Andrei M. Ranchin, DSc in Philology, Leading Researcher, Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Nakhimovsky Avenue, 51/21, 117418, Moscow, Russia. ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0414-5106 E-mail: aranchin@mail.ru
The article examines the potential of the quantitative method using the example of defining the theme and genre of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”. The genre classification of “The Tale” has been and remains con-troversial. This article focuses on an unpublished work by B.I. Yarkho, a pro-ponent of the quantitative method of analysis, as reported by M.L. Gasparov, also a staunch supporter of this method. B.I. Yarkho compared “The Tale” with such medieval monuments of heroic epic poetry as “The Song of Ro-land”, “The Song of My Cid”, and “Beowulf”, and found that the percentage of vocabulary related to semantic fields such as ‘courage’, ‘military honor’, and ‘patriotism’ in the Old Russian monument is significantly higher than in all of the aforementioned poems, and this seems to indicate that the work belongs to the heroic epic genre. Meanwhile, while the significance of the patriotic motif in “The Tale” is intuitively felt, heroism is not the dominant theme of the work: unlike, for example, “The Song of Roland”, it does not depict the heroes’ military exploits, does not describe a single duel, the pro-tagonist is not simply defeated but captured, and the cult of arms, so signifi-cant in “The Song of Roland”, is absent. When determining the thematic focus of a literary text, the structural level of certain elements, whether or not they possess a dominant role, must be taken into account. In a narrative text, which, despite the author’s digressions, “The Tale” is, the genre-thematic dominant is formed not by the frequency of vocabulary in a particular field, but primarily by the semantics of individual episodes and the semantics of the plot as a whole, especially its climax and denouement. This Old Russian literary monument is unique in its genre.
“The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”; genre; heroic poem; quantitative method in philology; “The Song of Roland”; B.I. Yarkho; M.L. Gasparov.
23.10.2025
20.11.2025
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