FORMALISM

also called Russian Formalism, Russian Russky Formalism, 20th-century Russian school of literary criticism. It began in two groups: Opoyaz, an acronym for Russian words meaning Society for the Study of Poetic Language, founded in 1916 at St. Petersburg (later Leningrad) and led by Victor Shklovsky; and the Moscow Linguistic Circle, founded in 1915. Both groups made use of the linguistic techniques of Ferdinand de Saussure. Although they based their assumptions largely on Symbolist notions concerning the autonomy of the text and the discontinuity between literary and other uses of language, the Formalists sought to make their critical discourse more objective and scientific than that of Symbolist criticism. Closely allied to the Russian Futurists and opposed to sociological criticism, the Formalists placed an emphasis on the medium by analyzing the way in which literature, especially poetry, was able to alter artistically or make strange common language. They stressed the importance of form and technique over content. Although always anathema to the Marxist critics, Formalism was important in the Soviet Union until 1929, when it was condemned for its lack of political perspective. Later, largely through the work of the structuralist linguist Roman Jakobson, it became influential in the West, notably in Anglo-American New Criticism (q.v.), which is sometimes called Formalism. Victor Erlich's Russian Formalism (1955) is a history; Thorie de la littrature (1965) is a translation by Tzvetan Todorov of important Russian texts. Anthologies in English include L.T. Lemon and M.J. Reis, eds., Russian Formalist Criticism (1965) and L. Matejka and K. Pomorska, eds., Readings in Russian Poetics (1971).