Multilingual Strategies in Sorokin’s Manaraga and Pelevin’s Watchman

This article examines multilingualism in the prose of Vladimir Sorokin and Viktor Pelevin through an integrated translingual and sociolinguistic framework. Despite extensive scholarship on both authors’ postmodern and neomodernist aesthetics, the role of multilingual practices in their narrative structures remained underexplored. The study addresses this gap by analyzing how code-switching, borrowing, neologism, and resemanticization function across their texts as systematic rather than ornamental devices. Drawing on close reading and corpus-based selection of multilingual elements, the analysis identifies three main dimensions of literary multilingualism: discursive power, identity negotiation, and cultural translation. These dimensions reveal how linguistic hierarchies encode ideological asymmetries, how characters and narrative voices construct shifting subjectivities in contexts of globalization and post-Soviet transformation, and how meaning is transformed through cross-linguistic circulation. The comparative analysis shows that Sorokin’s multilingualism foregrounds cultural commodification and the marketization of language, while Pelevin’s linguistic hybridity emphasizes ontological instability and the simulation of meaning systems. In both cases, multilingual practices destabilize monolingual norms and function as structural principles shaping dystopian imaginaries, cultural critique, and representations of the world. The article argues that multilingualism in these works is not a stylistic feature but a central mechanism through which power, ideology, and meaning are produced and contested in contemporary Russian literature.