Russian formalism 100 years on

Close to the avant-garde movements in the arts during their early years, the Russian formalists revolutionized the study of literature between 1915 and 1930. They also played an essential role in the development of folklore studies, the theory of literature and structural anthropology, and they invented the theory of cinema. Reduced to silence by the Soviet authorities at end of the 1920s, the movement was then carried on in part in Prague from 1929 to 1939.
It was only starting in the mid-1960s in the context of the “thaw” that research carried out by the formalists was progressively rediscovered and acknowledged in Eastern Europe and in the West and that a major turn in awareness of their importance took place. The discoveries by the movement are now acknowledged as major advances in the human sciences during the last century. A hundred years after the birth of formalism, fifty years after becoming known in the West, thirty years after the opening up of archives in Russia, the time has come to reassess its heritage and to re-examine the historical and cultural context of its contributions.
This issue of Communications is directed by Catherine Depretto, John Pier and Philippe Roussin and devoted to the memory of Tzvetan Todorov. It also contains hitherto unpublished material: an article by Boris Tomaševskij dating from 1925 together with extracts from the 1928-1929 correspondence between Roman Jakobson, Victor Šklovskij and Jurij Tynjanov. In addition, the issue brings together contributions by some of the leading Russian, Czech, Polish, German, North-American and French theoreticians and historians of literature working in the field.