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Abstract: The article analyzes a subclass of nouns (in most cases, verbal nouns) with the ending -ние in the Russian language. These nouns have a colloquial variant with an ending -нье. This short variant in many cases is not fixed in dictionaries and is explained as a result of reduction of the post-stressed vowel [и]. However, the difference between the words with -ние and -нье endings does not tend to phonetic or stylistic features only but is also manifested in the fluctuations in the formation on the letter of the prepositional case. A literary orthographic norm requires the form “в молчанье”, but not “в молчании”. However, in texts, even those that have gone through an editorial correction, there are numerous occurrences of spelling “в молчаньи” and “в молчание”. In this connection, the article introduces the notion of a systematic mistake. This is a deviation from the literary norm, due to objective intralingual processes. To discuss this idea, the work analyzes examples from Russian fiction recorded in the Russian National Corpus. Several diagrams show the distribution of -ние and -нье forms by periods from the 18th century. There was an obvious increase in the use of the -нье form (as compared to -ние) in the XIX century and a significant decrease in its frequency during the XX century and at the beginning of the XXI century. Besides, it was found that -нье forms (-ньи in the prepositional case) are particularly common in poetic texts; they can be one of the signs of poetic discourse. This is partly due to the quantitative superiority of disyllabic foot over trisyllabic in Russian poetry. Several explanations of the complex orthological and sociolinguistic situation are offered. The conclusion is made that the appearance of a systematic mistake in the use of forms of the prepositional case is due to the complex influence of several factors: phonetic, phonemic (spelling), prosodic, stylistic and lexico-semantic.