Name

Summary: if you are citing a paper of mine of referring to me in an highly official document, use Aleksandrs, otherwise use Sasha.

Background: I come from a Russian-speaking family, and my original name is Александр Бердичевский (in ISO-9 transliteration: Aleksandr Berdičevskij).

It used to be quite common to represent such names in English as Alexander Berdichevsky, and some of my older works are signed like that, but I do not use this version anymore.

Here comes the twist: I am a Latvian citizen, and in my passport my name is spelled Aleksandrs Berdičevskis. The -s at the end are Latvian endings for nominative masculine singular, obligatory also for names of non-Latvian origin. The caron over č usually gets lost when my passport data are being processed by authorities in other countries. I tried to fight against that, but then gave up, and now I sign my works as Aleksandrs Berdicevskis. In Russian, however, I still use the original version.

To sum up, the official spelling of my name in Roman letters is Aleksandrs Berdicevskis (Berdičevskis also acceptable), while in Cyrillic it's Александр Бердичевский.

Apart from very formal contexts, I usually introduce myself as Sasha (a common Russian hypocorism for Aleksandr). Some people call me Alex, that's also fine.

Pronunciation: [bɛrdɨˈtɕɛvskɨs] is fine. If you want to show off and approximate the original surname, try [bʲɪrdʲɨˈtɕɛfskʲɨs]. Any combination of these two also works.