Is there any reason for a Russian woman to use the masculine version of her surname?

[chierii]

Okay, so I'm not really asking for my own work. Rather, I'm trying to help make sense of detail in someone else's work. Setting is nationality-neutral, military, near future. (And those of you reading this who know me know exactly what I'm talking about specifically, but who cares

Comments

[dustthouart]

Is she Russian from Russia in canon?

If she is descended from Russian-Americans or Russian-Canadians, to give two examples, it's highly likely that she would have the masculine ending name. Marla Sokoloff (rather than Sokolova) as an example.

[chierii]

Yeah, she is from Russia in canon. Sorry for not including that.

[rheasilvia]

If she lives in a country/area where a change of surnames according to gender is not the norm, she might use the masculine version as a matter of convenience, so the locals have no trouble recognizing it as the same name as that of the rest of her family.

I know that many Russian immigrants (not to mention women of Russian descent who grew up outside of Russia) in Germany use the masculine version of their names, presumably for that reason.

[chierii]

The canon never explicitly states where she's from, exactly, but she identifies herself as Russian when she introduces herself, so I took that to mean she actually lives in Russia.

[kutsuwamushi]

A couple of possibilities pop to mind. I'm not familiar with the series so they might not work.

She could have adapted her name to be consistent with male family members after emigrating to a country that doesn't do gendered surnames, to avoid bureaucratic hassles.

If she isn't married, maybe she's the daughter of Russian immigrants. There are a lot of women of Russian heritage in the US, at least, that have "male" Russian surnames. Somewhere along the line the gender distinction gets lost, and it's not hard to imagine it could happen in the first generation--the daughter simply gets the father's last name.

[chierii]

Hm, the phrase about gender distinction getting lost gave me an idea.

The near-future setting does give a bit of wiggle room. It could be maybe the use of that dichotomy has been lost altogether. ...But that seems like a cop-out for headcanon to me, for some reason.

[tisiphone]

I assume you mean the patronymic portion of their name? Russian last names are ungendered. I was going to say that I don't know of any Russian woman that use the masculine version of their patronymics. However, Svetlana Alexievich, author of the (really amazing) book "Voices from Chernobyl", uses the male patronymic. I do not know, however, whether that's because she's a feminist (which she certainly is) or whether it's because of her ancestry (her father is Belorussian and her mother Ukranian).

[ayashi_mikage]

There're 2 types of last names, one type changes depending on gender, another - doesn't.

Examples: 1. Matveev(m)/Matveeva(f) 2. Grinblat(m)/Grinblat(f)

The woman you're talking about just has a case of second example, and it's not related to her being a feminist.

[tisiphone]

As I said, I don't actually know why her name is what it is, just that it's an example of a Russian last name that looks masculine and used by a woman.

[mad_maudlin]

Um, Russian surnames decline by gender, at least when you're actually speaking Russian. Translation style guides can be inconsistent about whether to preserve the distinction in other languages, which is why you might see both (eg) Raisa Gorbachev and Raisa Gorbacheva in English-language news sources...but in Russian she will always be Раиса Горбачева. Ukrainian surnames follow different rules and don't decline; "Alexeivich" is probably your writer's actual surname, not her patronym.

[mad_maudlin]

You know, at first glance I thought I knew exactly which canon you were talking about, but apparently not. This is pretty common Russian!fail, because different style/translation guides have different advice on how to Anglicize feminine surnames--these days you can even find Anna Karenin in a bookstore. So she may very well have been advised at some point that, unless she's speaking Russian, she should use the masculine form. (Is there in-universe evidence that she uses the masculine form while speaking Russian as well?) That's in addition to the convenience of having the same surname as any male relatives/spouses she might be traveling abroad with.

[chierii]

She only ever speaks English throughout the canon, so I wouldn't know what she calls herself in Russian. I hadn't thought of that. She could well just use the masculine form as long as she's speaking English.

She's not traveling with any relatives. But that gave me another idea. If she's in the same field as a male relative, she could have adopted the masculine version of her name for recognition's sake, couldn't she?

So many new ideas!

[mad_maudlin]

That's a good idea, especially if her surname is unusual enough that foreigners might have trouble with it, or if she wanted to take advantage of networking opportunities.

In contemporary news usage, as far as I can tell, Russian women who are notable in their own right (Alla Pugachova, Rosa Otunbaeva, Anna Politkovskaya) tend to keep the feminine, but if a woman is only being mentioned in conjuction with her husband (Raisa Gorbachev, Ludmila Putin) they are given the masculine form for consistency's sake.

[nineveh_uk]

Knowing English-language media at least, I would be inclined to assume that women like Raisa Gorbachev are given the masculine form for convenience/ignorance's sake, but not that they use it themselves (in recent UK history see Cherie Booth and Miriam Gonzalez Durantez who get lumbered with Cherie Blair and Miriam Clegg even though these are not their legal names).