by Lev Rubinstein, a Russian poet, essayist and political dissident during the Soviet and Putin eras, died Sunday from injuries sustained after being hit by a car in Moscow. He was 76 years old.
His death was confirmed by his daughter María in a brief statement on her LiveJournal account. Mr. Rubinstein was struck while crossing a street and placed in a medically induced coma. Moscow authorities said the driver had committed numerous traffic violations and “failed to reduce speed” and that they had opened criminal proceedings against him.
Rubinstein was considered one of the founders of the Russian conceptualist movement, an avant-garde fusion of art and prose that mocked the restrictions of the socialist realism that predominated in the 1970s and 1980s.
One of his contributions to the movement was the genre-bending “notecard poems,” with each stanza printed on a separate card. He was inspired by the card catalogs he had encountered as a librarian at his alma mater, the Moscow Pedagogical Correspondence Institute, now known as Sholokhov Moscow State University of the Humanities. But being subject to censorship encouraged him to seek a different medium.
“I wanted the text to be able to be an object, a literary object, a theatrical object, all at the same time,” he said in a 2020 article. interview with the literary magazine Pank.
His work was published abroad and circulated within the Soviet Union as samizdat through a clandestine work reproduction system that could pass government censorship. After the collapse of Soviet communism, he continued to write for mainstays of the Russian liberal intellectual press, including Itogi, Kommersant and, most recently, the Republic website.
In 1999 he received the Andrei Bely Prize, the first independent literary prize for writings that avoid censorship, for his service to “humanities studies.” His novel “Signs of Attention” won the NOS prize, a Russian prize given annually to a work of prose, in 2012.
“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 telephone interview. The two met two decades ago while giving a lecture on cultural journalism in St. Petersburg.
“When he read his lectures,” he added, “it felt as if all the participants were taking communion.”
Filanovsky called Rubinstein “our linguistic conscience,” comparing his role in public intellectual life to that of the American writers Allen Ginzberg and Charles Bukowski and the English actor and author Stephen Fry.
“His texts address the very question of language: what we say in Russia now seems to have been stolen from Rubinstein’s texts,” he said.
In recent years, Rubinstein continued to write for independent-minded Russian media. He was outspoken about his opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and his support for opposition politician Aleksei A. Navalny, who has been jailed since January 2021 after spending months in Germany recovering from nerve agent poisoning.
Rubinstein’s death prompted tributes on social media, including one from representatives of Memorial, Russia’s best-known human rights organization, which was banned by court order in December 2021, on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine. They wrote:
“Rubinstein was not arrested or tortured, he was not poisoned or persecuted in Russia during the war in Ukraine. But his tragic death in January 2024, just on the eve of the second anniversary of the catastrophe, seems bitterly symbolic. In today’s Russia there is no place for free citizens and independent poets. He passes through them without stopping at the red light to watch them cross the street.”
Lev Semyonovich Rubinstein was born on February 19, 1947 in Moscow. His father, Semyon, was a civil engineer who had served at the front during World War II, known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War. The consequences of that war were visible throughout his childhood, he said in a recent interview; He recalled seeing “people without arms, without legs and without eyes” when his father took him to the public bathrooms.
His mother, Elena, was born in Ukraine and as a child there, in the city of Kharkiv, he experienced the Holodomor, the Kremlin-engineered famine of 1932-33 in which millions died.
After President Vladimir V. Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine, Rubinstein spoke of a current of “internal imperialism” present in Russia, even among the country’s intellectuals.
“I admit with shame that this internal imperialism was in us, even though we were not imperial,” he said in a speech. interview with the independent Russian media Meduza published in January 2023. “It took me time and effort to overcome this within myself. Now, of course, my friends and I have eradicated this as much as possible.”
Rubinstein spoke out against Putin’s growing authoritarianism and opposed the silencing of the independent television channel NTV. He denounced Moscow’s wars in Chechnya, as well as its illegal annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. And he actively participated in events organized by Memorial, the human rights organization. In March 2022, he joined writers in an open letter condemning the “criminal war” being waged in Ukraine and performed at the final event held at the Memorial headquarters, which has been closed and confiscated by the state.
Complete information about the survivors was not immediately available.
When asked a year ago what advice he would give to Russians living through the growing repression of war, Rubinstein found solace in history. “In the last Soviet years, my closest friends and I were convinced that this boring Soviet slime would be with us forever,” he said. saying. “But the opposite happened.”
And he added: “From those times I can give simple advice: do not be afraid.”
