A number of sociopolitical changes during late perestroika, including the fall of censorship and the policy of glasnost, led to a plethora of styles in official speech culture, but also in printed texts of all genres, allowing for a wider range of possibilities and choices with regard to not only topic, but also language and style. This development, in turn, inspired fervent language debates, with the participation of institutions, groups and individuals. In this book, the linguistic condition of post-Soviet Russian society, on the one hand, and the language debate – the linguistic metalevel – on the other, have provided a dual background, against which every literary ‘utterance’ – every text – may be read and interpreted. I have argued that these dimensions to what we termed sociolinguistic change – linguistic change as well as changes in society's life with language, including linguistic reflexivity – may have an impact on how language is represented, used or thematised in a given literary text, thus allowing us to read the literary work as a possible contribution to the language debate itself. As we have seen in the analyses undertaken in Chapters 7–9, such contributions differ in form, argumentation, and most probably also in impact, from the public debates on language, but also from the more explicit involvement in the debates by writers when they are interviewed or participate in surveys and round-table discussions on linguistic matters.

We saw in Chapters 5 and 6 that writers are still included in discussions about the state of the language. Naturally, their views range from the conservative to the liberal. In the surveys and interviews examined in Chapter 5, we observed a relatively relaxed attitude among writers towards the issue of norms and a highly sceptical view of political involvement in questions of linguistic regulation and legislation. We also sensed that many writers respond to ‘the language question’ with a natural authority, consciously or unconsciously perpetuating the earlier tradition where writers offered guidance and opinions on linguistic matters. In writers’ reactions to the law banning mat from literature, theatre, film and performances (the ‘Abanamat’ protests), we observed how political involvement in linguistic regulation is felt to be particularly unjustified when it targets the realm of culture and art.