Nikolai Cherginets’ prose: A quantitative stylistic analysis and the problem of authorship

Abstract

Nikolai Cherginets, a Belarusian author of prose fiction, was recently honored as People’s Writer of Belarus (2022), thus becoming the first holder of this title whose books are written in Russian. The quantitative linguistic analysis reveals that Cherginets’ novels “Riskovannaya igra” (A risky game), “Russkaya krasavitsa” (A Russian beauty), “Poslednii geroi” (The last hero) significantly differ from his other oeuvres and from each other. Linguistic and narrative similarities, improbable to arise by chance, are found between these novels and the creative output of Andrei Voronin, a collective pen name. We argue that the three books, released under the name of Cherginets, were in fact authored chiefly by the creators of Andrei Voronin.