The purpose of this paper is to test the methodological tools provided by TXM open-source software for research on dynamics of vocabulary and punctuation marks in diachronic corpora. TXM provides both quantitative and qualitative analysis features. It is shown that Russian revolution of 1917 did make significant changes in the core vocabulary of the corpus of Russian Short Stories (1901-1930). The same methodology may be used both for diachronic studies of literature and for various NLP tasks.