Graph-theoretical Approach to the Analysis of the Variability of Russian Fairy Tales

The paper considers the graph-theoretical approachused to analyze Russian folk fairy tales.Such a formal structuredescription of the analyzed folklore texts is based on the patterns outlined by V. Ya. Propp in a number of his works and in his famous book “Morphology of a Fairy Tale”, in particular. This allows systematization and analysis of the key events occurring in texts. The vertices of the graph-theoretical model represent the fairy talecharacters being classified into certain fixed groups, while the edges indicate meetings between the characters, accompanied by the actions significant for the fairy tale plot. Using the example of the text «Tereshechka» from the collection by A. M. Afanasyev, it is shown how the model is built and the numerical graphcharacteristics are calculated. For this purpose, the tools of the «Folklore» information system are also used. By means of this program, you can not only store textcollections and their graph-theoretical models, but also create formal structures, perform their visualization, aggregation and comparisonautomatically. Discriminant analysis showed that according to formal parameters it is possible to identify the plot of a fairy tale about a brave fellow, rejuvenating apples and living water. The Wilks' Lambda coefficient value is 0.0275781 (less than 0.05), which indicates the good quality of the classifier. Based on this, it should be concluded that graph-based mathematical modelscan be used to systematize and compare the plots of Russian folk tales. This opens up prospects for studying both the fairy talevariability and identifying the most significant and typical plots for a certain geographical area or time period.