Poetic Fragments of Prose Text: a Quantitative Study on the Material of Russian Short Stories Written in the XX Century

The work is devoted to the study of poetic fragments in prose text: their frequency, sources, contexts of appearance and functions. The study is conducted on the material of 1000 texts from the Russian Short Story Corpus, all written in the 20th century, from which 245 poetic fragments were extracted by applying machine learning models and manually refining the results. As a result of analyzing the distribution of fragments by decade, it was discovered that the highest rate of poetic and song quotations accrued to the 1930s; such fragments appeared slightly less frequently in the 1980s, and least frequently in the 1940s. The extracted fragments can be considered as precedent texts. Based on the literary analysis of these fragments, it was concluded that the functions of verse and song lines in short stories include refining the characters' images, appealing to the readers' personal experience, and creating the atmosphere of a certain time and place. However, quotations turn out to be connected with famous works not in all cases: among them there are both quotations from A.S. Pushkin and A.A. Blok as well as satirical poems written by the authors of the stories specifically for their texts.