorer fellow countrymen, because it is so well known from its transliteration into French – though it would be more English to write his name as ‘Trubetskoy’.
In yet another layer of enigma within a conundrum within a mystery, the way Russian is transliterated has also changed over time. Early in the twentieth century it used to be widespread for Russian surnames ending in ‘–OB’ (the Cyrillic letters ‘–ov’, which, however, are usually pronounced ‘–of’ at the end of a word) to be transliterated by using the Roman letters ‘–off’. Nowadays, the accepted transliteration is ‘–ov’, regardless of the pronunciation. It’s one rather charming way of telling the Soviet or post-Soviet Russians (the Smirnovs) from the older Tsarist émigrés (the Smirnoffs). But it isn’t easy.
I’ve used several Russian names and other words in my text. However, I’ve tried to keep things simple, so I’ve transliterated them in the style used by Reuters, the BBC and British and American newspapers (technically, a simplified form of a system called BGN/PCGN) because it is the most intuitive for English speakers to pronounce.
This means writing things as they will be said. So the single Russian letter ‘e’ – which is pronounced either ‘ye’ or ‘yo’ – is written in English here with the double letters ‘ye’ or ‘yo’. I believe this gives the non-Russian the best chance of saying the word correctly. The same rule applies to other Russian soft vowels (all those that sound as though they start with a ‘y’ sound) so that the single Russian letter ‘я’ is rendered with the double letters ‘ya’ and ‘ю’ becomes ‘yu’. In this system, too, endings that would be fully transliterated from Russian by the complex clusters ‘–iy’ and ‘–yy’ in Russian are simplified to the less alien-looking ‘–y’. Apostrophes used in other systems for ‘$$’ (a silent Russian letter) and ‘$$’ (a ‘half-y’ sound softening the consonant it comes after) can be omitted for ease (though personally I prefer to keep them).
I hope readers will not be confused by words they may have seen elsewhere with different spellings: the name Yevgeny, as I have given it, can also sometimes be written as Evgeny, Kovalyovsky as Kovalevsky, Kutyopov as Kutepov. I hope, too, that they won’t be afraid to try pronouncing these words the way they’re written here.
For reference, the stresses on the main characters’ names fall as follows.
NADÉZHDA PLEVÍTSKAYA:
Na-DYEZH-da (NA-dya, NA-dyen-ka)
Ple-VEET-ska-ya
YEVGÉNY MÍLLER:
Yev-GHE-nee
MEE-lyer
NIKOLÁI SK£BLIN:
Nee-ko-LAI (rhymes with ‘pie’),
(KO-lya, Nee-ko-LA-sha)
SKO-blin