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Abstract: The article presents observations of the development of literature as a social institution today, the main specific feature of which is determined by democratization – a temporary absence of state or moral imperatives that affect both the poetics of the text and its social advancement. The situation of temporary social refusal from programs and prescriptions seems paradoxical for the literature itself (the article gives a brief historical and analytical reference on how the Russian literary process was regulated, and outlines the modern reasons for democratization). The participants of the literary field form a complex of reactions, ideas and strategies that can be characterized as demophobia (the term of the politologist E. Schulman) — an attempt to protect themselves from the freedoms granted to literature. The main features of demophobia are the appearance of apocalyptic scenarios of development of literature as a social institution (according to them the roles of the author and the reader are leveled), the evolution of two main strategies, which are observed today at all stages of production and publishing of the text (author — editor — seller — reader — storage). These main strategies are: 1) Refusal from own freedom: choice of specific, narrow-local themes as essential ones, the regulated type of behavior within the literary field, the search for own identity against the background of informative availability. 2) The radicalization of own rights: the subordination of the entire production system of the text, the execution of other people's roles and the attempt to take over other people's rights and freedoms.