the choice of Carl
over Karl is no surprise to us mathematicians. The greatest German EVER was
christened CARL Friedrich GAUSS (1777-1855).
Dear Stan
Kelly-Bottle,
As someone who was born
in the Communist state (in 1970), I was habitually thinking of that other
Karl (of whom we belatedly found out that he was not the greatest
German -- in fact, not a German at all) and quite forgot about one of VN's
ancestors, the composer Graun, whose name was CARL Heinrich.
Your ‘coincidences’ are remarkably
UNremarkable
Prel = perl (Russian for "pearl")
pearl = aprel (Russian for "April;" Carl du
Prel was born on April 3, 1839, and died the year in which VN, whose life also
began in April, was born)
In you opinion, the above is
not erstaunlich?
I read only a few chapters of "The
Philosophy of Mysticism" (1885), the book by Carl du Prel that appeared, by
another coincidence, the same year as Stevenson's Jekyll & Hyde was written
and that deals almost exclusively with dreams, and those
chapters strike me, like Victor's tongue-twister, as strangely Pale
Fire-relevant. To Victor's observations about Charles/Karl (their irony didn't
escape me) I could add that Kinbote's uncle Conmal addresses him once
as karlik, which is Russian for "dwarf." Conmal's address is
ironical, because Kinbote is a big tall man, "the Great Beaver." It is Hyde
in the Stevenson story who has a dwarfish appearance. In his lecture on R.
L. Stevenson, VN points out that both "Hyde" and "Jekyll" are Danish words, just
as the word "bodkin" happens to be one. Add to this the fact that the word
"kinbote" occurs in "Jekyll and Hyde" (as pointed out by Carolyn).
Alexey Sklyarenko