If not overnight, then within a relatively short time, Russian society of the late perestroika and early post-Soviet years saw a radical shift in linguistic attitudes and drastic changes in official language usage: a huge number of words became historicisms, pre-revolutionary terms returned from oblivion and foreign loanwords flooded the language; the ideological substance of slogans and concepts was questioned, topics formerly kept secret could be named by their real names and taboo areas became the subject of official speech; non-standard elements challenged the hegemony of written and spoken standard Russian.

All this made ‘the state of the language’ stand out as a topic of discussion for a great many people, groups and institutions, as we saw in the Introduction. The focus on the language question in turn increased the general level of metalinguistic activity in society (Vepreva 2005: 8). What about professional language users, such as the writers? People who express themselves in language not only in order to communicate, but in order to create? In what sense, and to what degree, are artistic language practices such as the writing of novels influenced by changes in the language culture of a given society? The main task of this book is to answer this question by examining the ways in which verbal art engages in the language question on the level of metalinguistic activity – or in other words, to investigate how literary texts can be read as a response to the language question. In this chapter, meanwhile, I will try to characterise the language itself of this fiction and ask in what ways it reflects, or has been affected by, the changes in the language culture. In order to do this in a meaningful way, we need to operate with a broad understanding of ‘language’ as it overlaps with the concepts of ‘style’ and ‘genre’, dimensions of post-Soviet literary culture that are also influenced by the predominating themes and topics of the texts themselves. Let us start, therefore, by sketching the shifts in literary culture that impacted on the themes, languages and styles of post-Soviet literature, before looking in more detail at the literary texts themselves. In view of the multifarious literary landscape of Russian prose writing of the last two to three decades, it is impossible to be exhaustive.