The paper presents an investigation of the emotional aspect of the Russian short story of the 20th century. Our study is two-fold: firstly, we delve into emotional representation at the lexical level, building upon previous work on utilizing vector models to quantify emotional content. Following this line of research, we introduce an annotated corpus where words are tagged as expressing specific emotions as recognized by readers. Previously automatically derived lexical distributions are evaluated against the annotated data, comparing lexical diversity, frequencies and part-of-speech distributions. Secondly, we explore the perceptual aspect of emotions by conducting an experiment where readers assess their emotional experience while reading using valence and arousal scales. As a result, an exploratory analysis was conducted, revealing certain tendencies in readers’ affective perception of texts. Current study attempts to bring together the lexical expression of emotions in fiction texts and the subjective experience of emotional affect during reading.