One of the important tasks of creating the Corpus of Russian Short Stories of the first third of the 20th century is to identify and describe the changes that took place in the Russian language and in stylistics of Russian literature in the chain of dramatic events of the World War I, the February and October Revolutions, and the Civil War. The essential principle for creating the corpus is an attempt to include in the database literary texts of the maximum number of authors who wrote stories in 1900–1930. The article describes the principles of writers and text selection for the annotated subcorpus containing stories of 300 Russian prose writers and considers the list of linguistic and stylistic parameters proposed for studying the language of literary texts in synchrony and diachrony.