In the second week of January 2024, word came that the Russian-Jewish poet and essayist Lev Rubinstein had been killed in an accident at a deserted pedestrian crossing in Moscow. Struck on January 8 by a car that reportedly did not slow down, he was placed in a medically induced coma and never regained consciousness. He died several days later from his injuries. This news at the beginning of the new year was truly disheartening.
If anything alters our reactions to death, war is certainly high up on the list. Stephen Spender remembered in his journals that when Virginia Woolf died in April 1941, the news about her death, which would have made the headlines just a few years earlier, went almost unnoticed. Britain was at war with Nazi Germany. Londoners were sheltering in the Underground from the Luftwaffe’s frequent bombing raids and did not pay much heed to the passing of a major English writer. Spender, who extinguished fires caused by the falling bombs during the raids, was one of those who mourned Woolf. She had been a mentor and a model for Spender’s entire generation of writers in the 1930s.
Lev Rubinstein’s death happened against the backdrop of another war: Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The images from the early days of the invasion showing civilians—mostly women and children—hiding from Russian bombs in the Kyiv Metro underground unmistakably rhymed with the scenes from the London Blitz. Rubinstein was sensitive to such rhymes, in spite of coming from a country that makes a habit of bombing innocent civilians. Perhaps it was a matter of his ethics, or his gifts of intellect, and the ethos of the Russian intelligentsia, for whom the notion of living by one’s conscience is paramount, that made him take an unequivocal position on the invasion. Rubinstein was one of the few intellectuals who spoke of his personal responsibility for the devastation that Russia was inflicting upon Ukraine, even though he had been consistently critical of Putin’s regime long before this war had started. Moreover, he had family ties to Ukraine (Rubinstein’s mother was born in Kharkiv and two of his aunts were murdered by the Nazis in Kyiv during the Holocaust).
After February 24, 2022, his Moscow circle of friends had dramatically shrunk. Rubinstein chose to stay in Russia, both because of a family health crisis and because he was reluctant to leave home at his age, and he publicly condemned the invasion. This was a display of civic courage. Many public figures who have come out against the Russian invasion have been targeted since then, and some, including people as prominent as Oleg Orlov—who received the Nobel Prize in 2022 on behalf of the international human rights organization Memorial—have been slapped with lengthy prison sentences. That Rubinstein had managed to defy this censorship for so long became a source of moral support and hope for other like-minded Russians who also remained inside Russia while opposing Putin’s rule. All the more dispiriting and symbolic, then, was Lev Rubinstein’s sudden death, which struck a distressing chord among his friends and fans scattered around the globe. It laid bare the reality that mere decency and dignity are again under attack in Russia, as was the case during the Soviet era. That he was becoming a thorn in the side of the authorities could be gleaned from a shameful article reporting on his funeral that appeared briefly on the pro-government tabloid site Express-Gazeta. The article, which expressed glee, hatred, Schadenfreude, and unadulterated anti-Semitism, was later removed from the site, as its authors must have realized that even by today’s standards in Russia, they might have gone a little too far.
Lev Rubinstein was born in 1947 in Moscow, then the capital of the Stalinist Soviet Union. His first years of life, from 1948 to 1953, coincided with several waves of state-sponsored anti-Semitic campaigns that clearly left a trace on his young psyche. They were intended to prepare the ground for the mass deportation of Jews to remote regions of Siberia, mirroring the fate of the Poles, Lithuanians, Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Ingushes, Kabardino-Balkarians, and many other ethnicities in the Soviet Union who were subjected to mass deportations. Soviet Jews were saved from this fate solely by the sudden death of the totalitarian ruler.
Lev Rubinstein was only six when Stalin died in 1953. Poetry became a catalyst for generating cultural change and for fomenting civil disobedience during the brief period of liberalization and partial de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union that occurred shortly thereafter. Rubinstein was too young to participate in the revival of Russian poetry led by the older generation of poets, whose most prominent figure was the future Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996). Rubinstein’s artistic maturity coincided instead with the last decades of Soviet rule under Brezhnev—the gray and hopeless years of so-called “stagnation.” During this period, the Soviet public sphere was dominated by ubiquitous ideological slogans, as repetitious as commercial advertising, but somehow even more meaningless because most people no longer believed in them. Rubinstein had a rare sense of humor and a keen ear for absurdity, cliché, and colloquial speech. He developed a technique in poetry that could be compared to American pop art, but his vehicle was the use of words. By altering the context of everyday propaganda slogans—of communist partyspeak—and including random bits taken from everyday Soviet conversation, his poems exposed the emptiness and the rhetorical bankruptcy, but also the deafening discord between intentions and deeds: the utter disconnect between the Soviet-era lofty proclamations and the routine cruelty, squalor, and backwardness of daily life. In recycling such seemingly irretrievably dead material in his unique manner, Rubinstein made it entertaining. Like the writing of most underground artists of the period, his works could not be published in official venues, and he had to settle for library work for many years. Another marker of his playfulness was displaying his verses on library index cards, which demarcated units of poetic expression ranging from a few words to a few sentences, not unlike poetic stanzas. An unauthorized publication of his poems in the West resulted in an invitation from the KGB for “a chat,” but the USSR was already in its final death throes, and there were no further repercussions for the poet. In time, Rubinstein came to be considered the founder of the Moscow conceptualist movement. His poem “Unnamed Events” (1980) is an example of this:
1
Absolutely impossible.
2
Not at all possible.
3
Impossible.
4
Perhaps, at some point.
5
Sometime.
6
Later.
7
Not yet.
8
Not now.
9
And not now.
10
And not now.
11
Perhaps, soon.
12
It could be soon.
13
Really soon.
14
Perhaps earlier than expected.
15
Quite soon.
16
Just about.
17
Now.
18
Pay attention.
19
Here.
20
Well, that’s about all.
(Translated by Philip Metres and Tatiana Tulchinsky)
My own generation came of age when the Soviet empire started to crumble. As the walls of the pyramid began to show cracks and the Iron Curtain became porous, millions of Soviet citizens streamed to the previously prohibited Western hemisphere in pursuit of change, opportunity, and freedom. I arrived in Berlin as a teenager, shortly after the Wall fell. Conversely, Lev Rubinstein did not emigrate to the West, in part due to the previously mentioned family-related reasons. Instead, he stayed in Moscow during perestroika and witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Having contributed up until that moment strictly in the artistic underground, Rubinstein benefited from the lifting of censorship in 1991 and became a leading artistic presence in Russia during the first two decades of the twenty-first century. While he never regretted remaining, he gladly embraced the new opportunities to travel abroad. Thus, he spent a year in Berlin in 1994, where I first met him in person through a mutual friend, a German translator of Russian literature. Rubinstein’s civility and delicate manner were particularly memorable.
In the more open Russian context of the late 1990s and 2000s, Rubinstein embraced new genres such as opinion journalism and political commentary. Always centered around language, his essays managed to chronicle the gradual erosion of freedom of speech and other political freedoms, as well as the creeping restoration of authoritarianism in Putin’s Russia. Often there was a sense of a déjà vu as the familiar Soviet linguistic and rhetorical tropes returned to public discourse under a new guise. Rubinstein’s essays appealed to me, as I followed events in Russia from abroad, because they looked at current events through the prism of language. Corruption and misuse of language is not solely a Soviet phenomenon. We all contribute to it, but Rubinstein’s pen managed to magically restore to words their original meanings. The murder of Boris Nemtsov, the most charismatic Russian opposition politician at the time, gunned down in front of the Kremlin on February 27, 2015, had a devastating effect on many people. Of the scores of Russian journalists who commented on this shocking political murder, only Lev Rubinstein managed to find the most precise, moving, and reassuring words. Rubinstein died just a month before the assassination of Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny and was thus relieved of writing yet another obituary that tragically rhymed.
I consumed many of Rubinstein’s articles as they appeared over time in book format and became one of his fans. Almost thirty years after our first fleeting encounter, I reached out to him as I was organizing a Zoom conference called “Poetry as Political Resistance” at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, during the pandemic. Finally, in May 2022, I had the opportunity to meet with him again in person. He came to Stockholm to give a reading in an antiquarian bookstore, accompanied by his Swedish translator Lars Kleberg, from his new book of poems Vidare och vidare (On and On). The reading took place just two months into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The atmosphere was tense. Many events featuring Russian cultural figures were being boycotted and canceled. But the bookstore where Rubinstein gave his reading was packed. His humility, humor, and light touch managed to somewhat dispel the reigning doom and gloom and to brighten the atmosphere, which was clearly his goal. Magically, the Swedish audience repeatedly laughed as the Swedish translation was read. This was a testimony to the verbal mastery of his translator, to the Swedish sense of humor, as well as to Rubinstein’s knack for finding common ground amidst divisions through a universal sense of the absurd. After the reading, I managed to ask Lev Rubinstein a few questions about the relationship between poetry and politics, which had been even more fraught under Soviet rule due to the unprecedented level of the state’s attempts to control poetry. I will conclude this homage with our exchange on May 7, 2022, a memory I will cherish alongside the signed copy of his book of poems in Swedish translation.
Zakhar Ishov: Your poetry reading today brought to mind both Venedikt Erofeev and Daniil Kharms.
Lev Rubinstein: This is quite suprising. Thank you!
ZI: Well, in the sense that the reading was very humorous. But on a different note, it now seems that the question will constantly hover over Russian writers as to whether one can write poetry after Auschwitz—or after Bucha.
LR: Or after Kolyma.
ZI: Yes, precisely. And in a way you have answered that question today with your poems. At least, as I see it: humor is necessary in order to survive in Auschwitz or anywhere else, for that matter. Forgive me, this is more of a commentary. But here is my first question: over the last decade I’ve been following your journalism on both Grani.ru and Echo of Moscow, and I appreciate and love your book The Ghosts of Time (2008). I have always wondered how you ended up writing political commentary? And my second, broader question—which touches on the nineteenth century and concerns the Russian poet Nikolai Nekrasov who wrote, “You may not be a poet, but you have to be a citizen”—is about the role of the poet in politics. Or, more precisely, how do you see the importance of the stance a poet takes towards politics?
LR: Well, first let me try to answer the first question, how I actually arrived at journalism. The answer is, like a lot of things in life and in art, it was by sheer accident. In the mid-1990s, my friend, the journalist Sergey Parkhomenko, called me and said he was going to be the editor-in-chief of the magazine Itogi, that it was going to be a modern magazine and we would try to make it fashionable. He said, “Would you like to work here and write about books?” “Well,” I said, “let’s give it a try, even though I’ve never actually done that, I’ve never been a critic, and I’ve never written for the mass media.” It was a gamble, but since I had run out of money, and he was offering me a pretty good salary at the time, I agreed. So, I wrote several book reviews. Mostly they turned out to be reviews of my friends’ books. Then things got a little stagnant because I realized that, for one thing, there was not much that I liked about contemporary literature. And in general, it’s hard to have a dispassionate look at the process when you are inside of it. I couldn’t look at the entire literary process as one removed from it, as it were, it doesn’t work that way. It reached the point that I was not certain whether I should stay or go. And out of this muddle, I composed something almost anecdotal, describing a funny situation: in other words, I wrote something like a feuilleton. Mostly, of course, it was centered around language. It is, in general, my favorite subject. Suddenly the management liked it very much, it got published, and they even created a special column for me in the magazine. I gradually moved away from book reviews and started to write all sorts of small and large essays. As a result, I worked with that magazine until the very end—until it closed (2001). Later, I started writing for other publications, largely in online media format. And the subject matter gradually changed—I did not make any dramatic decision to do so—the topics changed along with the changes in the social situation. In the 1990s, and even in the early 2000s, I could afford to not be interested in politics at all. I was really not interested in politics because, at that time, for a person who was not directly involved in it, politics was limited to who was appointed where, who was removed from which position, etc. Politics was not an interesting subject to me. But the more charged the atmosphere became, the more my attitude started to change. Strictly speaking, I am still not interested in politics—after all, everything I think and write is not really about politics—but I had one text that was very important to me (Lev Rubinstein, 20.12.2005), almost a manifesto, in which I wrote that in the Soviet years, being nonpolitical was a sign of a certain opposition, because politics back then was considered something like knowing by heart the articles from the newspaper Pravda, or the like. And we were apolitical in the sense that it all passed us by; we were not interested in it. We lived in a parallel world. And back then the word apolitical itself sounded a little ominous. For instance, when someone said, “You, citizen, are thinking apolitically,” this meant you did not think in the way they demanded from you.
These days, gradually, I came to believe that being nonpolitical—especially among people of culture—is, on the contrary, a terribly reactionary position. There’s also such a phenomenon as an aggressive apoliticism, when people say, “I don’t care about it [politics].” Because apoliticism is one of the most widespread types of conformism today. The totalitarian regime always demanded complicity from the citizen, from the individual, it demanded consent and acquiescence expressed in one way or another. A person who kept silent under a totalitarian regime was under suspicion. On the contrary, the authoritarian regime we have today requires nonparticipation. You can relax, sit back, watch your television, take no part in anything, do whatever you like, just don’t get in our way. I keep thinking of the words of Bertolt Brecht. I don’t remember them word for word, but in essence what he wrote was that an artist who claims to be apolitical actually supports the policies of the authorities. And what we often call politics, I keep telling everyone, is not politics—it belongs to the realm of ethics and morality.
With kind thanks to translators Philip Metres and Tatiana Tulchinsky for their permission to reprint the poem “Unnamed Events.”
More of Rubinstein’s poems are available in these English-language magazines:
“A Little Night Serenade” (Asymptote)
“Time Passes” (Jacket)
“Life Is Everywhere” (Poetry International)
Lev Rubinstein was born in 1947 in Moscow and studied at the Moscow Pedagogical Institute, after which he became a librarian. His highly original, conceptual approach to poetry included the use of boxes of note cards, which he drew on for readings and performances. Rubinstein’s poems were known in informal literary circles. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, his works, including A Little Night Serenade and Farther and Farther Away, gained a wide audience. Considered one of the central figures of the Russian Conceptualist movement, he also gained strong international recognition for his work, which has been translated into numerous languages. Starting in the 1990s, in addition to poetry, Rubinstein began writing for numerous Russian periodicals including the online magazine Grani.ru. His essays were collected in Dukhi vremeni (Ghosts of the Time), Znaki vnimaniia (Tokens of Attention), Kladbishche s vaifaem (Cemetery with Wifi), and Vremya politiki (Time for Politics). He was outspoken in his support for democracy and tolerance. His awards were numerous, including the Andrei Bely Prize and the Nos Prize for New Literature. Rubinstein’s works in English include Compleat Catalogue of Comedic Novelties (2014), Thirty-Five New Pages (2011), and Catalogue of Comedic Novelties (2004), all translated by Philip Metres and Tatiana Tulchinsky and published in the US by Ugly Duckling Presse, and Here I Am: New Russian Writing, translated by Joanne Turnbull (Moscow: GLAS, 2001).
Zakhar Ishov is a researcher at Uppsala University. His areas of expertise include Russian, Italian, and English poetry, translation studies, Jewish studies, comparative literature, and the intersection between humanities and social sciences. His monograph, Brodsky in English (2023), examines the exiled Russian poet and 1987 Nobel Prize winner’s radical project of translating his own poems into “new originals” in English. Ishov’s new project, “Dangerous Russian Poets,” which was awarded a grant by the Swedish Research Council (2022), posits the unprecedented role played by poetry in the last decades of the Soviet regime in sustaining political dissent and civil disobedience.
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