Quote Originally Posted by gRom
In fact, these are street nicknames and they are real (otherwise there were no so many Boldins,Kuritsins,Drozdovs,Zaitsevs Kozlovs, Orekhovs etc. in Russia), but,of course, they are not proper names. Iosif is a sound Christian name, mostly used by priests (Iosif Volotskiy, for exemple). The problem with russian names in game that in XI-XIII ceturies they were Pagan, but since XIV they become exclusively Greek Orthodox.
Pagan??? Russia became christian in 989, do u know? And now here is not much lesser slavic names than in XI - for example my name is traditional slavic, my grandfather too, and names of many of my friends. Svyatoslav, Vsevolod, Vladimir, Vyacheslav, Stanislav was popular in Russia in all times, since first written sources in IX century! This names are not pagan, they are traditional. I tink u will not call Richard, Whilliam or Frederic a pagan names, but they are not Christian names by origin!
And about nicknames.. they don't look like medieval nicknames, the forms of them is more like XVIII-XIX centuries. In medieval times this animals was called in some another form. Some nicknames - Postoy, Bezvitny, Ogibalo, Almaz, Minin, Palitsin, Silyanin, Susanin=)) - u can simply find many of them in Yandex. I had never heard in russian history surnames or nicknames like u wrote since XVII.
The peasant names was like Domashek, Voebud, Stanigost, Vdovin, Zhirochek - u can look about them here: http://newspskov.ru/news/sosedi/743/
http://ru.narod.ru/imenaf.htm