Soviet and Post-Soviet History of Friendship: a Quantitative Analysis of the Emotional Concept in Children’s Literature

The research is focused on the comparison of contextual meanings and frequencies in Soviet and post-Soviet literature for children. The main goal of research is to identify semantic and quantitative changes in contexts around friendship-related words, and to compare these changes between two periods with an attempt to match them and their frequency with the political, cultural and value fields of the periods in which these texts were written. Given the fact that the amount of data is too large for manual content analysis, this work proposes an approach that combines both qualitative and quantitative methods in the exploratory analysis of textual data. Research findings comprise the "Thaw effect" existed in the literature for children of post-Stalinism times and the impact of genres on the contextual meanings in post-Soviet literature for children.