Daniil

Daniil is the Russian form of Daniel, and the name goes back to the Hebrew Daniyyel. Its sense is plain. "God is my judge," or in Polish "bóg jest moim sędzią," the name states a whole belief: that a higher court weighs a life.

The form Daniil belongs to the Orthodox East. Daniil Aleksandrovich, prince of Moscow around the turn of the fourteenth century, founded the line that would rule Russia and was later canonized. Readers of a stranger cast may know Daniil Kharms, the absurdist writer of 1920s Leningrad, whose short prose still unsettles.

In Poland the spelling stays foreign, unaltered, without a Polish softening. A boy called Daniil on a school register sits near a Daniel and a Damian, close in sound and separate in root only to those who look. The Hebrew judge stands behind all three. And the meaning holds: bóg jest moim sędzią.