Norm Negotiations in Russian Literary Criticism Martin Paulsen R   in linguistics and sociolinguistics have pointed out the abundance of metalinguistic reflection and its significance for the way languages exist and develop. 1 Talking about language seems to be a cru- cial activity in any language community. e same appears to be true for the Russian language community in the post-Soviet era. is article is devoted to the concept of linguistic “norm negotiations” and how they manifest themselves in one particular area of post-Soviet Russian language debate. I will start by looking at the relationship be- tween metalanguage and language norms. I shall then go on to study a few examples of such norm negotiations in post-Soviet Russian literary criticism. 2 I shall focus on how language is discussed in connection with the reception of literary fiction. My examples will be taken from literary reviews that discussed publications by Viktor Erofeev, Vladimir Sorokin and Viktor Pelevin in the 1990s. 1 Deborah Cameron, 1995, Verbal Hygiene, London; Adam Jaworski, et al., eds. 2004, Metalanguage: Social and Ideological Perspectives, Berlin; Dennis R. Preston, 2004, “Folk Metalanguage,” in Metalanguage: Social and Ideological Perspectives, eds. A. Jaworski, et al., Berlin, pp. 75 –101; Henning Andersen, 1989, “Understanding Lin- guistic Innovations,” in Language Change: Contributions to the Study of its Causes (Trends in Linguistics; Studies and monographs 43), eds. L. E. Breivik & E. H. Jahr, Berlin, pp. 5 –28. 2 e article is based on work conducted for my PhD thesis. However whereas the the- sis includes perspectives on language ideology, the Russian standard language and the sociology of literature, the discussion here will be more explicitly focused on the concept of norm negotiations. Martin Paulsen, 2009, Hegemonic Language and Literature: Russian Metadiscourse on Language in the 1990s, PhD-thesis, University of Bergen.