Why is there so much variation in how westerners spell Russian names?
Because the speakers of every single western language read in different ways the same combination of letters, according to the rules of pronunciation of their own language. For example, Rachmaninoff is probably a French spelling, since, to pronounce it correctly, French people have to write it like that. Another example: Pushkin = English spelling; Pouchkine = French spelling; but they are pronounced in the exact same way, because that’s how English and French speaking people pronounce these combinations of letters. However, there exists a so-called scientifically correct transliteration for all the languages that use the cyrillic alphabet, used mostly by scholars. Here’s a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_… As for Tolstoy/i (by the way, its scientifically correct transliteration is Tolstoj) both are correct for English speakers, since they are pronounced in the same way; Leo is not a tran
