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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 (Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Grigory Vinokur) 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 such as Mikhail Bakhtin and Yuri Lotman, and on structuralism as a whole. The movement's members are widely considered the founders of modern literary criticism. Under Stalin it became a pejorative term for elitist art.