Lev Rubinstein, a Russian poet, essayist and political dissident throughout each the Soviet and Putin eras, died on Sunday from accidents sustained after he was hit by a automobile in Moscow. He was 76.
His loss of life was confirmed by his daughter Maria in a quick assertion on her LiveJournal account. Mr. Rubinstein was struck whereas crossing a avenue and had been positioned in a medically induced coma. The Moscow authorities stated that the driving force had dedicated quite a few site visitors violations and “didn’t decelerate,” and that they’d opened prison proceedings towards him.
Mr. Rubinstein was thought-about one of many founders of the Russian conceptualism motion, an avant-garde fusion of artwork and prose that thumbed its nostril on the restrictions of the Socialist Realism that predominated within the Nineteen Seventies and ’80s.
One among his contributions to the motion was genre-bending “notice card poems,” with every stanza printed on a separate card. He was impressed by the cardboard catalogs he had encountered as a librarian at his alma mater, the Moscow Correspondence Pedagogical Institute, now generally known as Sholokhov Moscow State College for Humanities. However being topic to censorship inspired him to seek for a unique medium.
“I wished that the textual content could possibly be an object, a literary object, a theatrical object — suddenly,” he stated in a 2020 interview with the literary journal Pank.
His work was printed overseas and circulated inside the Soviet Union as samizdat by an underground system of reproducing work that might make it previous authorities censors. After the collapse of Soviet Communism, he continued writing for mainstays of the Russian liberal mental press, together with Itogi, Kommersant and extra not too long ago the web site Republic.
In 1999, he obtained the Andrei Bely Prize, the primary impartial literary prize for writing that eschews censorship, for service to “humanities research.” His novel “Indicators of Consideration” gained the NOS prize, a Russian award given yearly for a piece of prose, in 2012.
“He was a dwelling legend,” Boris Filanovsky, a composer who wrote an opera based mostly on a few of Mr. Rubinstein’s works that premiered in 2011, stated in a cellphone interview. The 2 met 20 years in the past whereas lecturing on cultural journalism in St. Petersburg.
“When he learn his lectures,” he added, “it felt like all individuals have been taking communion.”
Mr. Filanovsky known as Mr. Rubinstein “our linguistic consciousness,” likening his function in public mental life to that of the American writers Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski and the English actor and writer Stephen Fry.
“His texts concern the very matter of language — what we are saying in Russia now appears to be stolen from Rubinstein’s texts,” he stated.
In recent times, Mr. Rubinstein continued to write down for independently minded Russian retailers. He was outspoken about his opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and his assist for the opposition politician Aleksei A. Navalny, who has been imprisoned since January 2021 after spending months in Germany recovering from poisoning by a nerve agent.
Mr. Rubinstein’s loss of life elicited tributes on social media, together with one from representatives of Memorial, Russia’s best-known human rights group, which was banned by court docket order in December 2021 on the eve of the Ukraine invasion. They wrote:
“Rubinstein was not arrested or tortured, he was not poisoned or persecuted in Russia within the time of conflict in Ukraine. However his tragic loss of life in January 2024, simply on the eve of the two-year anniversary of the disaster, appears bitterly symbolic. In the present day’s Russia has no place free of charge residents and impartial poets. It barrels by them, not stopping on the crimson mild to see them cross the street.”
Lev Semyonovich Rubinstein was born on Feb. 19, 1947, in Moscow. His father, Semyon, was a civil engineer who had served on the entrance in the course of the Second World Battle, recognized in Russia because the Nice Patriotic Battle. The results of that conflict have been seen all through his childhood, he stated in a latest interview; he recalled seeing “the armless, legless and eyeless folks” when his father took him to the general public bathhouse.
His mom, Elena, was born in Ukraine and as a toddler there, within the metropolis of Kharkiv, skilled the Holodomor, the Kremlin-engineered famine of 1932-33 through which hundreds of thousands died.
After President Vladimir V. Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Rubinstein spoke a couple of present of “inner imperialism” current in Russia, even among the many nation’s intellectuals.
“I admit with disgrace that such an inner imperialism was in us — even if we weren’t imperials,” he stated in an interview with the impartial Russian outlet Meduza printed in January 2023. “It took effort and time to beat this inside myself. Now, in fact, my mates and I’ve eradicated this as a lot as attainable.”
Mr. Rubinstein spoke out towards the creeping authoritarianism of Mr. Putin, opposing the silencing of the impartial tv channel NTV. He denounced Moscow’s wars in Chechnya in addition to its unlawful annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. And he actively took half in occasions organized by Memorial, the rights group. In March 2022, he joined writers in an open letter condemning the “prison conflict” being waged in Ukraine and carried out on the remaining occasion held in Memorial’s headquarters, which have been shuttered and confiscated by the state.
Full info on survivors was not instantly accessible.
When he was requested, a yr in the past, what recommendation he would give to Russians dwelling by the growing repression of wartime, Mr. Rubinstein drew solace from historical past. “Within the late Soviet years, my closest mates and I have been satisfied that this boring Soviet slime can be with us perpetually,” he stated. “However the reverse occurred.”
He added, “From these instances, I may give easy recommendation: Don’t be afraid.”
