Vyacheslav

The name is a compound of old Slavic elements — vyache, meaning greater or more, and slav, glory — and it belongs to the category of -slav names that thread across Eastern European history like a river system: Vladislav, Miroslav, Yaroslav, Bohuslav. Vyacheslav is the one that carries the Christmas-carol duke inside it: the tenth-century Bohemian saint known in English as Good King Wenceslas began as Vyacheslav before the translation softened him into a carol.

The Soviet foreign minister Molotov wore it in the twentieth century, though he is better remembered by his surname and the cocktail that took his name. The familiar short form is Slava — glory itself, a nickname that carries the name's meaning in undiluted form. Three syllables in the Russian, consonant-rich at the start, a soft v hum in the middle, the stress on the last syllable. Vyacheslav reads strong and deeply classical, a name of chronicles and crowns, one that requires a little more of its speaker than most names do and rewards the effort with something that sounds genuinely historic.