Ruslan

Ruslan is a name that traveled east to west, probably from the Turkic arslan, lion, and into Slavic tradition through the Kievan Rus' and the folk tales that surrounded it. Pushkin gave it permanent literary citizenship with his 1820 poem Ruslan and Lyudmila, a fairy-tale epic that Glinka later turned into an opera. It's widespread in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and across Central Asia and the Caucasus. Two syllables, stress on the second, a soft landing on the n. Ruslan reads strong and classical, a name with horseback dust and palace chandeliers in it, heroic without swagger.