Russian formalism
Based on Wikipedia: Russian formalism
In 1916, a young Russian critic named Viktor Shklovsky published an essay that would change how we think about literature forever. His thesis was deceptively simple: art exists to make us feel things again.
We sleepwalk through life. The thousandth time we see a chair, we don't really see it—we just register "chair" and move on. Language works the same way. We hear words so often that they become transparent, mere vehicles for information. Shklovsky argued that literature's job is to smash this autopilot, to force us to experience words and images as if for the first time.
He called this process "defamiliarization"—in Russian, ostranenie, which literally means "making strange." And the group of critics who developed this idea into a full-blown theory of literature became known as the Russian Formalists.
The Two Circles
Russian Formalism wasn't a single movement with a manifesto. It emerged from two separate groups of young scholars who happened to be asking similar questions at the same time.
In Moscow, a group called the Moscow Linguistic Circle formed in 1915, focused primarily on the scientific study of language. In St. Petersburg, another group called the Society for the Study of Poetic Language—known by its Russian acronym OPOJAZ—began meeting in 1916. This group was more interested in literature proper, in the specific techniques that make writing feel literary.
The scholars in these circles would go on to become some of the most influential literary theorists of the twentieth century. Roman Jakobson, who started in the Moscow group, would later help found the structuralist movement and revolutionize linguistics. Vladimir Propp would analyze Russian folktales in a way that anticipated modern narrative theory and even influenced the design of video games. Viktor Shklovsky's concept of defamiliarization would ripple through every subsequent school of literary criticism.
But here's the thing: these scholars never called themselves "Formalists." That label was pinned on them by their critics—and eventually, under Stalin, it became an insult, a way of dismissing art that didn't serve the state's propaganda needs.
What Made Literature Literature?
The Formalists were obsessed with one fundamental question: what makes a piece of writing literary? What's the difference between a grocery list and a poem? Between a newspaper article and a novel?
Previous critics had answered this question in various ways. Some said literature was a vehicle for social and political ideas. Others said it was the personal expression of an author's inner world. Both approaches treated the actual words on the page as secondary—as a container for something more important.
The Formalists flipped this completely. They argued that the words themselves, the techniques, the formal devices—these were literature. You couldn't separate the content from the form any more than you could separate a dance from the dancer's body.
This was radical. It meant studying literature scientifically, like a biologist studying organisms. It meant ignoring questions about what the author intended or what the reader felt and focusing instead on what the text actually did.
The Device
The central concept in Formalist theory is the "device"—in Russian, priyom. A device is any technique a writer uses to create a literary effect. Rhyme is a device. Metaphor is a device. An unusual word order is a device. A plot twist is a device.
Shklovsky's famous essay "Art as Device" argues that art is essentially a collection of such techniques, deliberately arranged to produce defamiliarization. The artist's job is to take the automatic and make it manual again, to force the reader to work, to struggle, to actually perceive.
Consider the difference between saying "the sun rose" and "the sun clawed its way above the horizon." Both sentences convey the same basic information. But the second one makes you pause. It forces you to actually picture the sun, to imagine it as something alive and struggling. That's a device at work.
Roman Jakobson put it more dramatically: literature is "organized violence committed on ordinary speech."
Think about that phrase for a moment. Violence. Literature doesn't gently modify everyday language—it attacks it, disrupts it, makes it strange. When Nabokov opens Lolita with "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied," he's not communicating information efficiently. He's forcing you to slow down, to untangle the syntax, to feel the weight of every word.
Story Versus Plot
One of the most useful distinctions the Formalists introduced is between fabula and syuzhet—roughly translated as "story" and "plot," though these English words don't quite capture the distinction.
The fabula is what actually happened, in chronological order. First A, then B, then C.
The syuzhet is how the writer chooses to tell it. Maybe you start with C, then flash back to A, then reveal B at the very end.
This might seem obvious now, but it was revolutionary. It meant that plot was itself a device, a technique for creating effects. Why does a mystery novel typically reveal the murder at the beginning and the murderer's identity at the end? Because that arrangement creates suspense, makes the reader work, delays the satisfaction of understanding.
The Formalists catalogued the specific devices writers use to manipulate plot: repetition, parallelism, gradation (building tension through escalation), and retardation (deliberately slowing down the narrative at key moments). These aren't just ornaments. They're the machinery that makes stories work.
The Science of Sound
Some Formalists went even deeper, into the raw material of language itself: sound.
Osip Brik studied Russian poetry not for its meaning but for its acoustic patterns. He catalogued different types of sound repetition with technical precision: the "ring" (where a sound at the beginning of a line returns at the end), the "juncture" (where a sound at the end of one word appears at the beginning of the next), the "fastening" (sounds linking the ends of adjacent lines), and the "tail-piece" (sounds that conclude stanzas).
This might sound tediously technical. But consider what it reveals: poetry works on us partly through pure sound, through patterns we may not consciously notice but that our ears register anyway. When you feel that a poem is "musical" or "flows well," you're responding to exactly these kinds of acoustic structures.
The Formalists distinguished between what they called "practical language" and "poetic language." Practical language is what you use to order coffee or write a memo—it's transparent, efficient, and forgettable. Poetic language calls attention to itself. The words don't just point to meaning; they are the meaning.
Evolution and the Organic Model
Early Formalism had a problem. If literature was just a collection of devices, how did it change over time? Why don't we still write like Homer?
Some Formalists turned to biology for answers. They began thinking of literary works not as machines assembled from parts, but as organisms with internal hierarchies. In this view, devices don't just sit next to each other—they work together in functional relationships, like organs in a body.
This "organic model" also helped explain genres. Just as individual organisms belong to species, individual works belong to genres. And just as species evolve, so do genres. The novel of the eighteenth century is recognizably related to the novel of the twentieth century, but it's also different—adapted to new conditions, new audiences, new cultural needs.
Vladimir Propp's famous Morphology of the Folktale emerged from this biological thinking. Propp analyzed Russian fairy tales and found that they all shared a common structure—a sequence of "functions" (the hero leaves home, the hero encounters a magical helper, the hero defeats the villain, and so on) that appeared in the same order across hundreds of different stories. It was as if all folktales shared the same DNA.
Yury Tynyanov and Literary Evolution
The most sophisticated Formalist thinking about change came from Yury Tynyanov. He argued that literature doesn't evolve smoothly—it evolves through struggle.
At any given moment, certain devices and conventions dominate. They become automatic, expected, boring. Then something new comes along that disrupts them. Parody, for instance, takes familiar devices and turns them inside out, making them strange again. The disruption eventually becomes the new norm, and the cycle repeats.
Tynyanov also insisted that literature doesn't exist in isolation. It's part of a larger cultural system, constantly interacting with other human activities—politics, economics, everyday speech. When society changes, literature must change too, absorbing new material and new concerns.
This was a crucial development. Early Formalism had been accused of ignoring the real world, of treating literature as a self-contained game with no connection to life. Tynyanov's systemic approach acknowledged that literature and society shape each other—while still insisting that literature has its own internal logic that can be studied scientifically.
The Critique from the Left
Not everyone was convinced.
Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik revolutionary, wrote one of the sharpest critiques of Formalism in his 1924 book Literature and Revolution. He didn't dismiss the Formalists entirely—he acknowledged that their methods were "necessary." But he insisted they were "insufficient."
The problem, Trotsky argued, was that writers and readers aren't empty machines. They're human beings shaped by social conditions. You can't understand why a novel was written, or why it moves people, without understanding the world it emerged from.
The form of art is, to a certain and very large degree, independent, but the artist who creates this form, and the spectator who is enjoying it, are not empty machines, one for creating form and the other for appreciating it. They are living people, with a crystallized psychology representing a certain unity, even if not entirely harmonious. This psychology is the result of social conditions.
This critique would echo through the decades. Later Marxist critics, structuralists, and post-structuralists would all wrestle with the relationship between form and society, between the internal workings of texts and the external forces that shape them.
The End and the Afterlife
Russian Formalism as a movement didn't survive Stalin's cultural crackdowns of the 1930s. "Formalist" became an accusation, a way of labeling art that was too experimental, too concerned with technique, insufficiently devoted to socialist realism. Scholars abandoned the approach or redirected their energies. Some, like Jakobson, emigrated and continued their work abroad.
But the ideas didn't die. They migrated into structuralism, which dominated European intellectual life in the mid-twentieth century. They influenced the New Criticism that shaped how literature was taught in American universities for decades. They informed narratology, the systematic study of how stories work. They even shaped how we think about film, advertising, and video games.
Every time someone analyzes a text by asking "what techniques is this using and what effects do they create?"—they're doing something the Russian Formalists pioneered.
Why It Still Matters
We live in an age of content. Words wash over us constantly—tweets, headlines, advertisements, notifications. Most of it is designed to be frictionless, to slide past our defenses without requiring any effort at all.
The Formalists would recognize this as the ultimate triumph of automatization. We're drowning in language that doesn't make us feel anything, that passes through us without leaving a trace.
Their answer—that art's job is to break through, to make us actually perceive again—feels more relevant than ever. When you encounter writing that stops you cold, that makes you reread a sentence three times just to feel its shape, that forces you to see something familiar as if for the first time—that's defamiliarization at work.
Literature, the Formalists taught us, isn't just a different way of saying things. It's a different way of experiencing reality. And in a world that constantly pushes us toward numbness, that might be the most important thing it can do.