The Polish-Russian Parallel Corpus has been developed at the University of Warsaw (the Faculty of Polish Studies and the Institute of Russian Studies) in co-operation with the National Corpus of Polish and the Russian National Corpus. The annotation and search possibilities in the corpus result from the annotation of the co-operating national corpora. The search interface is based on the user-friendly interface of the Russian National Corpus. The corpus consists of Russian and Polish literary classics (90%), nonfi ction books and legal texts (5%), religious texts (i.e. Bible translations; 4%) and contemporary press articles (1%). Great Russian realistic novels of the 19th century, together with the modern Russian books (e.g. by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and Victor Erofeyev) which are the most popular in Poland, made up a signifi cant part of the corpus. We have also taken into account these works of Polish literature that are the most widely known in Russia. Looking for loci communes in the Russian and Polish cultures was an important, extra-linguistic aspect of the corpus project.