Russia Creates a Single Digital Archive of Poetry From the Middle Ages to the Modern Era
The country’s first scientific digital corpus of Russian free verse has been launched in St. Petersburg.
A digital library of free verse has been created by a team of graduates and students from the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg, bringing together thousands of texts into a single research database. The corpus includes about 3,000 poetic works spanning from Old Russian literature to the mid-20th century. Some of the materials previously existed only on paper and are now being published for the first time.
The foundation of the database is the archive of prominent literary scholar Yuri Orlitsky, which he assembled over several decades. The project team digitized a substantial part of the collection and organized the texts to make them suitable for systematic analysis.
Built for Research
The newly created corpus allows scholars to work with free verse as they would with a conventional dataset. Researchers can analyze textual structures, identify patterns, and test hypotheses using statistical methods. According to project author Anton Azarenkov, the absence of such a tool had long prevented scholars from reaching a shared scientific understanding of how free verse works.
Students from the Higher School of Economics made a major contribution to the project. They digitized texts, annotated data, and developed the corpus website. The platform is already being used in academic research: studies based on it have examined unofficial poetry of the 20th century, post-revolutionary free verse, and adaptations of foreign poetic forms. These papers have been published in leading literary journals.
Going forward, the team plans to expand the digital archive and is considering the creation of a dedicated laboratory focused on non-classical poetry. The group is also discussing the release of a printed anthology of early Russian free verse based on materials from the corpus.
