Russian formalism was a school of literary criticism that originated in Russia around 1915 and focused on analyzing the form and stylistic devices used in literature rather than their social or historical context. The movement emphasized making aspects of language unfamiliar through techniques like defamiliarization to draw attention to a text's artificiality and how it conveys meaning through form over content. Key concepts included literariness, the idea that literary language is distinguished from ordinary language by its use of devices like metaphor, rhyme and rhythm.