What was the Arzamas literary society that Aleksandr Pushkin joined?

The Arzamas society was an exclusive Russian literary circle that flourished between 1815 and 1818. Aleksandr Pushkin was elected to the group in 1817.12

The society was formed with the semiserious goal of ridiculing the conservative group known as the "Lovers of the Russian Word," which was led by Aleksandr S. Shishkov. While the conservative group sought to keep the Russian language tied to archaic Old Church Slavonic, the members of Arzamas—including Vasily A. Zhukovsky, Konstantin Batyushkov, and Pushkin—advocated for recent Westernized language reforms.1

Although the club's activities were primarily limited to composing burlesques of the archaic style, their commitment to the new, modernized language had a lasting impact on the development of the modern Russian literary language.1