This article, written by Igor Mandel and Mikhail Epstein, is appearing for the first time in English on the NURPLRT Forum. The article is also published in a Russian version: “Что в имени тебе моем? Русские писатели в статистике интернета” “Новый Журнал” / The New Review. №316, 2024, сентябрь, стр. 309-324.
Abstract
This article analyzes the frequency of references to renowned Russian writers over various years, reflecting their level of recognition in the Russian-speaking and English-speaking segments of the Internet. The popularity of each of the forty-one writers was assessed both as their relative significance within the entire set of references (the “universe of culture”) and as the number of references per Internet user (“intensity of acquaintance”).
The findings allow for the adjustment of certain established stereotypes regarding the perception of iconic figures and the magnitude of their symbolic capital in the two languages. For instance, Gogol emerges as a more significant figure than Dostoevsky in the English perception; Leskov and Chekhov occupy a larger share in the English-speaking “universe” than in the Russian one. In the Russian segment, there is a sharp decline in mentions of Dostoevsky relative to his high rank in Murray’s assessment, in contrast to Nabokov, who is very popular in the English-speaking segment despite his low rank.
The article provides a general overview of the situation over the past 70 years, revealing striking differences between the Russian and English dynamics. In the Russian segment, there is a surge in interest in reading, starting around 1980, with the culmination by 2005, followed by a decline more or less to the pre-perestroika level. The previously semi-banned Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak are at the peak of this short-lived feast of the spirit, while the classics participate more moderately. The English-language segment exhibits different dynamics, with graphs tending to either grow or stabilize at a higher level than before.
The study also examines the intensity of occurrences of a writer per Internet user in Russian and English, revealing that five writers have a very high intensity in English, only 1.3-2 times lower than in Russian, suggesting they are almost equally well-known in the two languages. This study can serve as an example for further, more in-depth statistical research on “thoughts in numbers” and “people’s lives on the Internet.” The findings contribute to understanding the perception of Russian literature in different countries. A more detailed analysis is needed to fully comprehend the complex factors influencing the symbolic capital of Russian literature in various cultural contexts.
Keywords: cultural comparisons, frequency of references to writers on Google, Russian literature, Russian writers, Russian and English segments of the internet, statistical analysis of popularity, word frequency
In 2006, Mikhail Epstein introduced the concept of “humanetics” in his article “Thoughts in Numbers: Russia and the West in Internet Mirrors” as a science for studying the electronic Internet network from the perspective of extracting humanitarian knowledge [Epstein, 2006]. He provided numerous examples illustrating how differently the world is perceived from the viewpoints of the conventional “West” and Russia, based on the number of Google search results for various queried terms. It could be considered as one of the approaches to estimate the quality of aesthetically important objects and/or their authors (see [Mandel et. al., 2021] for references). Since then, much has changed, and Google itself has developed advanced systems such as Google Trends and Google Ngrams, allowing for the processing of links from various angles. However, that distant experience with the Internet in its early stages of development represents a kind of “snapshot in time,” which is interesting to compare with certain contemporary facts. In particular, Epstein’s work compared Russian writers in the Russian-language and English-language segments of the network, yielding rather intriguing conclusions. Independently, the other author Igor Mandel conducted an analysis of a broader range of writers but did not address the differences between multilingual segments [Mandel, 2010].
In this article, we attempt a more comprehensive analysis of previously posed questions, focusing solely on Russian literature (Epstein also examined philosophy, politics, and other domains in [Epstein, 2006],). The urgency of this issue is evident. For two years, a brutal war has raged in Ukraine, radically altering the world’s perception of Russia. A country that justifiably prided itself on its civilizational achievements, among which literature undoubtedly held the foremost position in public consciousness, is rapidly and perhaps irreversibly losing prestige in virtually all areas, including, certainly, the sphere of culture. Heated debates are ongoing regarding the reputation of Russian writers, the fate of the Russian language, and Russian culture as a whole.
The authoritarian system of governance established in the Russian Federation, the so-called “schizofascism,” as defined by M. Epstein [Epstein, 2023], constantly fuels these debates by virtue of its nature, creating a simulacrum of the “Russian world” with properties of an anti-world and anti-system, while escalating an apocalyptic threat to all of humanity. Under such circumstances, we deem it appropriate to create another “snapshot in time” – who knows what will remain of this entire culture in a few decades…
The popularity of a phenomenon in different cultures can be compared in at least two ways. Suppose we know a certain characteristic of the presence of writers A and B in culture 1 and in culture 2. Presence can be measured in different ways: the number of books published, the number of people who know about these writers, the number of references to them on the internet, etc. With the first approach, we can calculate the total interest in both writers in each of the cultures and establish the relative significance of the writers within that culture—namely, to determine the fractions A1/(A1+B1) and A2/(A2+B2) and compare them. With this approach, the sum A+B characterizes the “overall interest” in the given phenomenon in the corresponding culture, or the “size of the cultural universe,” and the fraction shows the share of a given author in it, their influence. For example, A might account for 70% of the overall interest in culture 1 and only 40% in culture 2. A peculiarity of this approach is that it does not depend on the actual size of the cultures, i.e., A1 and B1 are not directly compared with A2 and B2.
The second approach, on the contrary, considers these sizes and, accordingly, answers a different question. Suppose that the “overall size of the culture” is N1 and N2, respectively. As before, size can be measured in different ways: the number of native speakers of a given culture, the prevalence of the language of a given culture, the total number of all works within a given culture, etc. Then we can calculate the values A1/N1, A2/N2 (the same for B) and compare these specific indicators. Each such fraction will show the “intensity of the writer’s presence.” If, for example, N is the total number of speakers of a given language, and A is the number of books published by the writer, then A/N characterizes the familiar statistic “number of books per capita.” Suppose A is the number of references on the internet, and N is the size of the language segment of the internet. In that case, A/N reflects the frequency of mentions of the writer in that language (see more details below, comments on Fig. 7). We used statistics of both types in the analysis; let’s start with the first one.
Consider the graph in Fig. 1. It shows in a condensed form the information collected in [Epstein, 2006]. The data was calculated as follows. A word was entered in the Google search box, and the number of times it occurred was recorded. The word was entered in quotes, so only literal occurrences were counted (this is especially important when searching for two or more words—for example, a first name and surname). Only surnames were checked, without first names. In the English version, there could be variations in spelling—for example, Dostoevsky or Dostoyevsky; such variants were checked, and then the frequencies were added up. After measuring the frequencies in Russian, their total sum was calculated, and then each frequency was divided by this sum. The sum defines the “universe of Russian writers,” and the fraction is the share of a given writer in this universe (the data used for calculation in 2024 is given in Appendix 1). For example, for “Пушкин” (A.S. Pushkin, in Cyrillic), his share on the Russian internet in 2006 was 7,960,000/34,400,000 = 21.3%, while for “Pushkin”, similarly, it was 3,90,000/33,530,00 = 9.2%, which is shown in Fig. 1. The red line divides all writers into two groups: those to the right of it are more popular in the Russian language, and those to the left are more popular in English, percentage-wise. As can be seen, there were six Russian writers who, relative to the volumes of the English internet and the Russian internet, were more popular in English than in Russian in 2006: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Gogol, Mandelstam, and Pasternak. It is not very surprising that, conversely, poets who are difficult to translate into another language are more popular in Russian. It is also evident that the undisputed leadership, in both languages, is occupied by Leo Tolstoy, followed more or less expectedly by Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Pushkin, and Gogol.
Let’s now compare this graph with the same one for 2024 (Fig. 2). Pushkin and especially Tolstoy have hardly changed their positions; the entire group of poets (together with Bulgakov) also remained almost where it was, in the range of 4 to 8% in both languages. The ones who most radically changed their location were Chekhov (increased his share in Russian and decreased in English), Gogol (significantly increased his share in English); Mandelstam (sharply decreased his share in English); Pasternak (on the contrary, increased it). But the most unexpected happened with Dostoevsky – his share in English fell from the second after Tolstoy (about 16%) to 7%, while maintaining his steady place in the Russian environment (also about 7%). In general, instead of six out of eleven in 2006, only three are still noticeably more popular in the English-speaking world (Tolstoy, Gogol, and Pasternak – all of them, it should be noted, were to the left of the red line earlier, too). Technically, Mandelstam also falls into this category, but he (like Dostoevsky) is in the neutral zone, very close to the level of equal interest.
Fig. 1. Relative popularity of Russian writers, surnames only, 2006, based on data in [1]
The “blitz” analysis conducted above already gives some idea of the situation with some famous Russian writers and poets, but it has quite obvious drawbacks. Only 12 authors were considered, which is not enough. Surnames were used without first names, which creates a high probability of errors in the data. There are at least three famous writers with the surname Tolstoy, not to mention many other people with this surname. The surname “Bulgakov” is quite popular, and there are also many Pushkins. In addition to Osip Mandelstam, his wife Nadezhda, whose memoirs were very popular in the West, also shares the same surname. In short, adding the first name, although significantly reducing the number of occurrences, increases the reliability of identifying the intended individual. Experience shows that measurements taken even at close hours or days can yield quite different results, sometimes differing by a factor of two or more (this fluctuation is inherent in all search engines, as they constantly change the angle of search, like the direction of a spotlight, to illuminate the entire network space). Some analysis of variability and averaging of data is necessary.
Fig. 2. Relative popularity of Russian writers considered in [Epstein, 2006], in 2024 (surnames)
The work was carried out anew in several stages. The first step was to compile a list of those writers who “adequately” represent Russian literature. This, of course, is a non-trivial task, requiring, in principle, an entire study in itself. But to some extent, such a study has already been done. In 2003, the remarkable book [Murray, 2004] was published, in which Charles Murray did a tremendous amount of work, collecting data on 4,002 “significant figures” in world history, divided into 21 segments (see the list in [ibid., p. 143]), such as astronomy, physics, medicine, science in general, Western philosophy, Chinese literature, etc. The segment of interest to us is called “Western literature” and contains 835 significant figures, of which 53 belong to Russian literature (see Appendix). Murray’s cutoff point for selection was 1950: by that time, either the candidate for consideration had to be dead, or they had to be at least years old. For this reason, many celebrities of a later time were simply not considered.
We will not dwell in detail on the description of the evaluation procedures in [Murray, 2004], but only note that they were based on how much professional scholars write about a particular person in the most well-known solid publications of different countries, such as the “Encyclopedia of Mathematics” and the like. Within each segment, the evaluations ranged from 100 (the highest) to one. In Western literature, for example, Shakespeare received 100, Goethe (the next on the list) – 81, and the two most famous Russian writers, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky – 42 and 41. Writers were evaluated only based on foreign sources to avoid the natural distortion of significance in favor of a national representative. In other words, German encyclopedias were not accounted for in the evaluation of Goethe, and Russian ones were not used in the evaluation of Pushkin. Of course, the bias in favor of “one’s own” person will still be present in any segment, but only in literature does it have a radical nature, because the very subject matter of literature is language, which cannot be adequately perceived in translation, especially in the case of poetry. Murray refers to very specific individuals; he does not have the problem of “false identification” that, unfortunately, arises for us and in all other automated approaches, as noted above. The specificity of his approach is what can be called a “scientific bias” in the assessments. The fact that many pages are devoted to someone in serious scientific reference books does not necessarily mean that they are most widely read, loved, and valued. But in any case, the assessments in [Murray, 2004] are the most reliable guide for understanding the “quality” of a particular person. We took the list of writers from this book as a basis but discarded some and added other authors (not including those currently living). We ended up with 41 people (see Appendix 1).
Estimates of the average number of references were made over 8-10 days in the period from February 7 to February 22, 2024, both manually and using a special program written in Python (the authors are grateful to Dr. A. Shoshitaishvili for assistance in its implementation). As can be seen from Appendix 1, overall, the estimates are quite stable, with a coefficient of variation of 10-20%. However, for three writers – Gogol, Yevtushenko, and especially Chernyshevsky – the variability is significantly higher. There is no rational explanation for the high variability precisely for these writers; perhaps extending the observation period will lead to a decrease in variability. Let us look at Fig. 3, which shows, for convenience, the results of these refined calculations for 2024 for only those twelve writers who were considered above.
As can be seen, compared to Fig. 2, Tolstoy and Gogol have not radically changed their positions, but Chekhov and Dostoevsky have confidently moved to the left of the red line. It is interesting that the original analysis of 2006 for surnames alone (Fig. 1) also showed this, but now such a statement can be made much more substantiated. Pasternak’s very high status in Fig. 2 has been replaced by a much more modest one in the English-speaking world (the surname is quite popular, so adding the first name, we hope, reduced the identification error). But perhaps the most significant thing is that Pushkin no longer appears so significant in either the Russian or the English-language segments of the internet. The remaining writers, obviously well-identified by their surnames, more or less maintained their position.
Fig. 3. Relative popularity of Russian writers (first name and surname), 2024
All other writers considered in 2024 have estimates below 5% in any language, so we show them separately in Fig. 4 (which also includes a few from the list of twelve in Fig. 3). The picture is interesting – all poets are to the right of the red line (expectedly); all Nobel laureates (Bunin, Pasternak, Sholokhov, Brodsky, Solzhenitsyn) are also to the right. Who is on the left, whom the English-speaking people “love” more?
Fig. 4. Russian writers with popularity below 5% (first name and surname), 2024
With certainty, one can speak of three writers, of whom only one does not cause surprise. Turgenev was traditionally perceived as a Westerner. Leskov’s unexpectedly high popularity in the English-speaking world is largely due to the success of the 2016 British historical drama film Lady Macbeth, directed by William Oldroyd and based on Leskov’s 1865 novella “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” (in Murray’s assessment, Leskov’s rank is relatively high, 6). Leskov was one the most virtuosic masters of the Russian language among the giants of 19th-century Russian literature, but also the least “liberal” of them. Chernyshevsky, on the contrary, was an aesthetically unremarkable author but an extraordinary propagandist of revolutionary ideas. As such, he may still be revered in broad circles of the leftist intelligentsia in the West.
The question of how much the number of occurrences in the internet corresponds to the “gold standard” proposed by [Murray,2004] is of undoubted interest. Thirty-two of the forty-one writers we examined here have his assessments, so it is quite possible to conduct a meaningful comparison. The graphs in Figures 5 and 6 show how Murray’s ranks and Google frequencies behave together for each language (they only show the most significant writers, with occurrences exceeding 500,000, otherwise the graphs would be unreadable).
Fig. 5. Relationship between the number of occurrences of the most popular writers in 2024 and Murray’s index, Russian
As can be seen, the correlations are positive (Tolstoy sets the tone, as before), especially for the English language, but there are some significant exceptions. In the Russian version, as already noted, there is a very noticeable sharp decline in the status of Dostoevsky – he is almost equal to Tolstoy according to Murray, but lags behind many other writers in terms of frequency of occurrences. In a sense, this may reflect the fact that scholars love to write about Fyodor Dostoevsky (thus increasing Murray’s rank), but people read him less and less – although this phenomenon is much weaker in English (see more below). Similarly – Turgenev and, perhaps, Gogol are read very little compared to their very high ranks according to Murray.
In the English version, there is also a strong contrast between the high ranks of Pushkin and Turgenev and their relatively low presence on the internet. But the most interesting thing here is Nabokov’s very high popularity, fifth among all, although his Murray rank is very low (3). Nabokov’s star in the English-speaking world, so to speak, is steadily rising, while Dostoevsky’s star (whom Nabokov, as is well known, disliked) is set in the Russian world.
Fig. 6. Relationship between the number of occurrences of the most popular writers in 2024 and Murray’s index, English
Overall, if we judge not by the most successful writers on the graphs, but by all of them, the correlation of Murray’s assessments with mentions in the Russian version is 0.73, and in the English version – 0.81. However, in the first case, the correlation is strongly influenced by Leo Tolstoy (an outlier) – if he is removed, the correlation will drop to 0.64, while in the English version, Nabokov is an atypical observation; if he is removed, it will increase to 0.86. The square of the correlation coefficient is a characteristic of the quality of approximation of one variable by another – it shows, what percent of the variation of one variable could be explained by another. It turns out that if we discard outliers, then the relationship between Murray’s coefficients and estimates becomes significantly higher for the English internet: knowing the observed values, one can describe almost three-quarters of the variation in Murray’s index (0.86^2=73.7%); at the same time, in Russian, it is only 41%. Both results support the idea, that internet frequencies can approximate at least partly the popularity of the outstanding figures (expectedly, it works better for English than for Russian).
Let us briefly look now at the second kind of popularity statistics, the characteristics of intensity. There are several ways to estimate the size of the internet; we tried to do this based on the following technique: count the frequency of occurrence of the most popular word in the respective language (as was proposed in [Epstein, 2006]). In 2006, the estimates were made as follows. After measuring the usage frequency of writers’ surnames in English and Russian, their share was calculated relative to the total volumes of the English-speaking Internet and the Russian-speaking Internet, which were determined based on the number of the most frequent words in the two languages, the article “the” and the preposition “в”(in), according to Google. In 2024, the most popular word in English, the article “the,” occurred about 25 billion times, and the most popular Russian word “и” (and) – about 2.5 billion times, that is, the difference is 10 times. This is very close to the estimate of the volumes of the The English internet and The Russian internet on Wikipedia – 52% and 4.4%. Approximately the same coefficient of 10 is obtained when comparing the estimates of the English internet users (1,186,451,052) and the Russian internet users (116,353,942) – these are data for 2020, but the proportions have already stabilized for 2024. The simplest way to understand intensity is to calculate the number of mentions per internet user in each language and compare them.
The results are shown in Fig. 7. Here, each number is a fraction, where the numerator is the intensity of occurrences of the writer per thousand internet users in Russian, and the denominator is the same in English. For example, Tolstoy is mentioned 57 times per thousand users in Russian and only 9 times per thousand in English. The fraction is, respectively, 57/9 = 6.36. The list of writers is ordered by this indicator.
As can be seen, five writers (Chernyshevsky, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Grossman, and Nabokov) have a very high intensity in English, only 1.3-2 times lower than in Russian (we remind you that the figures for Chernyshevsky are not very reliable). In this respect, one can say that they are, on average, almost equally well-known in the two languages. Those at the end of the list are very little known to the English-speaking reader (Aksenov with a coefficient of 202 is not shown on the graph for the sake of readability).
Note that this view of popularity, although partially coinciding with the one previously considered (for example, both here and there Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Nabokov are very popular), generally gives a different idea of it. However, let us not try to “combine” different pictures.
The perception of Russian literature differs significantly between the Russian and English segments of the Internet. To illustrate this, we sorted Russian writers by the frequency of their occurrence in the Russian language (calculated as a share in the total “Russian universe”), took the first twenty most popular names, and compared their popularity to that in the English language (Appendix 2).
Fig. 7. The intensity of occurrences of a writer per Internet user in Russian to the intensity in English (for example, a coefficient of 1.5 for Gogol means that the number of his mentions in The Russian internet per user is one and a half times higher than the same number in The English internet, while for Merezhkovsky this ratio exceeds 60).
It is important to note that the coefficient of variation of estimates in this group (without Tolstoy) is 39%, while for the same group in the English Internet, it is much higher at 107% (a similar phenomenon is observed for all 41 writers). Thus, in the Russian audience, interests are distributed more evenly among writers, whereas in the English audience, more attention is paid to “stars” and less to everyone else. For this reason, when a writer’s popularity in the English world significantly exceeds their popularity in the Russian one, it is more logical to look for the reason in the numerator of the fraction (i.e., the share in the English Internet) rather than in the denominator (the share in the Russian Internet). The overall correlation of estimates in the two languages, 0.63, is not particularly high but still positive. However, if we remove the unifying figure of Leo Tolstoy, it drops sharply to almost zero (0.14), and for the first ten writers, it becomes negative (-0.08). There is a clear mismatch of popularity in the two worlds.
Let us focus on the most notable figures from the first twenty writers in the Russian version, whose popularity in the West substantially exceeds their popularity in Russia (see Appendix 2, bolded names). It is practically impossible to find just a philological explanation of the differences in popularity; a more in-depth detailed analysis requires extensive additional research. We just give the possible hints, which, hopefully, point out the right direction.
Ivan Turgenev (2.0% on the Russian Internet, 2.8% on the English Internet, English popularity is 1.37 times higher than Russian: 2.8/2.0=1.37). Turgenev’s fame in Europe has always been extremely high. He was one of the very few Russian ideological Westernizers; his texts are the most “rational” and understandable to the foreign reader; they often discuss social ideas that are fundamentally important both for their time (like “nihilism”) and now. He spoke French like a native, knew German and English, and was at par with European intellectual elites. It was thanks to Turgenev that Russian literature began to be perceived as an organic part of European literature.
Anton Chekhov (5.1%; 9.3%; 1.84 times difference). Chekhov managed in an amazing way to feel something that would later, in much more developed forms, be called the depth of subtext, the problem of loneliness and miscommunication, existentialism, and even postmodernism. Moreover, he did it “in gray tones”, with sadness and humor, without pedaling and pressure, in a “restrained” style familiar to the West – and therefore very convincingly. He rejected stereotypes in the portrayal of his compatriots and expanded the image of the Russian person, especially the intelligent one, bringing it closer to the Western.
Vladimir Nabokov (2.5%; 8.6%, 3.44 times difference). Having flared up with his “Lolita” (amplified by Kubrick’s 1962 film) as one of the pioneers of a new erotic openness, he immediately took a prominent place in mass culture and has remained there ever since. He, more than anyone else, personified the eternal tragedy and at the same time the strength of the Russian diaspora, opposing his undying love for his homeland with an even greater love for freedom.
Fyodor Dostoevsky (3.1%; 14.0%, 4.55 times difference). Dostoevsky is intuitively perceived as the most Russian writer; he should, ideally, occupy the highest place in the Russian pantheon (which is reflected in Murray’s estimates – 42 for Tolstoy and 41 for Dostoevsky), but the picture is completely different. What can rationally explain this? Dostoevsky absorbed so many different aspects of the “Russian soul” that the mirror he built of it must be very distorted. He not only proclaimed the microscopic “tear of a child” and the macroscopic “beauty will save the world” – concepts that expanded the usual psychological continuum to supernatural dimensions, but also proposed to “narrow down” exactly what he expanded
In conclusion, let us note again that the frequencies used in the article are the result of a vast number of factors that cannot be accounted for in such a simple study as ours. Even an attempt to decompose them into some simple components – for example, regional ones – is already a matter of high complexity. For instance, the “English segment of the Internet” is usually associated with the USA, Britain, and Canada – with what is sweepingly referred to as the “West” in the article. However, there are approximately 150-200 million English speakers in India and 30 million in Indonesia, and in total, one and a half billion people worldwide use English as a native or “second” language. Cultural traditions in these regions differ from both American and Russian ones. The penetration of Russian culture there occurred in a completely different way than in Europe and America. In addition to regional factors, there are other circumstances, such as the influence of films, theatrical productions, and various political circumstances. To seriously answer the question “why”, it would be necessary to conduct a huge amount of additional work. Our explanations in literary terms of some facts above are just one of the possible interpretations.
Humanetics still has a lot to do to understand what is happening with the symbolic capital of Russian literature (and not only) in different countries. This brief panoramic review is merely an introduction to a larger topic.
Igor Mandel: economist, statistician, PhD; Dr.Sc. Igor taught statistics as a professor at the Almaty Institute of National Economy, and marketing at the Institute of the Cabinet of Ministers of Kazakhstan; worked in American firms investing in Central Asia and Kazakhstan as an investment officer and executive director of the joint ventures. Since 2000 he has worked in several large marketing companies in senior analytical positions in the USA. Igor published 3 books and more than 150 scientific articles on statistics; 4 books (with co-authors) of iron and prose in Russian; and more than 70 articles, mainly on literature and art, in Russian and English. He lives in New Jersey.
Mikhail Epstein is a philosopher and a cultural and literary scholar. He is Samuel Candler Dobbs Emeritus Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University. He served as a professor at Emory University from 1990 to 2023. From 2012 to 2015, he served as professor and founding director of the Centre for Humanities Innovation at Durham University (UK). Epstein’s research interests include new directions in the humanities; contemporary philosophy and religion; the poetics and history of Russian literature; postmodernism; and the evolution of language. Epstein has authored 50 books and over 1,000 articles. His works have been translated into 26 languages.
Image: Mikhail Epstein, Reputation in Numbers 2024
References
Epstein M. (2006). Thoughts in Numbers. Russia and the West in the Mirrors of the Internet. Zvezda, 10. pp. 204 – 213 (in Russian) https://magazines.gorky.media/zvezda/2006/10/mysli-v-chislah.html
Epstein M. (2023). The Russian Anti-World. Politics on the Brink of Apocalypse, FrancTireur, USA (in Russian)
Languages used on the Internet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_used_on_the_Internet
Mandel I. (2010). Requiem for Everything with Subsequent Exposure. Almanac Lebed, 612 (in Russian) http://lebed.com/2010/art5677.htm
Mandel I., Mastandrea S., Rachenkov K., Shamshurin I. (2021). Beauty or money? Statistical analysis. Model Assisted Statistics and Applications 16 (2021) 151–162
Murray C. (2004). Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950, Harper Perennial.
Appendix 1.
Writers considered in this article and their evaluations for February 2024*
* “Variation” – coefficient of variation (the ratio of the standard deviation to the mean). Index [Murray, 2004] – original assessments (ranks); Index [Mandel 2010] – regression estimates of 2010; the correlation between it and the original estimates is 0.86.
Appendix 2.
Twenty Most Popular Writers in the Russian segment of the Internet, 2024
(outlined are writers more popular in the English segment)
