The acronym Opoyaz stands for Obshchestvo izucheniya poeticheskogo yazyka (Society for the Study of Poetic Language) – a group of Russian literary scholars and linguists from 1916 to 1928 who were predominantly of Jewish origin. As part of Opoyaz, they developed and formulated the ideas of Russian formalism, a school of literary criticism that for the first time viewed literature as an autonomous field of poetic language that was to be stu…