The Bear and the Nightingale

Author’s Note

Students and speakers of Russian will surely note, and possibly deplore, my wildly unsystematic approach to transliteration.

I can almost hear the hand-wringing of readers, who will be asking, for example, by what possible method could I have gotten vodianoy from the Russian водяной and then have turned around and gotten domovoi from the Russian домовой, a word with an identical ending?

The answer is that in transliterating, I had two aims.

First, I sought to render Russian words in such a way as to retain a bit of their exotic flavor. This is the reason I rendered Константин as Konstantin rather than the more familiar Constantine, and Дмитрий as Dmitrii rather than Dmitri.

Second, and more important, I wanted these Russian words to be reasonably pronounceable and aesthetically pleasing to speakers of English.

I like the way vodianoy looks on the page, just as I like the look of the name Aleksei (Алексей) but preferred to render the name Соловей as Solovey.

I dropped any attempt to indicate hard and soft signs, with apostrophes or otherwise, as these have absolutely no meaning for the average English-speaking reader. The only exception is in the word Rus’, where the extensive use of that spelling with the apostrophe in historiography has made it the most familiar of any to English-speaking readers.

To students of Russian history, I can say only that I have tried to be as faithful as possible to a poorly documented time period. When I have taken liberties with the historical record—for example, in making Prince Vladimir Andreevich older than Dmitrii Ivanovich (he was actually a few years younger) and marrying him to a girl named Olga Petrovna—it was for dramatic purposes, and I hope my readers will indulge me.