In the works of “socially oriented” Soviet linguists composed in the 1920s-1930s, the notion of “literary language” appears in various contexts with the meaning of either language of literature or language of culture. In the 1930s, E.D. Polivanov speaks about the standard (“literary”) language in several articles. He defines this phenomenon referring to its dominant social position, to its prestige and to its possible influence on the language use by speakers. At the same time, his general attitude towards linguistic researches supposed a descriptive approach to real language in use, without any value judgments. From this point of view, the “literary” language could not be considered as object of descriptive linguistics: this position is very different from that of V.V. Vinogradov who, in the 1960s, works out a theory of “literary” languages which became a basis of many theoretical and descriptive researches in the Soviet and post-Soviet linguistics.