  A network analysis of the structure of verbal communications in one of the
most popular Russian novels of the Soviet era The Master and Margarita by
Bulgakov has been carried out. The structure of the novel is complex (a story
within a story). Moreover, the real-world-characters and the
other-world-characters are interacting in the novel. This complex and unusual
composition makes the novel especially attractive for a network analysis. In
our study, only paired verbal communications (conversations) between explicitly
present and acting characters have been taken into account. Based on a
character pair verbal communication matrix, a graph has been constructed, the
vertices of which are the characters of the novel, while the edges correspond
to the connections between them. Taking only paired verbal communications into
account leads to the result, that the character network can be described by an
ordinary, rather than a directed graph. Since the activity of the conversations
was out of our intended scope, the edges have been given no weights. The
largest connected component of the graph consists of 76 characters.
Centralities, such as degree, betweenness, closeness, eigenvector, and
assortativity coefficient were computed to characterize the network. The
structure of the communities in the network was also analysed. In addition to
the obvious large communities-the characters from the Yershalaim part of the
novel and the characters of the Moscow part-the analysis also revealed a fine
structure in the Moscow component. Using the analysis of centralities, a group
of main characters has been detected. The central characters of the novel are
Koroviev, Margarita, Bezdomny, Woland, Behemoth, Azazello, Bosoi, Warenukha,
Master, and Levi Matthew.
