The paper presents a brief essay of the life and work of the Russian writer of the last third of the XX century - the beginning of the XXI century Vladimir Makanin, characterized by the features of his prose in the framework of communicative roll of the works of writers known as ‘generation of the forties’. The author analyses the sociological aspects of the continuity of the literature of the period of ‘thaw’ (‘the sixties’) and the period of stagnation (‘the prose of the forties’). Special attention is paid to the realistic social typicality of the characters created by the writers of this literary movement. The study represents a comparative communication analysis of writings of the ‘lost generation’ and the ‘epoch of troubled times’ in the historical and literary context: from the writings of Benjamin Constant through the oeuvres of Alexander Pushkin to the writings of Alfred de Musset as appercieved by Mikhail Lermontov - as a dialogue between the two epochs. Russian writers of the postmodern period are interpreted in this paper by the successors of the global direction of the literature of the epochs of stagnation. This kind of character of the postwar and the post-thaw period of the country’s history is characteristic of the works of Vladimir Makanin. The writings of the ‘generation of the forties’ are compared here with the program works of V. Rasputin, V. Astafiev, Ch. Aitmatov, whose books have already entered the school educational standards on the history of Russian literature as reflecting the basic realistic typologies the typical characters of the epoch, and highlighting its aesthetic and ideological distortions.