The paper deals with the language of Russian short stories written in the period from
1900–1930. It is based on the Russian Short Stories Corpus, an ongoing research project aimed to
collect, digitally process, and present the Russian literature of the early 20th century in an electronic
form. The Corpus contains the stories written by thousands of Russian authors, both well-known
and almost forgotten ones. From the corpus, a sample was taken to serve as a testbed for linguists,
lexicographers and literary scholars, enabling them to check their intuitions concerning the language
and style of the epoch. The sample has been divided into three subsamples along the lines set by the
dramatic turns of Russian history. The first subsample contains the stories produced from the onset
of the 20th century up to WWI (1900–1913), the second one refers to the tumultuous period of wars
and revolutions (1914–1922), and the third accounts for the stories written in the Soviet Union
(1923–1930). The Corpus has proved instrumental in detecting manifold changes in language use,
including grammar, vocabulary, syntactic patterns, collocations, and stylistics. In the present paper,
frequency-sorted word lists are used to bring out relevant changes in Russian vocabulary, linking them
to the sociopolitical context. The results obtained will provide valuable data for the lexicographers
compiling Russian dictionaries of the above-mentioned period.