Why Is My Last Name Popov?
Many of my students have expressed surprise about my last name. The combination of one of the most common Russian surnames, Popov, with a typically Anglophone first name, Ryan, has even led some to wonder whether I made the name up for my teaching profile.
No—it’s my name, and the explanation is relatively straightforward.
My paternal grandfather, Fyoder—who went by Fred—was the son of Russian Molokans, members of a Spiritual Christian movement that separated from the Russian Orthodox Church. Interestingly, even many Russians I know have never heard of them.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, my great-grandparents made their way from the Kars region of the Russian Empire to California. Kars is now in eastern Turkey and may be familiar to readers of Orhan Pamuk’s novel Snow. Under the Russian Empire, the region was home to a substantial Molokan population, some of whom eventually emigrated to the United States.
Others settled elsewhere, including in Armenia, where Molokan communities still exist today.
That fact became unexpectedly personal when my family and I traveled through Armenia. We visited Fioletovo and Lermontovo, two Molokan villages not far from Dilijan. In Fioletovo, my wife began asking people we met whether any Popovs lived in the village.
To our surprise, they did.
Someone directed us to a house, and we knocked on the door. An elderly couple invited us inside. They gave us homemade bread and cheese while our daughter crawled around on their spotless floor, and we talked about our families and where they had come from.
Were these Armenian Popovs actually distant relatives of mine? We couldn't establish that with certainty. But given the history of the Molokan communities that left the Kars region, the possibility suddenly didn't seem so far-fetched.
There was something strange about sitting there.
My grandfather's mother tongue was Russian, but he did not pass the language on to his son, my father. I grew up in California with a Russian surname but without any connection whatsoever to the Russian language or Russian culture. I didn't begin learning it until I was twenty-one.
And when I did, my surname had nothing to do with the decision.
I started Russian from scratch simply because the language interested me. I could hardly have imagined then how much of my life would eventually become connected to it.
Years later, Russian became the language I spoke at home. I lived in Russia for many years. I met my wife there, and Russian became the language of our relationship. Today it remains the language we speak to each other every day.
None of this was a recovery of some lost family language. I never heard my grandfather speak Russian, and I didn't grow up thinking of it as a language that somehow belonged to me. The connection between my ancestry and the direction my life eventually took came into focus only much later.
Which made that afternoon in Fioletovo feel particularly strange: an American named Popov, who had independently spent years learning Russian, sitting in the home of another Popov family in an Armenian Molokan village, wondering whether our ancestors might once have belonged to the same community.
Perhaps the way Russian returned to my family after a generation without it is simply a coincidence.
Or perhaps some coincidences are too good not to wonder about.
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