Further observations on the name of Tovste and similarly-named towns in Ukraine (edited) I am fairly certain that in the Soviet period (1944-1991), the various towns in Ukraine called Tovste, or some variant of Tovste, were known as Tolstoy(e), or a variant of it. In a modern road atlas of Ukraine (Ukraina: atlas avtomobil'nikh shlyakhiv, 1: 500,000 - published in 2004), only the last of the five "other unrelated Tovste's" mentioned on your web page - the one near Donetsk - is called Tolstoy. (In fact, it is the only town in Ukraine now known as Tolstoy, according to this atlas; the other four are referred to as either Tovste or Tovsta.) Donetsk is an area that leans to Russia politically and where, I think, Russian is spoken, so it is not surprising that they have kept the Russian name. I surmise that all these towns were called Tolstoy (or similar) during the Soviet period, and most of them have reverted to being called Tovste/Tovsta, or similar, since 1991. Of course, in the case of the eastern Galician towns, they also earlier had Polish names (Tluste) as well as other variants (Touste, Toyst(e), etc). Interestingly, the above-mentioned road atlas lists a number of other towns containing tovste + another word or particle: Tovsten'ke (Ternopil oblast) in Gusyatin district: 49°03'N 26°04'E Obviously, there is no confusion here, not even for the places in Ternopil oblast, with the other Tovste's, but it is interesting how tovste and variants crop up in place names. Finally, I found on a web site that the small town [approx. 49°08'N 25°00'E] presently called Vysoke (and previously called by the Russian name Vysokoye -- both adjectives meaning 'tall', 'high') was, at one time, called Tovstobaby or Tlustobaby or Toustobaby. It is a few kilometres to the east of Galych, and north-east of Ivano Frankivsk. [See, for instance, among sites that can be found on Google: https://www.personal.ceu.hu/students/97/Roman_Zakharii/pidhajtsi.htm. Tony Kahane (pers.comm., 2007) |