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Russian formalism emphasizes the autonomous properties of literary form and the concept of defamiliarization (ostranenie)—the capacity of literary devices to disrupt habitual perception and make the familiar strange. Formalists prioritize analysis of how form works to generate meaning, rejecting biographical, historical, and intentionalist approaches.
From your study of New Criticism and Anglo-American formalism, you already know that close attention to the text itself — rather than to the author's biography or historical context — can reveal how literary meaning is made through structure, imagery, irony, and tension. Russian Formalism, which emerged independently in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the 1910s and 1920s, arrives at a similar insistence on the text but from a different direction, with sharper theoretical claims and a distinct vocabulary. Understanding Russian Formalism means grasping two foundational concepts: literariness and defamiliarization.
The Formalists asked a deceptively simple question: what makes literary language *literary* rather than ordinary? Their answer was that literary language deviates systematically from practical language. Practical language is automated — we use it to communicate efficiently, passing through it to the thing meant. Literary language resists automatic processing; it foregrounds itself as language, making the reader slow down and *feel* form as such. Viktor Shklovsky called this quality ostranenie — defamiliarization or "making strange." A description of a horse race narrated from the horse's perspective (as in Tolstoy's "Kholstomer") makes familiar social customs appear alien and inexplicable. The technique works by removing the protective coating of habitual perception and forcing renewed attention to what we thought we already knew.
This connects to a broader claim about the purpose of art. Shklovsky argues that habituation is the enemy of experience: we stop seeing things we encounter routinely; they become mere signs pointing through to function. Art's job is to restore sensation — to make the stone *stony* again. This is not decoration or emotional communication (as expression theories claimed) but a specific cognitive operation: the prolongation of perception, making perception itself an end rather than a means. Literary devices are instruments of this prolongation — meter creates rhythmic expectation that makes each word take longer to process; metaphor forces a detour through comparison before meaning resolves.
The Formalists also distinguished between fabula (the raw events of a story in chronological order) and sjuzhet (the actual arrangement and presentation of those events in the narrative). This distinction — later adopted by structuralist narratology — clarifies that plot is not the story but the *construction* of the story. A detective novel presents events in an order designed to withhold information; the sjuzhet controls when we know what. Analyzing how a narrative sequences, delays, and reveals events is analyzing sjuzhet — and the Formalists insisted this was where the specifically literary work was happening. Their legacy is a set of tools for treating narrative arrangement, rhythm, and device as meaningful structures in their own right, not merely vehicles for content a paraphrase could capture.
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