Yevhen

Yevhen begins in Greek. Behind it stands Eugenios, made from eu, meaning good, and genos, meaning born. The name makes a plain claim: well-born. It reached Ukrainian through the calendar of Orthodox saints, and there it hardened into its own shape, shorter and blunter than the Latin Eugene.

The Ukrainian poet Yevhen Malaniuk carried the name through the twentieth century, and his work fixed it in the country's literary memory. Well-born, in his case, had nothing to do with rank. The sense of good birth attached itself in antiquity, when eugenes described a person of worthy descent, and it stayed on as an ideal rather than a fact about anyone's family.

Picture the moment a teacher reads Yevhen from a class register and pauses on the opening sound. The name has no diminutive to soften it and no Polish twin to hide behind. What stands on the form is the Greek word for well-born.