Aleksey

Both of Anna Karenina's central men are named Aleksey — Vronsky and Karenin, the lover and the husband, the passionate one and the correct one — and Tolstoy presumably chose that doubled name deliberately, to say something about how thoroughly the name ran through Russian society. The source is the Greek Alexios, defender, and it reached Russia through the Orthodox church, where Saint Alexius of Rome wandered in voluntary poverty. Tsar Alexis ruled seventeenth-century Muscovy.

Three syllables with the stress on the second — soft and rolling, the s landing gently. In daily Russian use it almost always becomes Alyosha, the diminutive so warm and familiar that Dostoevsky gave it to the saintly youngest brother in The Brothers Karamazov, making the nickname carry its own literary weight. Aleksey, the full form, reads strong and classical, a name with samovar steam and long novel chapters in it. For parents in English-speaking countries drawn to Russian naming tradition, it offers both the formal grandeur and — through Alyosha — the domestic tenderness that make Russian names so compelling.