Polishchuk

Polissya is the great belt of forest and marshland in the north, straddling what is now Ukraine and Belarus. Polishchuk is a Ukrainian-language surname and a toponymic one: it does not record a trade or a father but that country. The people of the region were themselves called Polishchuks, so the surname belongs to the small class of names taken from what a whole population was called rather than from a single village, farmstead or estate. A man carrying it was not being pinned to a map reference. He was being placed in a landscape.

Nobody acquires a habitation name at home. Such names hardened into surnames because migration in medieval Europe ran steadily out of small communities toward larger ones, where a new arrival needed something to be called. In Polissya itself every man was of Polissya, and the word told you nothing. It became a name only when he stood among the farmers of the open country to the south, where being the woodlander was the most obvious fact about him. The surname is evidence of a journey, and it was given by the people at the far end of it.

Before surnames, East Slavs identified a man by his given name and his father's. Where he was noble, wealthy or otherwise respected, that pairing was the dignified form of address, name plus patronymic, in the manner of Yaroslavich and Yaroslavna. For commoners the same work was done more bluntly. When two men in one place shared a given name and had to be told apart, a qualifier was added: Ivashka, Antonov syn, Ivashka son of Anton. None of it was hereditary. The identifier died with the man, and his son started again from his own father's name.

Where that pairing hardened into a formal system it did so in Russia, and by the tsar's gift: from the 17th century the -ovich ending was a privilege the crown granted to commoners, and only by the 19th century did it settle into the ordinary form for everybody. A name like Polishchuk grew up outside that system of grants. It came from below, out of what the neighbours already called a man.

Ukrainian and Belarusian surnames are assembled with their own set of endings, -ko, -uk and -ych, which mark them off at sight from the Russian -ov and -ev. The machinery is indifferent to what it is fastened to. Pysarenko is built on the word for a scribe, Kovalchuk on the word for a smith, Polishchuk on the country a man had come out of. Trade, parentage, region: the suffix takes any of them and turns it into something a son inherits.

The Russian equivalents carry different freight. The -ov and -ev endings mean belonging to, of the line of, so that Petrov is of Petr's line. The adjectival -sky was the toponymic form there, and it could be conferred as a token of nobility, as Shuysky rested on the ownership of Shuya. Beside that, Polishchuk is the same idea stripped of ceremony. No estate, no charter, no grant: only the country a man walked out of, said aloud by the people he arrived among, with the western -chuk fixed to the end.

East Slavic languages decline names like any other noun, and surnames that are grammatically adjectives change shape with the sex of the person carrying them. Boris Yeltsin's wife was Naina Yeltsina; Leo Tolstoy's wife was Sophia Tolstaya. The same instinct runs through the West Slavic languages, turning Novák into Nováková.

Names that are not adjectives escape all of it. The -enko and -ych types, and noun surnames in general, stand identical for a man and a woman. That is why Anatoliy Polishchuk and Lyubov Polishchuk carry precisely the same word, letter for letter, where a Russian couple would carry two versions of one name. It is a small point of grammar with a long reach: the Ukrainian surname passes through daughters without being reshaped.

Everyone in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus is supposed to hold a three-part name: given name, patronymic, surname, all of it written into legal and identity documents. The patronymic is not an English middle name and it is not optional. A pupil speaking to a teacher must use both the first and the patronymic name, and omitting it is taken as an offence.

The surname is the least spoken of the three. On its own it belongs to formal communication and to schoolteachers calling on pupils, and on documents where sorting matters it is placed first, in the manner of Petrov Ivan Ivanovich. So a family could carry Polishchuk for generations and seldom hear it in the house. It sat in the register and on the papers, doing the work a surname exists to do, while ordinary life ran on given names and patronymics.

Valerian Polishchuk (1897–1937) is the earliest bearer the record names, a Ukrainian author, and the first man of the name whose work survives on paper rather than in a register. Lyubov Polishchuk (1949–2006) was a Soviet Russian actress, and the name reached a mass audience through her in a language that was not the one it was coined in.

The living bearers keep the same spread. Yuliya Polishchuk, born in 1983, is a Ukrainian artist. Kateryna Polishchuk, born in 2001, is a Ukrainian singer, playwright and paramedic, three callings held by one person. Victor Polishchuk, born in 1976, is a Ukrainian businessman. Between them they hold the name in the country it was made in.

Sport carries the name further than any other field in the record. Anatoliy Polishchuk (1950–2016) was a Ukrainian volleyball player. Fyodor Polishchuk, born in 1979, is a Kazakhstani professional ice hockey player. Dmitry Polishchuk, born in 1987, is a Russian windsurfer, and Mikhail Polischuk, born in 1989, a Russian swimmer who spells it the shorter way. Sofia Polishchuk, born in 2001, is a Russian competitive ice dancer.

Nothing links them but the word itself, and that is the ordinary condition of a toponymic surname. Bearers of it are not one kindred but many, scattered across territories that were once inside the Russian Empire and afterwards the Soviet Union, spelling it Polishchuk or Polischuk, all of them pointing back at one country.

Polishchuk is a common surname of central and western Ukraine, and when Ukrainians crossed to North America it went with them, into the wooded parkland of the Canadian prairie. There is a neatness in that: a name meaning a man of the northern forests came to rest, generations on, in wooded country again.

For a descendant, the name is the most durable thing the family owns. It records no ancestor, no landlord and no trade, and it never belonged to an estate. It records a region, in Ukrainian, with the western suffix on the end, which is a great deal more than most surnames will tell anyone about where their people stood before they started moving.