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For what it's worth (un pet de lapin?) Mikhail BOTVINNIK (1911-95) was
a leading Soviet Chess Grandmaster, becoming World Champion first in
1948. I'm sure the startling near-anagram has been spotted by others.
Remove VIN ( = I, VN!) and out comes our two-faced deceiver.
Jansy, methinks, reads too much into the literal string-matches with
the letters KIN. It's such a common diminutive suffix (catkin, bumpkin,
bod[t]kin), unrelated (except to devout monists!) to the KIN in
kinship/kithship or PushKIN.
BTW JM: delighted you are reading Ian Stewart, FRS, and hope some real
mathematical osmosis will inspire you. You should next read his How to
Cut a Cake - and other Mathematical Conundrums. And not just because
Ian quotes one of my songs (Lemma 3 Very Pretty) as a sign that
mathematicians can have plain-daft FUN!
I was pleased to see one recent contributor reminding us that Pale Fire
is, after all, a SATIRE, and to many of us, possibly the greatest such
since Swift in stretching that fuzzy genre in so many sublime
directions. E.g., we have Shade, a not-that-great fictional, academic
poet using inappropriate prosody to ponder Life's major and minor
ontologies. VN has Shade pen both the greatest lines since Keats, and
the funniest doggerel since McGonnigal. Lurking behind CK's
quasi-scholastic nit-picking, 'must-have-the-last-word' commentary is
the Elephant-in-the-Room: a WARNING against similar LitCrit excesses in
dissecting Pale Fire, the novel. The sweet paradox is that VN himself,
with those 4-volumes on Onegin, was the master of ultra-zealous,
mind-boggling exegesis. (Paraphrasing an earlier quip on Keatsian
scholarship, 'Not one of Pushkin's Laundry Lists must go unexamined!')
I trust that this encourages MORE and BETTER Pale Fire analysis?
Stan Kelly-Bootle