QUANTITATIVE APPROACH TO A CHARACTER SYSTEM ANALYSIS IN A LITERARY TEXT (based on Crime and Punishment by F. M. Dostoyevsky)

The paper presents the experience of formalized approach to the character system analysis in a literary work. The study object is F. M. Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and
Punishment. The study aims at visualizing the character system in this literary work. The procedure for analyzing the character system is preceded by making a concordance of the text. Then it is used for conducting a coreference analysis of character nominations followed by calculating the strength of the links between them. The magnitude of the link strength in a pairwise comparison of characters is equal to the number of established syntactic links between these characters. To visualize the character system links with maximum strength are considered. 
The graphical way of visualizing the data indicates that the murder of an old womaninterest-taker by the central character Raskolnikov, and detection of this crime do not constitute the main conflict of the novel Crime and Punishment. On the contrary, it lies in revealing the tragedy of the personality manifested through the prism of the central character perception by other characters and through their attitude to him. Along with this, the quantitative approach turns out to be an effective way to penetrate the plot-compositional structure of the novel and establish that the main confl ict of the novel consists in the confrontation between Raskolnikov and investigator Porfiry Petrovich, which is traditionally recognized. At the same time, it demonstrates that the literary function of another main character Razumikhin seems to be underestimated. The function of secondary and episodic characters is the direct or indirect addition of traits to the portrait of the central character. The visualization of the character system results in an oriented loaded graph illustrating the strongest possible links between the characters of the novel.