Novels of Vladimir Nabokov in the context of Russian interbellum prose: stylometric aspect

The paper deals with the style of Vladimir Nabokov’s Russian-language novels and identifies their place in the literary flow of the interwar period using quantitative methods. The main method in the study in is Burrows’ Delta - one of the most reliable stylometric tools, assessing the preferences of authors in the area of the most frequent words (function words) and, on this basis, allowing to compare texts with each other. In the course of the study, it turns out that the novels of the interbellum period are divided into several groups: the largest groups are “Odessa-Fedin” and “Nabokov-Grin” branches. Nabokov’s Russian-language novels are divided into two groups: early texts (“Mary”, “The Defense”, “King, Queen, Knave”, “Glory”, “Laughter in the Dark”) and later (“Despair”, “Invitation to a Beheading”, “The Gift”). It is significant that Delta shows the stylistic similarity of Leonov’s novel “Skutarevsky” with Nabokov’s later texts, attributing it to the latter, and also reveals signs of Leonov’s stylistics in “The Gift”. During an experiment on an expanded corpus with the addition of other novels of Leonov, the correctness of attribution is restored, Leonov’s texts are reunited on one branch, but similarities in the authors’ styles are also noted. The result confirms the hypotheses of some critics about the similarity of the styles of two peers and is a significant stylistic indicator in the context of studying the evolution of authors’ styles and comparative analysis of their texts.