Fyodor
Meaning
gift of God (Russian form of Theodore); famously borne by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Russian novelist and author of Crime and Punishment
The story
Fyodor is the Russian form of Theodore, from the Greek for gift of God, a name worn by tsars before it became shorthand for one of literature's giants. Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and Notes from Underground, and lived a life as extreme as his fiction: sentenced to death as a young man, reprieved at the last moment in front of the firing squad, and sent to a Siberian prison camp instead, an experience that burned through everything he wrote afterward. His novels made Fyodor a name readers everywhere recognize on sight. Americans have admired him from a distance without borrowing the name: Fyodor first appears in US records in the 2020s and remains genuinely rare, a deep, unmistakably Russian choice with a built-in reading list.
Popularity, 1890–2024
Shape drawn from US Social Security baby-name records. Fyodor has stayed rare in US records the whole time: no peak decade to name.
The Fyodor deep dive
Whether you’re naming a baby or exploring your own name’s history, this is a personal letter, not a list: where Fyodor truly comes from, how it traveled, and what a century of records reveals. If you have grown a tree on nametree, it also considers how Fyodor fits with your family’s names and surname.
Keep exploring
Does Fyodor fit YOUR family?
nametree reads your family’s names and finds the ones that belong. Free, private, no ads.
Add Fyodor to your family’s tree →