The language of the modern Russian city and, in particular, its sub-st and ard speech have not as yet been studied profoundly and systematically despite their ever increasing role in literary Russian which, due to its cultural and social importance, remains the center of attention for scholars. Both the city language and urban sub-st and ard Russian are traditionally considered deviations from the literary norm or an intermediate stage of the merging of peasant dialects with the normative literary st and ard. This approach seems open to question if we take into consideration the fact that the language of the city as a whole does not coincide either with literary Russian or with the peasant dialects and has its own social basis and linguistic characteristics. One of its most important features is the constant merging and interaction of several different linguistic strains in the speech of city dwellers. Owing to the lack of factual material specifically gathered for the purpose of scientific investigation, literature remains the main source of such information; and from this point of view Vasily Aksenov's novel Ozog represents special interest both as creative usage and an extensive picture of the vocabulary, speech patterns and lexical peculiarities of modern spoken urban Russian. The goal of this dissertation is to analyse the characteristic features of the language of Aksenov's Ozog, a novel, which had been written in the Soviet Union and was published for the first time in the United States in 1980. Among the linguistic devices used in the novel the following three seem to be of most importance: (1) elements of cant and slang in the speech characteristics of the personages in the novel; and (2) parody and satire of the official language, both in the mass media and in colloquial speech; and, finally, (3) the names of the heroes, which acquire special significance, because of the system of "group images," embracing almost all the characters of Ozog. The young use obscenities and special slang which serve as a kind of protest against the language of political propag and a and the traditional values of their "fathers." The dissertation is supplemented with glossary of cant, slang and elements of sub-st and ard Russian which cannot be found in most conventional dictionaries and may cause problems in underst and ing even for a Russian reader. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)