Specific words and phrases of Russian classic writers of the XIX century: an essay on a contrastive corpus study

The paper presents the results of a quantitative study that identifies characteristic and specific low-frequency words for the prose of Russian classic writers of the XIX century. TF-IDF measure and a large collection of the XIX century texts by Turgenev, Goncharov, Leskov and Dostoevsky were used to identify words and phrases that are rarely found or not found in other authors’ works, but appear several times in the prose of the classic writers. This contrastive approach is able to complement the traditional author’s lexicography, to identify the specific features of a particular author’s style against the background of the contemporary language. Writer-specific words and phrases have foreign language origin or come from the reality contemporary to the writer. Words identified for Turgenev, Leskov and Dostoevsky correlate well with the stylistic peculiarities of these writers. At the same time, the revealed vocabulary of Dostoevsky once again underlines his historical and literary connection with Gogol and provides new data for philological analysis, which can lead to finding evidence that the author of the “Great Pentateuch” was familiar with Pyotr Kropotkin’s works.