Critic, writer and Russian and Soviet pamphleteer. It was one of the first theorists called Russian Formalism.
He went to the University of there. During the war, he served as commissioner in the Red Army, as described in his memoirs «Сентиментальное путешествие. Воспоминания».
He was the founder of OPOYÁZ (Society for the study of poetic language) one of the two groups, with techniques of Russian Formalism Linguistic Circle of Moscow, which developed the critical theories and techniques of Russian Formalism.
In addition to literary criticism and biographies of authors such as Laurence Sterne, Maksim Gorky, Lev Tolstoy, and Vladimir Mayakovsky, he wrote a number of semi-autobiographical works presented as fictional.