Savelii

Savelii is a Russian name with roots traced to Hebrew. Its short meaning, recorded in name dictionaries, reads "of the Sabines," a gloss pointing toward an old people of central Italy rather than toward the Hebrew source itself. That sense of "Sabine" was attached to the name later, laid over an origin most Russian bearers rarely stopped to unpack.

In Russia the name has a settled, unhurried sound. It was carried by peasants and by clerks, by men whose names filled parish registers long before any of them reached a novel.

Savelii keeps its full form. No diminutive was handed to it here, no softer variant, so a boy signs the same four syllables on an official form at the urząd that a grandfather once signed. The name stays whole. What a Polish reader meets, then, is a Russian name of Hebrew origin whose dictionary meaning is "of the Sabines."