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Digital Humanities and Literary Realism
This chapter investigates literary prose of the realist era in Russia using digital humanities methods. It focuses on how computational analysis can enhance an understanding of descriptions of literary characters, geographical locations, and lexical composition in literary texts. Using a corpus of more than five hundred texts (forty-six million word occurrences), it eschews the focus on individual writers and puts Russian realism within the broader context of nineteenth-century Russian literature. The authors employed word embeddings and vector semantics to analyze character descriptions in realist literature. The results indicated that the “typical” aspects of literary characters often overshadowed their individuality, reflecting the realist focus on common human experiences. The study utilized geocoding techniques to map mentions of geographical locations within the texts. This analysis showed that realist literature turned from portraying historical (and largely mythical) settings of Muscovite Rus’, Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltics to the then-new capital Saint Petersburg, to western Europe, and to the “new” eastern and southern peripheries of the Russian Empire as it continued to expand. With the help of a contrastive corpus analysis approach the authors examined the general lexical composition of the texts. This analysis showed that realist prose diverges from its romantic predecessor in its higher degree of dialogism, focusing more attention on depictions of everyday life, and in more explicit portrayal of thought, conscience, and human experience. However, it also showed that the poetry of the realist era did not undergo the same transition and maintained much of the romantic aesthetics, remaining a refuge for more conservative genres.
