A (Hebrew) article at https://he.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/2096985 mentions, incidentally, this detail (translation mine):
“What's with this name Vasily?” he thought to himself.
Now, there are a lot of Russian names that come from Jewish ones, or at least have some kind of Jewish connection. Jews in Russia bear names like Misha, Sasha, Boris, Vladimir, Igor—names reminiscent of Moshe, Baruch, Zev, Asher, etc. But “Vasily”? That’s a true-blue gentile name; not many Jews bear it.
So I'd like to know: what indeed makes certain names more or less likely to be used by Russian Jews? It's not just the etymology, since neither Boris nor Vladimir nor Igor come from Hebrew or (as far as I know) have any Hebrew/Jewish antecedents. I don't suppose it has to do with whether these are saints' names, either, seeing as how there's a St. Boris and a St. Vladimir. And if it's just the phonetic similarity of the beginning of the name - then why is Vladimir, which would pair up with the Jewish name (Zev) Wolf and its diminutive Velvel, more preferred than Vasily?