20TH-CENTURY POETRY IN THE RUSSIAN NATIONAL CORPUS: HOW TO CREATE A REPRESENTATIVE POETICAL CORPUS

The paper regards the principles of selection of poems for Russian National Corpus’ poetical subcorpus. The developers of the corpus try to create an instrument that both simplifies studies in the field of metrics and analysis of poetical language and serves as a representative source of 20th-century poems. The structure of 20th-century Russian poetry is very complicated: the poetry was split between several areas that were almost independent of each other. Developing poetical subcorpus had to be representative for each of these areas (such as “official” poetry and “unofficial” one, emigré poetry, soviet poetry etc.). Poetical subcorpus has to be useful for two groups of scholars, for metricists and researchers of Russian poetry, and therefore corpus’s developers have decided to reject a hierarchy of poets and poems that characterizes most of 20th- century poetry studies and concentrate on the reconstruction of 20th- century poetical context. Thereby we have included in the poetical subcorpus not only the most prominent or famous poems and poets, but also poetae minores that were crucial for their own epoch’s poetical context nevertheless. Poetical subcorpus includes poetae minores, but doesn’t include mass versification and/or poésie naïve that can still be interesting for metricists, but can reduce representativeness of the corpus in the same time.