The Great Date Debate and What’s in a Name?

My mother was born in somewhere in Vitebsk Oblast in Belarus. A birth certificate later issued in Germany lists Lagi, the village where her father was born, as her place of birth. But my mother says she was born in another nearby village where her maternal grandmother lived at the time. (I’ll get into the geographic significance later.) To the best of her recollection, she was born June 21st or 23rd by the Gregorian calendar (now internationally the most widely used civil calendar) in either 1936 or 1938. As a Russian Orthodox Christian, my mother observes holy days, or moveable and immovable feasts, by the Julian calendar, a reform of the Roman calendar introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 BC. The Julian calendar served as the civil calendar in some countries until as late as the 20th century. But her birthday, for all practical intents and purposes, has been July 5th since she immigrated to the United States in 1950. It has nothing to do with the differences between the two calendars. “When my father was interrogated, when we were prisoners in Germany (circa 1946), he had made a mistake about (some other fact) and he got scared and that's what he gave as my date of birth,” she explains.

The notion of a birthday being a movable feast would be social sacrilege to the typical American today. As a first-generation American who was raised Russian Orthodox, I’ve long been bewildered by the American obsession with one’s own birthday after age 10 or so. That some people promote their “birthday week” on social media, inviting all their Facebook “friends” to attend multiple celebrations in their honor is at odds with how I was taught to treat that day. It wasn’t until I moved to New York that I encountered the very common practice of inviting out other people with the expectation that “friends” will pay not only for their own food, drink and entertainment, but also pick up the tab for the person celebrating a birthday. I’d known only the social custom of treating the people you invite out as guests, regardless of the occasion. This behavior has now extended even into business relationships. A recent interaction with a wealthy (“I’m more mass affluent than upper affluent, by New York standards,” he bragged) work “source,” who invited me to meet for drinks and then made it a point to say he “relies on reporters to buy him drinks,” rattled my roots in etiquette and egoism. In the tradition carried down by my mother, it is self-centered and self-congratulatory to focus on one’s own birthday. It’s the Saint’s Day which is feted, but as a religious feast, not as an opportunity to receive gifts.

Luba is short for Lubov (more commonly transliterated as Lyubov), and means Love. Along with Faith (Vera) and Hope (Nadezhda), Love is the youngest of three daughters of Saint Sophia the Martyr. The girls were named after virtues mentioned by Saint Paul in 1 Corinthians 13. Born in Italy, Sophia is venerated by all the Eastern Orthodox churches. The story goes that Roman Emperor Hadrian (117-138) ordered the three young girls to be tortured by being burned over an iron grating, then thrown into a hot oven and finally into a cauldron with boiling tar. Lubov was tied to a wheel and beaten with rods until her body was covered with bloody welts. Sofia was forced to watch as her three daughters were beheaded. During my mother’s own lifetime, her father watched as his sister and mother were brutally tortured and killed. My mother herself witnessed countless brutal murders and sudden deaths of many of her loved ones and fellow ethnic Russian friends throughout her early child. My mother still lives her life as a martyr, sacrificing everything for her own daughters. This, after caring at home for her father, her mother and her husband, while all three suffered debilitating and consecutive illnesses over a period of decades.

I, too, was named after a martyr, or holy sufferer, Natalia (Natasha is the most common Russian diminutive and is my legal first name), the wife of Saint Adrian, also known as Hadrian, or Adrian of Nicomedia, a Herculean Guard of the Roman Emperor Galerius Maximian. They were married for a year before being martyred March 4, 306. March 4 (by the Gregorian or as my mother calls it “American” calendar) is the day my maternal grandmother died.

Such details have been a prominent part of my life, and often the topic of ridicule by those who shun any such coincidence as evidence of some greater force in the universe. This is why I rarely speak publicly about mysticism or other spiritual pursuits for conscious awareness of an ultimate reality. My study of Russian literature was one of the few periods of my life when I could indulge such ideas and examine, from a scholarly perspective, the deep, layered meaning of names, dates and anything that can be tied to a person’s destiny. Readers of 18th and 19th century Russian literature know that names are extremely significant and are chosen deliberately and carefully. Perhaps the most blatant name symbolism is found in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Kara come from the Turkish meaning "black" and maz in Russian means "paint" or "smear,” so the name is loosely (or tightly, if you choose to make the argument I did in undergraduate essays on the novel) means smeared in black or, more symbolically and obviously, just destined to darkness or cursed. Though in the years since I left grad school I’ve meet a shocking few people who have read this literary masterpiece, it is interwoven into the cultural fabric of all our lives via its influence on a cross-disciplinary group od highly influential figures including Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Cormac McCarthy and Kurt Vonnegut. The Brothers Karamazov is one of the most profound and complex ethical debates of God, free will and morality, and the meaning behind each name is an intrinsic part of the intricate story that frames the intellectual discourse. The exploration of the dialectic is not undermined, but enhanced, by an appreciation of and respect for the chosen names.

 “I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they've shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.” _ Part II, Book V (Pro and Contra), Chapter 3 (The Brothers Make Friends.)

Oh, if only.

More like this:

"I'm a Karamazov... when I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I'm even pleased that I'm falling in such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful. And so in that very shame I suddenly begin a hymn. Let me be cursed, let me be base and vile, but let me also kiss the hem of that garment in which my God is clothed; let me be following the devil at the same time, but still I am also your son, Lord, and I love you, and I feel a joy without which the world cannot stand and be." _ Dmitri (Mitya) to Alyosha, saying he has fallen in love with a "low woman,” Grushenka, Book III (The Sensualists), Chapter 3 (The Confession of a Passionate Heart.)

Now for a little comic relief. In her single years, my mother had a male admirer who called her Grushenka. She took great offense, because the lusty character is a depicted as a contemporary Mary Magdalene. My mother, a virgin until she married my father, viewed herself as the opposite of a Grushenka. Most women might have considered the comparison a compliment. Dostoyevsky’s Grushenka evolves from a free spirit to a faithful companion who accepts her role in the murder of Fyodor and agrees to share the guilt with Dmitri, only to become the personification of the ideal Russian woman. No wonder Marilyn Monroe wanted to play her in the movie.