[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
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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