Refined Digital Textual Criticism: More on the Question of Authorship of the novel Quiet Flows the Don
Kirill Maslinsky · Russkaya Literatura · 2022
In 2019, N. P. Velikanova and B. V. orekhov published a stylometric study that tested the hypotheses about the authorship of the novel Quiet Flows the Don using Burrows’s Delta. The aim of this article is to suggest a minor but signifcant correction to their conclusions, based on the replication study made possible by the recent publication of the research data by orekhov. The extended series of Delta experiments using these data supports the conclusion that The Don Stories and the frst three volumes of Quiet Flows the Don were written by the same author. The alternative hypotheses about the authorship of the novel (kryukov, Sevskij, Serafmovich) are not confrmed by the stylo-metric data. Yet, despite Velikanova and orekhov’s claim, the Delta method and the corpus used in the study do not provide suffcient evidence to reliably attribute the fourth volume of Quiet Flows the Don to the same author.