The Russian Formalist school of literary criticism and linguistic studies emerged shortly before the Russian revolution. The Moscow Linguistic Circle was formed in 1915; the St. Petersburg Society for the Study of Poetic Language (Opoyaz) in 1916. These two groups launched a savage polemical attack upon existing academic orthodoxy: neo-grammarians, symbolists, psychologists, sociologists, historians of ideas. They found their allies among the futurist poets—Brik, Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky—and they consolidated their ideas by introducing new concepts from outside Russia: in particular, they drew heavily on the work of De Saussure (referred to in the sixth of the theses that follow) and Husserl. The Moscow Group, whose most dynamic member was Roman Jakobson, tended to be more interested in Linguistics; the Opoyaz group was made up mostly of literary historians.
The Bolshevik Revolution created a vacuum into which the Formalists promptly stepped. They soon constituted the leading school of literary studies in the Soviet Union. Their main centre of activity was the Petrograd Institute of Art History, where such leading Formalists as Eichenbaum, Shklovsky, Tomashevsky and Tynyanov all worked. However, the Revolution also meant that Formalism became increasingly criticized by orthodox Marxist writers. The most important critiques of Formalism were made by Trotsky, Bukharin and Lunacharsky. In order to defend themselves the Formalists were compelled to elaborate their theoretical positions and put forward views on such topics as the relationship between social life and literature, which in their enthusiasm for discussion of such literary devices as parody or alliteration they had previously ignored. In the theses that follow the stormy disputes surrounding the Formalists are cryptically evoked particularly in the conclusion of the last thesis.