ONE APPROACH TO THE CLASSIFICATION OF RUSSIAN SONNETS

In this article which developes the ideas of our other article in this collection 5636 sonnets of precisely 14 lines are studied. An approach using the notion of the Ham- ming distance from the theory of codes and calculating Hamming distances between the sonnet lines. An important notion of Hamming Index is introduced which is a sum of 13 Hamming distances and is a measure of variability of distribution of stresses in a sonnet. Sonnets are shown which have the minimum and maximum Hamming indexes, Hamming distance being determined for each line. The sonnets prevailing in a corpus have masculine as well as feminine clausulae. It is shown that the presence of caesurae and the length of clausula do not considerably affect the Hamming index that is they do not make the rhythm more variable.