OPOJAZ was a prominent group of linguists

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 and literary critics in St. Petersburg founded in 1916 and dissolved by the early 1930s. The group included Viktor Shklovsky

Viktor Shklovsky

Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky was a Russian and Soviet critic, writer, and pamphleteer.-Life:...

, Boris Eikhenbaum, Osip Brik

Osip Brik

Osip Maksimovich Brik , , Russian avant garde writer and literary critic, was one of the most important members of the Russian formalist school, though he also identified himself as one of the Futurists....

, and Yury Tynianov. Along with the Moscow linguistic circle

Moscow linguistic circle

The Moscow linguistic circle was a group of important thinkers in semiotics, literary theory, and linguistics active in Moscow from 1915 to ca. 1924. Its members included Roman Jakobson, Grigory Vinokur, and Petr Bogatyrev. The group was a counterpart to the St...

 it was responsible for the development of Russian formalism

Russian formalism

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 such as Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Vladimir Propp, Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Grigory Vinokur who...

 and literary semiotics. It was dissolved under political pressure as "formalism" came to be a political term of opprobrium in the Soviet state.