How It All Got Started
Two groups of guys got together in Russia in the 1910s. Yes, groups of guys get together all the time of course (in Russia and elsewhere), and nothing usually comes of it except maybe a game of beer pong—or vodka pong if you're in Russia. However, in the 1910s in Moscow and St. Petersburg, it wasn't just any guys getting together. It was a bunch of super clever, almost terrifyingly well-read guys.
The first group of dudes formed the Moscow Linguistic Circle in 1915. They included Roman Jakobson (whom we'll learn more about soon). These guys basically sat around thinking and chatting and writing about linguistics mostly, but also literature when they felt like a day off.
The second group, OPOYAZ (Society for the Study of Poetic Language—yeah, don't ask us how that's abbreviated into OPOYAZ, we're going Russian to English here), was founded in St. Petersburg in 1916. It included people like Boris Eikhenbaum, Viktor Shklovsky, and Yuri Tynyanov. These guys thought and chatted and wrote, usually about poetry, but also linguistics when they needed a break.
These two circles were kind of independent of one another—Moscow and St. Petersburg are a whole overnight train ride away from each other, after all—but the groups also collaborated. And their founding marked the beginning of Formalism as a theoretical movement. It was the members of these two circles who developed some of the most important Formalist concepts and ideas.