On its surface, the explanation for the naming of Alexanderwohl sounds plausible: Alexander wished the Przechovka party well, so the village they settled was named accordingly: Alexanderwohl, which combines Alexander’s name plus the German word for “well.” Most etiologies sound plausible on the surface, but frequently they become suspect when one digs a little deeper.
So it is with the Alexanderwohl etiological tale: the details of the story do not all correspond to the simple etiological explanation. That is, Alexander wished the party luck, not well, and the mundane character of the encounter, essentially wishing someone safe travels, would not typically warrant any sort of memorialization, let alone the naming of a village.
Without calling into question the basic facts of the story, one wonders if the explanation given is the real meaning of the village name. Such skepticism increases when one considers a similarly named Molotschna village, namely, Mariawohl.
This village was one of the last founded in Molotschna, in 1857. According to Helmut Huebert, the village “was named in honour of Wilhelmia Maria, wife of the recently crowned Czar Alexander II” (Huebert 2003, 158). In other words, this village received its name by combining the name of the person being honored plus the German word wohl, or “well.” In this case there is no hint that Maria wished the townspeople well. On the contrary, the village name is more likely an expression of well wishes to the person whose name provides the first part of the village name. The village name is thus a shorthand way of saying: May it be well with Maria.
Why would not the same explanation be applied to Alexanderwohl? If we did not have the story of the encounter in Poland, we would naturally think that the village name was intended more to honor Alexander than to commemorate a brief encounter between Alexander and the Mennonites in which the tsar wished them safe travels. In this explanation, the village name was a vehicle for expressing a wish of good things for the tsar: May it be well with Alexander.
This clearly is not the perspective of the etiological tale, but it makes better sense of the way some village names were created at that place and time. There was, after all, a clear precedent for naming a Molotschna village after Alexander. In 1820, one year before the founding of Alexanderwohl, the village of Alexandertal was founded. The -tal suffix simply indicates that the village was located in a valley; the primary emphasis is on the person being honored by the village name: Alexander I.
Similarly, in 1857 the Molotschna colony saw the founding of Alexanderkrone (where Peter D and Sarah Siebert Buller lived for a few years). This village was named in honor of Alexander II, husband of the Maria honored by the naming of Mariawohl. The German word Krone means “crown” in English, which suggests that the village name meant something like Crown of Alexander. The point, again, is that the village name honored the one after whom it was named.
To bring this all back around to Alexanderwohl, one need not be a skeptic to find the etiological tale a little suspicious at the end. Granted, Alexander likely met and conversed with the Przechovka group south of Warsaw, and they dutifully shared his greetings with their fellow Mennonites in Molotschna. All that seems not only plausible but likely.
However, when Fadeyev named the village—and we should not lost sight of the fact that Fadeyev was the one who named the village, not the Alexanderwohl settlers—he probably was more interested in currying favor with his tsar than in memorializing the tsar’s encounter with a party of Mennonite immigrants. Given the fact that just a year earlier Fadeyev had named another Molotschna village to honor Alexander, and in light of the plain meaning of the -wohl suffix in the later village Mariawohl, it seems most plausible to conclude that the village Alexanderwohl was given its name as a means of expressing a positive wish to a much-loved tsar: May it be well with Alexander.
The association of the account of the journey and encounter with the naming of Alexanderwohl is, in all likelihood, secondary. It may be that Fadeyev named the village for the reason just given but told the Alexanderwohl settlers that the name commemorated their extraordinary encounter with the tsar. Fadeyev may have told them, in other words, what he thought they would like to hear.
It is equally possible, in my view, that the etiology proper—“When the office in Ekaterinoslav heard of this extraordinary event, the chief judge Fadeyev immortalized it by naming the colony Alexanderwohl because, as he said, ‘Tsar Alexander has wished you well.’”—was the villagers’ own creation over time, their attempt to make sense of the village name in light of their own history with the tsar.
We may never know the precise origin of the etiology proper, but it does seem more likely than not that the etiological tale of the naming of Alexanderwohl is both generally true but mistaken in its final detail. Indeed, everything up to that final detail seems likely to have taken place just as it was recounted. However, it probably had little to do with the naming of the village when Fadeyev called this new settlement Alexanderwohl in 1821.
This long discussion of the naming of Alexanderwohl has shed light on this one village but has also revealed a great need to examine more systematically the names of the other Molotschna villages: how they were constructed and what they might have meant. Keep watch for a new series on exactly that topic in the near future.
Work Cited
Huebert, Helmut T. 2003. Molotschna Historical Atlas. Winnipeg: Springfield.
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