The paper deals with a corpus of the Russian language of the 19th century. The corpus offers the opportunity to accomplish some essential tasks of modern Russian linguistics like getting various linguistic and statistical information, investigating dynamic processes in the vocabulary, analyzing grammatical changes in the lexicon. To make the corpus representative, some special criteria should be determined. The corpus belongs to corpora with morphological annotation, i.e. each word form has a list of morphological features. Additionally, the metadata set includes identifiers of structural division together with external features. The metadata description is based on international recommendations.