Under a False Flag: Literary Hoaxes and the Use of Numerals

Abstract

The present study pertains to stylometry. There are cases when a writer who has achieved fame, for various reasons, begins to create under a different name, tries to write in a different manner and, at times, again succeeds in a new incarnation. Whether the author is able to significantly change the literary style inherent in him or it is impossible to escape from himself – our work is devoted to the study of this issue. The study is based on the analysis of what numerals are present in the texts of an author. It has been shown by several examples from English-, French- and Russian-language literature, that the use of numerals is an author's feature that manifests itself in all or most of the sufficiently long texts of a given author. We apply our approach to the works of Romain Gary, Boris Akunin (Grigori Chkhartishvili) and some other authors of interest for stylometry. The conclusions are drawn on the basis of hierarchical cluster analysis and supported by the Pearson's chi-squared test.