Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita” and Yury Trifonov’s “Preliminary Results”: Parallels and their linguistic analysis

The article compares Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita” with Yury Trifonov’s novella “Preliminary Results”. More than 30 pairs of text fragments are identified in which narrative, stylistic, and lexical similarities emerge. The study attempts to formalise these parallels using several linguistic methods: statistical counts of lexical overlap, analysis of coinciding multi-word fragments, detection of shared low-frequency vocabulary, and automatic measurement of semantic proximity. None of the applied methods reveals a statistically significant influence of one text upon the other. The conclusion discusses the fundamental possibilities of formalising intuitively perceived parallels in works of fiction and outlines potential directions for further research of this kind.

corpus linguistics, literary language, quantitative linguistics, Russian literature, textual parallels