2024-01-14 09:49:03
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” aiming to be inventive and insolent. He was considered one of the founders, in the 1970s, of the Moscow “conceptualist” movement, which mocked 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.
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, 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 Kremlin’s “lies”.
Read also: Dialogue on freedom between Svetlana Alexievich and the Russian intelligentsia
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