Russian literary theory: from the Formalists to Lotman

Literary theory in Russia was not the exclusive concern of literary theorists and critics. Just as in England writers as varied as Alexander Pope, T.S. Eliot, and David Lodge have theorized about literary form and language, about the place of literature in culture and in relation to the other arts, so in Russia Mikhail Lomonosov in the eighteenth century, Aleksandr Pushkin and Lev Tolstoy in the nineteenth, and Andrei Bely, Vladimir Maiakovsky, and Boris Pasternak in the twentieth century made not only radical experiments with form in poetry and prose fiction, but also original and significant theoretical statements.