Švejk; Czech literature; proprial thematic concentration; thematic concentration; stylometry; authorship attribution; personal names; onomastics

The goal of the contribution is twofold – first, to present, on a larger scale, the proprial thematic concentration of text, a modified calculation of thematic words with a focus on proper names (cf. Čech – Kubát, 2016; Místecký, 2019), and second, to apply the method on various texts featuring the character of Švejk. Švejk is a grotesque, slow-witted, and talkative WWI soldier, which appeared, for the first time, in Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války (“The Good Soldier Švejk”), a four-volume novel by Jaroslav Hašek. The volumes were published in 1921, 1922, 1922, and 1923, respectively. As Hašek’s book attracted both domestic and foreign readers, during the Second World War, a new, twovolume novel with the same protagonist was anonymously published (1941, 1945). Since the original text is a patchwork of Švejk’s neverending anecdotes with a prominent use of personal names, the contribution will compare the first four books with the fifth and the sixth ones on the basis of anthroponyms. The counts of the anthroponymy-based thematic concentration will be carried out for individual chapters, and the averaged values for the books will be compared on the grounds of statistical tests. The resulting scatterplots will be able to show the differences among the books, and will possibly confirm the idiosyncratic position of the last ones, which were not authored by Jaroslav Hašek. The outcomes of the research may be of help for literary scholars centred on the Švejk texts, but they may also give impetus to onomastics and the study of authorship attribution.