A Statistical Analysis of Genre Dynamics: Evolution of the Russian Five-Act Comedy in Verse in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

My research examines the following questions: 1) Did Romanticism exist in Russian five-act verse comedy? 2) Did Russian five-act verse comedy evolve similarly to French five-act verse comedy? 3) Was Russian four-act verse comedy distinct from the Russian five-act verse comedy? I rely on Boris Iarkho’s quantitative features and methodology, which I modernize by automating data processing and calculations, replacing his transgression coefficient by statistical significance testing, and improving Iarkho’s synthesis with open-form scores that measure how experimental a tradition or author is. I maintain that, unlike the French, the Russian five-act verse comedy did not evolve in a wave-like manner with alternating closed and open forms. Instead, I have found a quantitative basis for Iurii Tynianov and Mikhail Gasparov’s earlier claim that the closed and open styles co-existed and mixed in the Russian context (Tynianov 1969, 52-3; Gasparov 1997, 434-455). In Russian five-act verse comedy, Romanticism did not supersede Neoclassicism; instead, some comedies were written in the Romantic style, whereas others remained faithful to the Neoclassical. The evolution of the French five-act verse comedy followed Heinrich Wölfflin’s model of alternating closed and open forms, which Boris Iarkho had also observed in the case of the French five-act tragedy. The Russian four-act verse comedy tended to be more experimental than the contemporaneous French and Russian five-act verse comedy.