One of my favorite authors is Victor Pelevin, but I am embarrassed to say I don’t know how to pronounce his last name. Does anyone here know?
The online biographies don’t indicate which syllable is stressed, but do indicate that both e’s are written with “yeh” rather than “eh,” and that the final vowel is the mirror-N “ee” and not “bI.” So my guess would be “pyeh-lyeh-veen,” probably with accent on the first syllable (the accented syllable being pure guesswork based on common Russian pronunciation of names and such).
IIRC Slavic languages have the accent on the first syllable in all cases. I can’t remember if the first one is the only one that’s stressed, but I believe it is always stressed.
Nope. A few have the accent almost always on the penultimate syllable, like Polish, or the first syllable, like Serbo-Croatian, but even those have exceptions. In Russian, it can be on any syllable, which means that Polycarp has it right – without knowing where the accent falls, there’s no way to precisely know how to pronounce it. Alas, my Giant Russian Dictionary of Death didn’t see fit to include proper names, so I haven’t a clue.
Thanks everyone. I don’t speak Russian but what little I know is that the issue of which syllable is stressed supposedly comes up all the time, even among native speakers, and knowing the right one is the mark of a cultured person (which I am not, in Russian anyhow!).
Pelevin is pronounced Pe-lev-in with “Pe” as in “peg”, “lev” as in “levitate” and “in” as in “in” :-). Emphasis on the first syllable, in most areas. That’s how the author himself pronounces it. That’s about as close as you can get to the proper pronounciation in English anyhow.
The reason it’s not P-yeh-l-yeh-vin is because the P is a hard P (again, like in peg, you wouldn’t say pyeg would you?) and a hard L (like in “lumber”, as opposed to a soft L in “linda”)