Russian dissident poet Lev Rubinstein dies aged 76

He is one of the Russian writers who described, in March 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a “criminal war”.

Russian poet Lev Rubinstein, a figure of Soviet dissidence and critic of the Kremlin, died on Sunday January 14, his daughter announced, six days after being hit by a car and seriously injured in Moscow. “My dad, Lev Rubinstein, died today”wrote Maria Rubinstein on her blog on the “Live Journal” website, an announcement echoed in the Russian media.

Lev Rubinstein, whose work was praised in Russia and the West, was hit on January 8 by a motorist while crossing a street in the capital, then hospitalized in very serious condition. In a statement, the Moscow Transport Department said the driver failed to slow down before a pedestrian crossing and hit the poet, specifying that, according to preliminary data, the car owner had been involved in 19 code violations the road during the last 12 months.

The inventor of “text-on-card”

Born in 1947 in Moscow, a librarian by training, Lev Rubinstein was one of the figures of the Soviet underground literary scene of the 1970s and 1980s, a “new avant-garde” wanting to be inventive and insolent. Considered one of the founders, in the 1970s, of the Moscow “conceptualist” movement, he ridiculed the official doctrine of socialist realism and wanted to go against it.

Attached to rhythm, Lev Rubinstein had created a separate genre, the “text-on-card”, relating to both poetry and theater: the poet read short sentences on stage, aloud, written on cards perforated. The practice, inspired by his daily life as a librarian and reference to the sinister bureaucracy of the Soviet era, mixed performance, absurd comedy and improvisation. With the idea of ​​shaking off the numbness of Sovietism.

Criticism of the regime

After the breakup of the USSR, his notoriety grew in Russia. He is published in reputed publishing houses and also works as a journalist. He is invited to international poetry festivals and his works translated into many languages.

At the same time, the poet did not hide his opinions hostile to the Putin regime, denouncing political repression, human rights violations, and participating in opposition demonstrators. In March 2022, along with other Russian writers, he signed an open letter calling the large-scale attack on Ukraine by the Russian army a “criminal war” and castigating the “lies” of the Kremlin.

A “symbolic” death

The Russian NGO Memorial, specializing in the defense of human rights and the preservation of the memory of victims of Soviet persecution, welcomed “an incisive descriptor of several eras of Russia”. In a press release, Memorial, actively supported during his lifetime by Lev Rubinstein, affirms that he expressed in his work “a perception of everyday life that is abrupt and poetic, sad and insightful, full of self-deprecation”.

“They did not arrest or torture Rubinstein, they did not poison him”adds the NGO, banned by the government at the end of 2021. “But his tragic death, shortly before the two years of the great catastrophe (the attack in Ukraine, Editor’s note)seems symbolic.” “Russia today leaves no room for free citizens and poets. It does not see them on pedestrian crossings”concludes Memorial.