Associate Professor of Russian Philology Plans to Issue Six Detective Stories with One of the Biggest Russian Publishers

Tatyana Shakhmatova’s latest work, Gone with the Blogosphere, saw light at Eksmo in November 2017.

The series, appropriately titled The Detective from the Philology Department, features the same linguistics-related traits in all of its stories. Gone with the Blogosphere tells about a murder of a couple in their own apartment. As it appears, they led very active social media lives, and the police decide to hire a philology expert to analyze all the amassed posts and messages for traces of threats or any other suspicious content. The protagonist, Viktoria Bersenyova, indeed finds many interesting details about the victims’ personalities.

“The first book was published in November. If everything goes according to the plan, the second and third ones will be out in the first half of 2018. They are ready and have been submitted to the publisher. Six books in total are planned in the series,” shared Dr. Shakhmatova.

The first draft of Gone with the Blogosphere was sent to Eksmo two and a half years ago. After revisions and tests, it was issued in 5 thousand copies.

Ms. Shakhmatova told about how she came up with the idea, “As a philologist, I could predict that a protagonist like Bersenyova must appear in the genre. If we take the most significant words of the Russian Word of the Year 2017 poll, we see that half of them are from the cyber reality – bitcoin, mining, and rap battles. The text content of our lives – from social networks to electronic governments – grows constantly. And everyone leaves a huge text trace. Sooner or later, as I thought, a detective story would appear where the protagonist investigates crimes through texts which were left by perpetrators. In the end, after taking up legal philology, I realized that I have enough material and practice for my own series.”

Bersenyova with her Dr. Watson-like sidekick – her nephew – uses all the available arsenal of text analysis methodology to dig through her findings and discover the truth. While the first novel focuses on social media, the second, according to Dr. Shakhmatova, will be staged at a large corporation which has become a target of information attacks.