As I said in one of my previous posts, golova is Russian for "head." The surname Golovin comes from golova. The Golovins were an old aristocratic family (included in Barkhatnaya kniga, "the Velvet Book," of Russian nobles). The most famous of them is Fyodor Golovin (1650-1706), diplomat, the state chancellor, an associate of Peter I. In the years of his diplomatic service in the Amur region (near the Chinese border) he founded Nerchinsk, the city that was a place of penal servitude during the next two centuries (it is mentioned by Pushkin in his poem Tsar Nikita and his Fourty Daughters, 1822).
Ivan Gavrilovich Golovin (1816-90) was an émigré since 1844. He is the author of Geographic Studies (1849), Zapiski (Memoirs, 1859), etc. He loathed Lermontov and was loathed by Hertsen (both of whom he knew personally). One of his pen names was Nivolog (a palindrome that combines vino, voin and ovin* with Log, the Supreme being on Antiterra). His patronymic reminds one of Pushkin's Gavriiliada (a frivolous long poem about the Archangel Gabriel, 1821), not to be confused with Gavriliada, a cycle of poems on Gavrila by Nikifor Lyapis-Trubetskoy, a character in Ilf and Petrov's The 12 Chairs, a graphomaniac.
The surname Veen, of the main heroes of Nabokov's Family Chronicle, looks as if the old Russian surname Golovin were "decapitated" (as a result of golovotyapstvo, which is Russian for "bungling" but literally means "head chopping") and all that remained of it was a little tail: Vin (or, in English spelling, "Veen").** Incidentally, vin is Ukrainian for "he" (as to the chopped off golo- part, it reminds one of golyi, "naked," golod, "hunger," and Goloday, an island in St. Petersburg, that was named, according to Nabokov,*** after Holiday, an English manufacturer). As has been pointed out before, veen (pronounced 'feyn') is Dutch for "peat bog." Neva means the same in Finnish. Btw., Neva = Vena (Russian name of Vienna; besides, vena is Russian for "vein").
In the pre-Revolutionary Russia, golova was also used in the sense gorodskoy [note the adjective's masc. ending! the noun golova is fem.] golova, "mayor." Golova (mayor) is a character in Gogol's stroy Noch' pered rozhdestvom (Christmas Eve). Another character in this story is chyort (the devil).
*vino means "wine" in Russian, voin, "warrior," and ovin, "barn"; besides, Batyushkov spells Bion, the ancient Greek poet (2nd century B. C.), Vion.
**Similarly, the name Zemski, of Van's and Ada's ancestor, looks as if Zemski were an illegitimate son of Prince Vyazemski. Cf. the Trubetskoy/Betskoy and Repnin/Pnin pairs.
***see Glory
Alexey Sklyarenko
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