From graphemic dependence to lexical structure: a Markovian perspective on Dante's Commedia

This study investigates the structural organisation of Dante's Divina Commedia through a symbolic representation based on vowel-consonant (V/C) encoding. Modelling the resulting sequence as a four-state Markov chain yields a parsimonious index of graphemic memory, capturing the balance between persistence and alternation patterns. Across the poem, this index exhibits a slight but consistent increase from the Inferno to the Paradiso, indicating a directional shift in local dependency structure. Trigram-level analysis shows that this trend is driven by a restricted set of recurrent configurations, interpreted as graphemic probes linking the Markov representation to identifiable lexical environments in the text. These probes display distinct behaviours: configurations involving two transitions more frequently emerge across word boundaries, reflecting interactions between adjacent tokens, whereas configurations with fewer transitions are largely confined to intra-lexical structures. Part of the signal is further shaped by orthographic phenomena, particularly apostrophised forms, highlighting the role of writing conventions alongside phonological and lexical organisation. A complementary classification analysis identifies cantica-specific terms, providing lexical anchors through which graphemic probes can be related to the structure of the poem. This organisation is reflected not only in the separation of the three cantiche, but also in a continuous trajectory across the text. Overall, the results show that simple probabilistic models applied to symbolic text representations can uncover structured interactions between local dependencies, lexical distribution, orthographic encoding, and large-scale organisation, providing an interpretable framework for linking local symbolic dynamics to higher-level textual organisation.

Markov reads Pushkin, again: A statistical journey into the poetic world of Evgenij Onegin

This study applies symbolic time series analysis and Markov modeling to explore the phonological structure of Evgenij Onegin-as captured through a graphemic vowel/consonant (V/C) encoding-and one contemporary Italian translation. Using a binary encoding inspired by Markov's original scheme, we construct minimalist probabilistic models that capture both local V/C dependencies and large-scale sequential patterns. A compact four-state Markov chain is shown to be descriptively accurate and generative, reproducing key features of the original sequences such as autocorrelation and memory depth. All findings are exploratory in nature and aim to highlight structural regularities while suggesting hypotheses about underlying narrative dynamics. The analysis reveals a marked asymmetry between the Russian and Italian texts: the original exhibits a gradual decline in memory depth, whereas the translation maintains a more uniform profile. To further investigate this divergence, we introduce phonological probes-short symbolic patterns that link surface structure to narrative-relevant cues. Tracked across the unfolding text, these probes reveal subtle connections between graphemic form and thematic development, particularly in the Russian original. By revisiting Markov's original proposal of applying symbolic analysis to a literary text and pairing it with contemporary tools from computational statistics and data science, this study shows that even minimalist Markov models can support exploratory analysis of complex poetic material. When complemented by a coarse layer of linguistic annotation, such models provide a general framework for comparative poetics and demonstrate that stylized structural patterns remain accessible through simple representations grounded in linguistic form.

Hybrid topic modelling for computational close reading: Mapping narrative themes in Pushkin's Evgenij Onegin

This study presents a hybrid topic modelling framework for computational literary analysis that integrates Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) with sparse Partial Least Squares Discriminant Analysis (sPLS-DA) to model thematic structure and longitudinal dynamics in narrative poetry. As a case study, we analyse Evgenij Onegin-Aleksandr S. Pushkin's novel in verse-using an Italian translation, testing whether unsupervised and supervised lexical structures converge in a small-corpus setting. The poetic text is segmented into thirty-five documents of lemmatised content words, from which five stable and interpretable topics emerge. To address small-corpus instability, a multi-seed consensus protocol is adopted. Using sPLS-DA as a supervised probe enhances interpretability by identifying lexical markers that refine each theme. Narrative hubs-groups of contiguous stanzas marking key episodes-extend the bag-of-words approach to the narrative level, revealing how thematic mixtures align with the poem's emotional and structural arc. Rather than replacing traditional literary interpretation, the proposed framework offers a computational form of close reading, illustrating how lightweight probabilistic models can yield reproducible thematic maps of complex poetic narratives, even when stylistic features such as metre, phonology, or native morphology are abstracted away. Despite relying on a single lemmatised translation, the approach provides a transparent methodological template applicable to other high-density literary texts in comparative studies.