Russian Formalism is a convenient label for a loosely knit group of critics whose signal role for contemporary literary studies can hardly be overestimated. They were born mostly in the 1890s, came to prominence in Russian letters during World War I, established themselves institutionally through the restructuring of academia after the Communist revolution, and became marginalized with the rise of Stalinism in the late 1920s. Though the affinities of Russian Formalism to some previous trends in Russian poetics cannot be denied (A. Potebnya's theory of poetic language, A. Veselovsky's historical poetics, or the metrics of the Symbolist poet-theoreticians A. Belyj and V. Bryusov), it represents a radical departure from the previously dominant mimetic theory of art. The Russian Formalists assailed the view of literature as an emanation of the author's soul, as a socio-historical document, or as a manifestation of a philosophical system. In this way, their theoretical orientation corresponded to the aesthetic sensibility of modernist art, in particular Futurism, with which the Russian Formalists were initially closely allied. It was the Futurist emphasis on the shocking effect of art and the understanding of poetry as the ‘unfolding of the word as such’ that found an analogue in Russian Formalist poetics.

Russian Formalism resists a totalizing historical synthesis for several reasons. First of all, from its very inception it was split geographically into two centres: the Moscow Linguistic Circle established in 1915, among whose members were Petr Bogatyrëv, Roman Jakobson and Grigory Vinokur, and the Petersburg OPOJAZ (the Society for the Study of Poetic Language) founded in 1916, with such scholars as Boris Eikhenbaum, Viktor Shklovsky and Yuri Tynyanov.