INVESTIGATING THE RECEPTION OF LIU CIXIN’S THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM ON RUSSIAN-LANGUAGE ONLINE PLATFORMS THROUGH NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING TECHNOLOGIES

Abstract

The article examines the reception of Liu Cixin’s novel The Three-Body Problem in the Russian-speaking digital reading environment. The empirical material consists of reader reviews published on the LiveLib platform, which makes it possible to analyze not isolated critical judgments, but a relatively broad field of public reader response. The study combines topic modeling and sentiment analysis in order to identify the main semantic directions of readers’ attention and to describe the emotional structure of their evaluations. The methodological basis of the research is formed by natural language processing technologies, including LDA topic modeling, TF-IDF feature extraction and classification of evaluative orientation based on users’ ratings. The analysis shows that the reception of the novel among Russian-speaking readers is not limited to the perception of an exotic Chinese text. It includes several stable lines of interpretation: translation and linguistic mediation, historical trauma, the fate of cosmic civilization, the readability of scientific concepts and the connection between the text and personal reading experience. The emotional structure of the reviews is predominantly positive, although negative reactions appear more often when readers describe difficulties caused by the density of scientific ideas and the complexity of the narrative. The results indicate that digital platforms create a specific space of intercultural literary reception, where translation, genre expectations, cognitive effort and reader motivation interact. The findings may be useful for further research on the international reception of contemporary Chinese literature, digital literary communication and the application of NLP methods in philological studies.