Pushkin inspires Seth -- novels in verse

      My enjoyment of novels in verse began to thrive when a friend and I determined to get into Vikram's Seth's The Golden Gate (Random House, 1986) by taking turns reading its sonnets aloud to each other. After several dozen aloud, I could hear the voice even when I read silently and I went on to finish alone. And I loved it. I have gone on to enjoy several more works by Seth -- none of them poems but all wonderful stories, well told.
      Seth has said that he was moved to write by the novel Alexander Pushkin's verse novel Eugene Onegin noted here on 10 August 2013 -- a novel of interest to mathematicians because of its link to Markov Chains. Seth's novel (reviewed here) also was made into an opera. These first two stanzas -- each containing the numbers 26 and 1980 -- introduce the novel's computer-guy, John:

Pushkin poetry, Markov chains

A Markov chain is a mathematical process that can be used to answer questions such as these:
          If the current letter I am reading is a vowel, what is the probability 
          that the next letter will be a vowel?  A consonant? 
Answers from these may be combined to create more lengthy predictions -- about the 3rd letter after a given one, or the 10th -- and so on. 
     A recent article by Brian Hayes in American Scientist (brought to my attention by Greg Coxson) alerted me to the fact that it is 100 years since the Russian mathematician A. A. Markov (1856 - 1922) announced his findings about these transition probabilities -- and, moreover, his work was based on analysis of poetry; the poetry was Eugene Onegin, a verse-novel in iambic tetrameter by Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837). Markov's analyis dealt with Pushkin's novel as a long string of alphabetic characters and he tabulated the categories of vowels and consonants for about 20,000 letters. (For a host of details, visit Hayes' careful and interesting article.)