Perhaps even the wisest sage could be led of astray by the question of whether it is worthwhile renaming all those objects around us that bear Soviet names. In all probability, the answer cannot be straightforward, especially if the point is in the names of populated areas, streets, and various institutions built during the Soviet regime. But it is quite a different thing when it comes to old names, the rejection of which has in fact led to the breakage of the chain of time, with the renamed historical objects themselves being effaced from human memory.
It is not so simple with new names either, for Soviet bureaucrats were not seldom lacking in taste and intellect. Numerous housing neighborhoods were given names that are not only senseless for society but also hard to pronounce, which can be explained by their non-Slavic phonetics. There are a host of names such as in Kyiv’s Obolon residential development. Take, for instance, Mate Zalka Street. 99% of those living on this street are sure to be unaware of who that esteemed gentleman (“Or maybe a lady?” some ask), who bore this name, was. However, Mate Zalka has the important merit of sounding easily and pleasantly, for it is free of sibilants or Rs but has as many as three “ah” sounds. A name like this might well occur in an Italian opera! The only embarrassment is how to decline it. The musical sounding Mate Zalka runs counter to the entirely different phonetics of Lajos Gavro Street. Obolon dwellers are familiar with the bearer of this name no more than with Mate Zalka but find it much harder to pronounce his name. People sometimes invent their own versions, sometimes quite exotic, like, for example, Gavroche (perhaps after Victor Hugo?)
I have returned old and threadbare topic because the newspaper Obolon recently published article, “Lajos Gavro Street.” And I could clearly see that this problem existed for far from all those who make decisions and mold public opinion. The article movingly tells the readers about the exploits Red Magyar Lajos Gavro, former coal miler in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and World War I prisoner, performed in Ukraine during the civil war. In 1919, he, at the head of the Astrakhan International Regiment, mercilessly and heroically wiped out “the packs of bandits around Kyiv” (read: peasants’ uprisings). The article gives a detailed account of all the medals this hero was awarded and the names of all the valiant Red Army division commanders who gave them to him. So the impression is that the author dropped off somewhere in 1985, then came round today, and got to writing his piece about international revolutionary brigades. I leave aside the question what all this has to do with Obolon. The article’s panegyric tone again reminded me of what Talleyrand said about the Bourbons who had been toppled from the French throne: “They have forgotten nothing and learned nothing.”
The point is, of course, not in the author (it is his personal business what to write) but in the editors of the newspaper that prints this, and in that we can hardly anticipate any early changes in toponymy which has long become an integral part of our environmental pollution.
But let us not lose hope that, sooner or later, the place names around us will begin to sound more familiarly to our native language and even carry information about the places and the land we are destined to live in: about ancient settlements on the territory of Obolon, the lakes, bights, and straits on the banks of which streets now run, and about the picturesque woods and fields down the Dnipro side. For all this has a name invented in bygone years by our ancestors who lived, hunted, and made war here. Listen to some of them: Borovnia, Chortoryika, Natalka, Verbliuzhy (camel’s) Bay, Kniaziv (prince’s) Island, Opechen Lake. If only we wished to look closely into nature and history and turn to the experts — historians, archeologists, literature researchers, and poets!
