formalism

In art, literature, and music, an emphasis on form and formal structures at the expense of content. Formalism also refers more narrowly to a Russian school of literary theory in the 1920s, which defined literature by its formal, aesthetic qualities, and did not recognize its social content.

Soviet formalism fell into disrepute as an aesthetic self-indulgence and was the focus of the cultural purges of 1948 under Stalin. It was superseded by socialist realism.