What is a skrepny (staple`s) analysis – on the example of the story "Netochka Nezvanova" as an unbalanced text in Dostoevsky's idiostyle (as well as "Poor people" and "White nights" as texts with insufficiently expressed authorhip)

Abstract

The article contains such well-known facts that Dostoevsky's stories "Netochka Nezvanova", "Poor People" and "White Nights" are deviations from the author's style, confirmed by statistical indicators of the use of small words in them, i.e. conjunctions, particles, discursive and introductory words, which are collectively referred to as staples. Because of this, the method we use can be called skrepny (staple’s) analysis. In total, there are 883 such units, according to the frequencies of which the authors differ, they are counted, on the one hand, in the analyzed text X, and on the other, in the corpus of all other texts, both the title text and any authors available in our database: now there are about 70 different authors in total XIX-XX centuries (or 77 different idiosyncrasies), and - 917 of their texts. The main indicator is the total deviations: the sum of the absolute values of the differences between the frequencies of the use of staples in the analyzed text and – the average values of their frequencies in other texts of the same or some other author. At the same time, we record the following two phases of the "loss" of authorship: at the 1st phase, text X loses a sufficient gap in the indicators of the total frequency deviations of all staples in the text of the titular author – a gap with the first or closest of all competitors-applicants for authorship – when such a gap is leveled and becomes approximately equal to the gaps (differences in deviations from the idiostyle of the analyzed text) between all other author's idiostyles, becoming almost indistinguishable from them: it is with such texts that the stories "Poor People", "White Nights", "Crocodile" and "Mr. Prokharchin" by Dostoevsky show themselves, and at the 2nd phase, deviations from the idiosyncrasy of the analyzed text of someone (or several of the competitors at once) become even smaller than the deviations of the titular author himself, i.e. the gap becomes negative: thus, the chances of "authorship" no longer appear in the real author, but in someone else or immediately several of these competing authors - as in the case of the leading titular author of "Netochka Nezvanova" (in terms of the total frequency deviations in all staples) at once have 6 idiostyles – prose A.Panaeva, N.Pomyalovsky, Turgenev, Gogol, L.Tolstoy and V.Garshin.