The Big Names in Formalism
When we talk about Formalism, we can't not talk about Viktor Shklovsky. Even if his name is kind of hard to say. He started out as part of the St. Petersburg OPOYAZ circle and came up with some seriously big Formalist ideas. He's the guy who first made the distinction between "plot" and "story," and he also came up with the notion of "defamiliarization." If those sound de-familiar to you now, just you wait—this guy's ideas were huge.
Lev Jakubinsky didn't come up with as many big ideas as Shklovsky (seriously, he doesn't even have his own Wikipedia page). But he did come up with one very important idea: he's the guy who first tried to explain the difference between "poetic" and "practical" language. Jakubinsky's distinction between poetic and practical language became really, really important to other Formalists, like Yuri Tynyanov and Osip Brik, who ran with it (and did such a good job that they earned their own Wikipedia spots).
Boris Eikhenbaum, also part of OPOYAZ, is important mainly because of an essay he wrote called "Theory of the 'Formal Method,'" which summarizes Formalism as a theoretical movement. Sure, he wrote a bunch of other things too. But the point is that this essay gives us a "big picture" of Formalism by explaining the different concepts and methods that developed within this school and the relationship of different theorists to each other. Which makes things a heck of a lot easier for us. Thank you, Boris.
Then there's this guy Roman Jakobson, who was part of the Moscow Linguistics Circle. In the wonderful world of Formalism, pretty much everywhere we turn we'll find Roman Jakobson. That's because he stands at the crossroads of a whole bunch of different disciplines and theoretical schools, and not just Formalism, even though that's basically his hometown.
So Jakobson: this guy was a linguist. He was also a Formalist literary theorist. He also developed the concept of "literariness." He was a "structuralist." It was largely thanks to Jakobson—who emigrated to the United States during World War II—that all of these wonderful Formalist and Structuralist ideas reached us way over here in America. Think of him as "The Bridge."