Post-Soviet Russia was a period of linguistic liberalisation, instability and change with varied attempts to regulate and legislate language usage, a time when the language question permeated all spheres of social, cultural and political life.

Key topics for debate included the Soviet linguistic legacy, the past and future of Russian, linguistic variation, language policy and linguistic ideologies. This book looks at how these debates featured in literature and illustrates the discussion through six interpretive readings of post-Soviet Russian prose. It analyses both the writers' explicit...