The "Russian Classics" corpus holds a special status within the Russian National Corpus (RNC). On the one hand, it is a historical corpus, featuring works by authors from the late 18th to the 19th century. The most recent author by birth date included is Anton Chekhov (1860), and the latest texts were written in 1910, the final year of Leo Tolstoy’s life. Naturally, the Russian language has changed since then—much of what the classics wrote may seem outdated or unclear to a modern speaker without commentary, and their language cannot be regarded as “modern (Standard) Russian” without important qualifications.

Nevertheless, these texts remain highly relevant to the standard of Russian literary language and occupy a central place in its development. Both normative and descriptive grammars, as well as people’s intuitive sense of language norms, often refer to them. If we define the "literary language" as that which has been “refined by masters,” then the texts of those masters form the core of the Russian literary/standard language corpus. This corpus can (with certain caveats) be consulted as a normative, rather than merely usage-based, resource. It provides authoritative examples for academic grammars, dictionaries, and teaching materials.

Including all these texts in the Main Corpus would be a controversial decision, as it would disrupt its balance by genre and authorship. Tolstoy’s collected works alone account for about 7 million word usages, which would make up nearly 2% of the Main Corpus—a substantial figure. Including the entire Tolstoy collection would introduce a significant skew toward a single author. Furthermore, a large portion of the Russian classics' collections consists of literary works, which the RNC traditionally limits to no more than 40% of the Main Corpus. In this specialized corpus, however, balance by genre, author, or date is not a priority, whereas completeness is. Finally, the creators of the Main Corpus tend to exclude drafts and edited versions of texts, which may nonetheless offer valuable linguistic material.

Therefore, the goal of this corpus is to present the legacy of Russian classical literature as fully as possible in the RNC, without the restrictions of the Main Corpus—gradually turning it into a corpus of 19th- to early 20th-century Russian literary language.

Since the purpose is to collect the complete body of works—not only literary texts, but also official, domestic, and other types of documents—by classical Russian authors, the text annotation is intentionally minimalist, including only a basic set of metadata used across all RNC corpora: general information such as author, title, date, genre, and prose/poetry, along with morphological, syntactic and semantic annotation. Verse-specific annotation is not included here but can be found in a dedicated poetic corpus. Unlike in the Main and Poetic corpora, the pre-1918 Russian orthography, where it was used in the publication from which the text was taken, is not preserved in the Russian Classics corpus: texts are converted into the modern orthography, while all other spelling features are retained.

Another useful feature of this corpus is the ability to search within individual authors' works, which are more fully represented here than in the Main Corpus. Searches can also be limited to individual works, making it possible to identify idiolectal (author-specific) stylistic features and refine insights into their lexical and syntactic preferences. This goal—studying the author’s idiolect—justifies the inclusion of the author’s entire legacy, including letters and business documents, even where no artistic intent was present.

For example, the word полузавядший 'half-withered', characteristic of Turgenev, also appears in one version of Tolstoy’sYouth. The phrase она немедленно же 'she immediately then', typical of Leskov, is a distinctive marker of his individual style.

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