Digital Textual Criticism: M.A. Sholokhov's Novel And Quiet Flows the Don as an Example of Text Attribution
Using the example of M.A. Sholokhov's novel And Quiet Flows the Don, the article deals with the development opportunities for digital textual criticism and analy ses those systemic causes which determine the methods of author's text quantitative attribution as applied to various textologi cal problems. Among the above mentioned causes are mythologization of statistical approaches and verification sampling in sufficiency. As a solution, the authors of the article propose the reliable attribution method Delta, which was created in the ear ly 2000s and is now applied to texts written in a variety of languages. The results of Delta may be presented as a dendrogram, and this method is good in de tecting stylistic differences between the liter ary works created by those writers who were contemporary to Sholokhov. As concerns the problem of the author ship of the novel And Quiet Flows the Don, Delta is quite good here in distinguishing its text from the ones created by the al leged authors of the epic novel (i.e., Krukov, Sevsky, and Serafimovich), and the results of its work are undeniable: all the parts of the novel And Quiet Flows the Don were written by the same author, who, moreover, is also the author of the Tales from the Don, published under the name of Sholokhov. Therefore, precisely Sholokhov - as com pared with all Soviet writers of 1920-1930 whose texts were digitized and are now available for a computer research - is the only plausible author of the novel And Quiet Flows the Don.