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What is Russian Formalism?

Russian Formalism was a literary theory and movement that emerged in the early 20th century,
primarily in Russia. It sought to shift the focus of literary criticism from the content of a work to
its form, structure, and language. This movement represented a radical departure from previous
literary approaches, which often emphasized the emotional, moral, or social significance of
literature. Russian Formalism is characterized by its rigorous analysis of the formal elements
of texts, such as narrative structure, language, and style.

Russian Formalism flourished along with movements in futurism and symbolism during the
period of the Russian Revolution of 1917. The works of two major groups of researchers based
in Russia is covered under the generic term ‘Russian Formalism’. It is also referred to as ‘East
European Formalism’, to distinguish it from Anglo -American Formalism which is also known as
New Criticism.

Russian Formalism began to take shape in the 1910s and 1920s, a period marked by significant
political and social upheaval in Russia. The movement was born out of a desire to establish a
more scientific and objective method for studying literature, one that could move beyond
subjective interpretations and focus on the intrinsic properties of literary works.

Principles of “Russian Formalism”

Literary pieces have specific structures and are systematic, making the “science of literature.”

A literary text is a holistic piece of work having its own meanings and forms and it is a finished
product.

The text creates holistic meanings, comprising its content and form.

Literary texts are not only coherent and timeless but also universal and constant and have fixed
interpretations and meanings.

A literary text invites interpretations based on its words, meanings, forms, structures, literary
terms and figurative languages, metrical pattern, and rhyme scheme as well as cadence and
rhythm of sentences which constitute its holistic meanings (message).
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A text has its own “literariness” that distinguishes it from ordinary pieces and ordinary language
used in every writing.

A literary text should have “defamiliarization” impacts on the readers to cause them to see the
difference contrary to the “automation.” It, then, results in “deautomatized” vision of the readers.

A narrative text has two major aspects; fabula and syuzhet (plot).

Two Movements

OPOJAZ "Society for the Study of Poetic Language") was a prominent group
of linguists and literary critics in St. Petersburg founded in 1916 and dissolved by the early
1930s. The group included Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, Osip Brik, Boris
Kušner and Yury Tynianov. OPOJAZ (the Society for the Study of Poetic Language), based in
Petrograd. This organization, founded in 1916, was composed of literary critics and scholars who
were committed to the formalist approach. OPOJAZ members were instrumental in developing
and popularizing many of the ideas that would come to define Russian Formalism.

The Moscow linguistic circle was a group of social scientists in semiotics, literary theory,
and linguistics active in Moscow from 1915 to ca. 1924. Its members included Roman
Jakobson (its founder),[1] Filipp Fortunatov, Grigoriy Vinokur, Boris Tomashevsky, and Petr
Bogatyrev. The group was a counterpart to the St. Petersburg linguistic group OPOJAZ; between
them, these two groups (together with the later Prague linguistic circle) were responsible for the
development of Russian formalist literary semiotics and linguistics. he Moscow Linguistic
Circle, founded in 1915, played a crucial role in the development of Russian Formalism. This
group of scholars and linguists was dedicated to the study of language and its relationship to
literature. Their work laid the theoretical foundation for many of the concepts that would later
become central to Russian Formalism.

Key Figures in Russian Formalism

Viktor Shklovsky

Viktor Shklovsky is perhaps the most well-known figure associated with Russian Formalism. His
work on defamiliarization and his analysis of narrative techniques have had a lasting impact on
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literary theory. Shklovsky’s writings, such as “Art as Technique,” are considered foundational
texts in the formalist tradition.

Roman Jakobson

Roman Jakobson was another key figure in Russian Formalism, known for his work on linguistic
theory and poetics. Jakobson’s contributions to the study of language and literature were
instrumental in shaping the formalist approach, particularly his emphasis on the structural
aspects of language in poetry.

Boris Eichenbaum

Boris Eichenbaum was a prominent critic and theorist within the Russian Formalist movement.
His essays and analyses helped to clarify and develop many of the core principles of Formalism,
including the distinction between fabula and syuzhet. Eichenbaum’s work remains influential in
the field of literary studies.

Defamiliarization

In Art as Technique (1917), Viktor Shklovsky introduces the concept of “defamiliarization,”

claiming it is central to formalist study. Also referred to as “ostranenie” in Russian,
defamiliarization describes the process of making the everyday and ordinary seem unfamiliar or
strange in order to challenge the reader’s perceptions and provide a new way of looking at the
world.

As indicated here, the idea of defamiliarization emerged as a challenge to the bureaucratic

monotony that had begun to pervade modern life. Our perception, according to formalists, had
become automated, to the extent we no longer see what is around us. The process of
defamiliarization looks to remedy this, creating obscurity in poetry so that we can see art and the
world anew. The formalist idea of defamiliarization can be compared to a myriad of other,
similar movements across the globe such as the insistence on novelty in modernism, and Ezra
Pound’s plea to artists to “make it new”.

Defamiliarization can be achieved through the use of literary devices such as symbolism and
metaphor. Defamiliarization also includes the use of foreign languages in a work and unfamiliar
or unusual plotting such as temporal disruptions.
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Shklovsky uses Leo Tolstoy to illustrate the technique of defamiliarization. Shklovsky writes,

[Tolstoy] describes an object as if he were seeing it for the first time, an event as if it were
happening for the first time. In describing something he avoids the accepted names of its parts
and instead names corresponding parts of other objects.

We can see examples of defamiliarization beyond Russian literature — for example in George
Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), where the presence of anthropomorphic animals allows the reader
to see Stalinism from a new perspective. Similarly, Matt Haig’s The Humans (2013) is told from
the point of view of an alien to emphasize the strangeness of human relationships from an
unfamiliar perspective.

Roman Jakobson’s Concepts of Metaphor and Metonymy

The English metaphor derived from the 16th-century Old French word métaphore, which comes
from the Latin metaphora, "carrying over", in turn from the Greek μεταφορά (metaphorá),
"transference",[5] from μεταφέρω (metapherō), "to carry over", "to transfer"[6] and that from μετά
(meta), "after, with, across"[7] + φέρω (pherō), "to bear", "to carry".

The words metonymy and metonym come from the Greek μετωνυμία, metōnymía, "a change of
name", from μετά, metá, "after, beyond" (more precisely = "between", "inside"), and -ωνυμία, -
ōnymía, a suffix that names figures of speech, from ὄνυμα, ónyma or ὄνομα, ónoma, "name".

In his 1956 essay, Two Aspects of Language and-Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances, Jakobson
proposes that language has a bipolar structure, oscillating between the poles of metaphor and
metonymy, and that any discourse is developed along the semantic lines of the metaphoric,
where one topic leads to another through similarity or substitution, and metonymic, where one
topic suggests another via contiguity (closeness in space, time and psychological association).

Jakobson holds that poetry is metaphoric, in that, it focuses on signs and on the principle of
similarity, while prose is metonymic, as it focuses on the referent and is based on contiguity —
an idea that was later taken up by the French Structuralists. Jakobson notes that in literary
Romanticism and Symbolism, metaphor has been widely used, while metonymy has been
predominant in Realism.
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He further observes that in any symbolic process, there is always the competition between the
metaphoric and the metonymic devices, Analysing the structure of dreams, Jakobson illustrates
this conflict by highlighting the question whether the “symbols and temporal sequences are
based on contiguity (Freud’s metaphoric dispensation or synecdochic condensation) or on
similarity (Freud’s ‘identification and symbolism’). Here Jakobson anticipates Lacan’s analysis
of Freud’s condensation and displacement in terms of metaphor and metonymy. His notion of the
binary oppositions being the elements of structure, also informed Mikhail Bakhtin s dialogic
criticism and Levi Strauss’ Structural Anthropology.