Arzamas society

Arzamas society, Russian literary circle that flourished in 1815–18 and was formed for the semiserious purpose of ridiculing the conservative “Lovers of the Russian Word,” a group dominated by the philologist Aleksandr S. Shishkov, who wished to keep the modern Russian language firmly tied to Old Church Slavonic. The Arzamas circle included the poets Vasily A. Zhukovsky, Konstantin Batyushkov, and the youthful Aleksandr Pushkin, who were all advocates of recent Westernized language reforms. Though the activities of the club members were limited to composing burlesques of the archaic Slavonic style, their adoption of the new style in their subsequent works had a permanent effect on the formation of the modern Russian literary language.