Russian poet Lev Rubinstein, a symbol of Soviet dissidence and a critic of the Kremlin, died on Sunday at the age of 76, his daughter said, six days after he was hit by a car in Moscow and seriously injured.
“My father, Lev Rubinstein, died today,” Maria Rubinstein wrote in her blog on the Live Journal website, an announcement carried by Russian media.
Lev Rubinstein, whose work has been praised in Russia and the West, was hit by a driver while crossing a street in the capital on January 8 and was subsequently hospitalized in serious condition.
In a statement, the Moscow Ministry of Transport said that the driver failed to slow down before a pedestrian crossing and hit the poet. According to preliminary information, the car owner was involved in 19 violations of road traffic regulations in the last twelve months.
Born in Moscow in 1947, the trained librarian Lev Rubinstein was one of the figures of the Soviet underground literary scene of the 1970s and 1980s, a “new avant-garde” that wanted to be inventive and outrageous.
In the 1970s, he was considered one of the founders of the Moscow “Conceptualist” movement, which ridiculed the official doctrine of socialist realism and wanted to take action against it.
Committed to rhythm, Lev Rubinstein had created his own genre, the “text-on-card,” which refers to both poetry and theater: the poet reads aloud short sentences written on perforated cards on stage.
This practice, inspired by his daily life as a librarian and a nod to the sinister bureaucracy of the Soviet era, mixes performance, absurd comedy and improvisation with the idea of shaking off the numbness of Sovietism.
After the collapse of the USSR, his popularity grew in Russia. He has published in renowned publishers and has also worked as a journalist. He has been invited to international poetry festivals and his works have been translated into many languages.
At the same time, the poet did not hide his hostile attitude towards the Putin regime, denouncing political repression, human rights violations and participation in opposition demonstrations.
In March 2022, together with other Russian writers, he signed an open letter in which he called the Russian army's major attack on Ukraine a “criminal war” and castigated the Kremlin's “lies”.