The subject of this study is literary escapism, examined as a linguostylistic phenomenon. The research aims to identify linguistic markers of escapism—defined as a strategy of individual withdrawal from reality into alternative worlds—within the texts of magical realism and science fiction, which prominently represent escapist discourses through the creation of alternative ontologies. The empirical basis of the study comprises a corpus of 55 novels from the 20th and 21st centuries, including original works in Russian and translations into Russian from English, Chinese, Spanish, and other languages. Particular attention is paid to how escapism, as a psychocultural phenomenon, is reflected in stable linguostylistic and thematic patterns. The analysis was conducted on two text sets: the "magical realism subcorpus" and the "science fiction subcorpus." This work is intended to reveal stylistic invariants in the representation of escapist motifs in contemporary prose. The methodology integrates tools from corpus linguistics, digital stylometry, and network analysis. Calculations were performed using the stylo package for the R programming language and John Burrows’ "Classic Delta" metric. Network analysis enabled the division of the corpus into clusters and the identification of influential texts both within the corpus as a whole and within specific clusters. The scientific novelty lies in the implementation of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of escapism based on 55 novels of the genres under consideration. The study revealed a complex organization of stylistic space; specifically, analysis based on the Most Frequent Words (top 100–300 MFW) indicates the dominance of individual authorial characteristics, whereas increasing the sample to 800–1000 words results in genre clustering. Seven stable stylistic communities were identified. During the research, "mediator texts" were identified, such as novels by Y. Zamyatin, A. Huxley, and M. Petrosyan. These works demonstrate the hybridity of genre boundaries between magical realism and science fiction. The clustering results allowed for the "purification" of the studied corpus from hybrid texts, yielding two genre subcorpora stylistically defined as "magical realism" and "science fiction." This work establishes a foundation for further study of thematic, stylistic, and other dominants in escapist literature.
Fedorov et al. (Sun,) studied this question.