NABOKV-L post 0020163, Thu, 3 Jun 2010 15:50:20 -0400

Subject

THOUGHTS: Idle note on Sebastian Knight -- last call?

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Thu, 06/03/2010 - 15:50

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[EDNOTE. I suggest that we end this thread here, and that anyone
interested in continuing contact SK, Grigori,SKB--or Don Johnson, who
started it--off the List. Thanks, SES.]

Stan: it wasn't my intention to argue with Don's interpretation. I was
arguing with your statement about /b/ and /b'/. These are two distincts
phonemes in Russian (in strong position, before vowel: obo and Obi, or
oboikh /ob-/ and obeikh /ob'-/. Just as /s/ and /s'/ are distinct
phonemes (/s'er/ "gray" and /ser/ "Sir").

Nonetheless, in the light of your last posting, I fail to see how seb-
in Sebastian and seb- in sebia can be semantically identical. Seb- in
Sebastian is not a distinct morph and doesn't have a meaning. Seb- in
sebia, however, is a distinct morph and has an undentifiable lexical
meaning as a root. It does indeed have allomorphs with the hard /s/ and
/b/ (as in soboi), but this alternation is historical in origin, not
phonological. (/b/ or /b'/ cannot be mophemes here, they are phonemes
and part of their respective morphs.) Etymologically, Sebastian comes
from the Greek sebastos ("reverenced," "august"), which comes from sebas
("reverence," "awe"), and the Russian reflexive pronoun sebia is totally
unrelated to it.

Trying to "prove" linguistically that Seb- in Sebastian and seb- in
sebia are in any way related or similar, is very different, in my
opinion, from suggesting a link between them as it might have existed in
VN's mind at the time he was writing the novel. In the latter case, I
suppose, one doesn't need to be linguistically correct. The fact that
[b'] and [b] are, as you say, allophones in English becomes relevant
here. But then, the argument will require a different type of evidence:
not linguistic, but textual. Don offered one piece of such evidence:
"the tangled relationship between the narrating half-brother and his
brother Sebastian." When textual "pro"-evidence outweighs linguistic
"contra"-evidence, I guess, we have a game.

Sergey Karpukhin

***

Dear Stan (if I
may),

Let me be brief:
there is no "себя" in "Sebastian". And if there is a reference to
"себя", there is also a deeply structured reference to the
Schutzstaffel we are free
to cull out from the same name (after all, "Sebastian" can be abridged as "SS"). And yet there is
no the SS in either "Sebastian" or The Real Life of Sebastian Knight: "Entities must not be
multiplied beyond necessity."

With respect,
Grigori

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