Down Among the Fishes

DOWN AMONG THE FISHESA note on transliteration Personal names are transliterated from the Belarusian forms, unless they are obviously the kind of officials who would never speak Belarusian, or are clearly Ukrainian, e.g. Belarusian: Babylyova, Henik Russian: Graychik, Kuleshov Ukrainian: Ponomariv Placenames and names of rivers are transliterated from the Belarusian forms, e.g. Chachersk, Lahoysk, Buh, Prypyats. This includes names of places that are now in Poland; in such cases the Polish forms are given in a footnote. Ukrainian placenames are given in the appropriate contemporary form: Lviv. A whole chapter is devoted to the names of the villages which are at the heart of this story. The real complication is the name of the city that lies closest to them. Its Russian and official Belarusian name is ‘Brest’. The author also refers to the city by one of its truly Belarusian forms: Berastse (with stress on the first syllable). It also appears in the form ‘Bereste’ as it would be written in a document dating from the seventeenth century. On one occasion the author refers to the city as ‘Brest-Litovsk’ (literally ‘Lithuanian Brest’). This brings me to a little bit of history, as Brest has never had anything to do with the country we now know as Lithuania: What’s in a name? A great deal, as it turns out. Part of this story is played out in what is sometimes called the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a federal state comprising the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Do not be misled by the name: the Grand Duchy was a predominantly Slavonic state in which the ancestors of the citizens of the modern Republic of Lithuania were a tiny minority. — Jim Dingley Although inspired in part by facts of real life, the following story and characters in it are fictional and do not depict any actual person or event.