WHY DOSTOEVSKY’S “THE DOUBLE”, “POOR PEOPLE”, “WHITE NIGHTS”, “NETOCHKA NEZVANOVA”, “MR. PROKHARCHIN” AND “CROCODILE” ARE UNBALANCED TEXTS IN THE WRITER’S IDIOSTYLE

The well-known facts — that Dostoevsky’s novellas “Netochka Nezvanova”, “Poor People” and some others are deviations from the style of the author himself — are confirmed by statistical indicators of the author’s use of small words, i. e. conjunctions, particles, discursive and introductory words, which are collectively referred to as staples. In total, there are 883 such units, according to the frequencies of which the authors diff er, they are counted, on the one hand, in the analyzed text X, on the other — in the corpus of all other texts of the titular or even any of the authors available in our database: now there are a total of about 70 diff erent authors of the XIX–XX centuries (or 77 diff erent idiosyncrasies and — 917 of their texts). The main indicator is the total deviations, i. e. the sum of the absolute values of the diff erences between the frequencies of the 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, the following two phases of “loss” of authorship are recorded: on the 1st text, X loses a suffi cient gap in the indicators of the total frequency deviations of all staples in the text of the titular author, i.e. a gap with the fi rst or closest of all competitorsapplicants for authorship: such a gap is leveled and becomes approximately equal to the gaps — diff erences in deviations from the idiostyle of the analyzed text of all the other author’s idiostyles, i.e. in the group of sediment, becoming practically indistinguishable from them (such texts in Dostoevsky’s idiostyle were the stories “The Double”, “Poor People”, “White Nights”, short stories “Crocodile” and “Mr. Prokharchin”); and at the 2nd phase, deviations from the idiostyle of the analyzed text from some or several of the competitors become fewer than deviations of the titular author himself, the gap becomes negative, and the chances of authorship no longer appear to belong to the real author, but to someone else or to several authors at once — as in the case of 6 idiostyles which get ahead of the titular author of “Netochka Nezvanova” in terms of the total frequency deviations: the prose of A. Panaeva, N. Pomyalovsky, Turgenev, Gogol, L. Tolstoy and V. Garshin.