Russian formalism was an influential school of literary criticism in Russia from the 1910s to the 1930s. It includes the work of a number of highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars such as
Viktor Shklovsky,
Yuri Tynianov,
Vladimir Propp,
Boris Eichenbaum,
Roman Jakobson,
Boris Tomashevsky,
Grigory Gukovsky who revolutionised literary criticism between 1914 and the 1930s by establishing the specificity and autonomy of poetic language and literature. Russian formalism exerted a major influence on thinkers like
Mikhail Bakhtin and
Yuri Lotman, and on
structuralism as a whole. The movement's members had a relevant influence on modern literary criticism, as it developed in the structuralist and post-structuralist periods. Under Stalin it became a pejorative term for elitist art.