Lev Rubinstein, dissident poet and Kremlin critic, dies at 76

Russian poet Lev Rubinstein, a figure of Soviet dissidence and critic of the Kremlin, died Sunday at the age of 76, 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.

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.

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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. The idea was to shake 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 have been translated into many languages.

At the same time, the poet had not hidden 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”.