Lev Rubinstein, a Russian poet, essayist and political dissident during both the Soviet and Putin eras, died January 14 from injuries sustained after he was hit by a car in Moscow, the New York Times reported. He was 76. Rubinstein "was considered one of the founders of the Russian conceptualism movement, an avant-garde fusion of art and prose that thumbed its nose at the restrictions of the Socialist Realism that predominated in the 1970s and '80s."
"Note card poems were one of his contributions to the movement, with each stanza printed on a separate card," the Times noted, adding that he "was inspired by the card catalogs he had encountered as a librarian at his alma mater, the Moscow Correspondence Pedagogical Institute, now known as Sholokhov Moscow State University for Humanities. But being subject to censorship encouraged him to search for a different medium."
"I wanted that the text could be an object, a literary object, a theatrical object--all at once," he said in a 2020 interview with the literary magazine Pank.
His work was published abroad and circulated within the Soviet Union as samizdat. After the collapse of Soviet Communism, he continued writing for mainstays of the Russian liberal intellectual press, including Itogi, Kommersant, and more recently the website Republic.
In 1999, Rubinstein received the Andrei Bely Prize, the independent literary prize for writing that eschews censorship, for service to "humanities studies." His novel Signs of Attention won the 2012 NOS prize, a Russian award for a work of prose. Rubenstein's other books include Catalog of Comedic Novelties, translated by Philip Metres & Tatiana Tulchinsky (2004), Compleat Catalog of Comedic Novelties, translated by Metres & Tulchinsky (2014), Here I Am: New Russian Writing, translated by Joanne Turnbull (2001), and Thirty-five New Pages, translated by Metres & Tulchinsky (2011).
"He was a living legend," Boris Filanovsky, a composer who wrote an opera based on some of Rubinstein's works that premiered in 2011, said in a phone interview. "When he read his lectures, it felt like all participants were taking communion." Filanovsky called Rubinstein "our linguistic consciousness.... His texts concern the very matter of language--what we say in Russia now seems to be stolen from Rubinstein's texts."
In recent years, Rubinstein continued to write for independently minded Russian outlets and was an outspoken opponent of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. He also supported opposition politician Aleksei A. Navalny, who has been imprisoned since January 2021 after spending months in Germany recovering from poisoning by a nerve agent.
Among the many tributes to Rubinstein posted on social media, one was from representatives of Russian human rights organization Memorial, which wrote: "Rubinstein was not arrested or tortured, he was not poisoned or persecuted in Russia in the time of war in Ukraine. But his tragic death in January 2024, just on the eve of the two-year anniversary of the catastrophe, seems bitterly symbolic. Today's Russia has no place for free citizens and independent poets. It barrels through them, not stopping at the red light to see them cross the road."
When he was asked last year what advice he would give to Russians living through increasing repression, Rubinstein observed: "In the late Soviet years, my closest friends and I were convinced that this boring Soviet slime would be with us forever. But the opposite happened.... From those times, I can give simple advice: Don't be afraid."