MOSCOW — Lev Rubinstein, a Russian poet, essayist and political dissident throughout each the Soviet and Putin eras, died Sunday from accidents sustained after being hit by a automotive in Moscow. He was 76.
His demise was confirmed by his daughter Maria in a brief assertion on her LiveJournal account. Mr. Rubinstein was struck whereas crossing a avenue and was put right into a medically induced coma. Authorities in Moscow stated 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 turned up its nostril on the limitations of the socialist realism that prevailed within the Seventies and Eighties .
Considered one of his contributions to the motion had been “notice card poems,” the place every stanza was 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 often called Sholokhov Moscow State College of the Humanities. However the censors inspired him to search for one other medium.
“I wished the textual content to be an object, a literary object and a theatrical object on the identical time,” he stated in a 2020 interview with the literary journal Pank.
His work was printed overseas and distributed inside the Soviet Union as samizdat by an underground system of copy of labor that would cross authorities censorship. After the collapse of Soviet communism, he continued to jot down 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 providers to ‘humanities research’. His novel ‘Indicators of Consideration’ received the NOS Prize in 2012, a Russian award given yearly for a prose work.
“He was a residing legend,” Boris Filanovsky, a composer who wrote an opera primarily based on a few of Mr. Rubinstein’s works that premiered in 2011, stated in a phone interview. The 2 met twenty years in the past throughout a lecture on cultural journalism in Saint Petersburg.
“When he learn his lectures,” he added, “it felt as if all of the members had been receiving communion.”
Mr. Filanovsky referred to as Mr. Rubinstein “our language consciousness,” likening his function in public mental life to that of the American writers Allen Ginzberg and Charles Bukowski and the English actor and creator Stephen Fry.
“His lyrics cope with language points – what we are saying in Russia now appears to have been stolen from Rubinstein’s lyrics,” he stated.
In recent times, Mr. Rubinstein continued to jot down for impartial Russian media. He has been outspoken about his opposition to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and his help for opposition politician Aleksei A. Navalny, who has been jailed since January 2021 after spending months in Germany recovering from a nerve agent poisoning.
Mr. Rubinstein’s demise drew tributes on social media, together with from representatives of Memorial, Russia’s best-known human rights group, which was banned by courtroom order in December 2021 on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine. They wrote:
“Rubinstein was not arrested or tortured, he was not poisoned or persecuted in Russia throughout the battle in Ukraine. However his tragic demise in January 2024, simply on the eve of the two-year anniversary of the disaster, appears bitterly symbolic. At this time’s Russia has no place totally free residents and impartial poets. He rushes by and does not cease on the pink gentle to observe them cross the highway.’
Lev Semyonovich Rubinstein was born on February 19, 1947 in Moscow. His father, Semyon, was a civil engineer who had served on the entrance throughout World Conflict II, identified in Russia because the Nice Patriotic Conflict. The implications of that battle had been seen all through his childhood, he stated in a latest interview; he remembered seeing “the folks with out arms, legs and eyes” when his father took him to the general public bathhouse.
His mom, Elena, was born in Ukraine and, as a baby, within the metropolis of Kharkov, skilled the Holodomor, the Kremlin-induced famine of 1932-33 that killed tens of millions of individuals.
After President Vladimir V. Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Rubinstein spoke of a present of “inner imperialism” that was current in Russia, even among the many nation’s intellectuals.
“I admit with disgrace that there was such inner imperialism in us – even supposing we weren’t imperialists,” he stated in an interview with the impartial Russian newspaper Meduza, printed in January 2023. “It took effort and time to this inside myself. Now, in fact, my associates and I’ve eradicated this as a lot as attainable.”
Mr. Rubinstein spoke out towards Mr. Putin’s creeping authoritarianism and opposed the silencing of the impartial tv channel NTV. He denounced Moscow’s wars in Chechnya and Ukraine’s unlawful annexation of Crimea in 2014. And he actively participated in occasions organized by Memorial, the rights group. In March 2022, he joined writers in an open letter condemning the “prison battle” being waged in Ukraine and carried out on the closing occasion at Memorial’s headquarters, which has been closed and confiscated by the state.
Full details about survivors was not instantly out there.
When requested a yr in the past what recommendation he would give to Russians residing amid growing battle repression, Rubinstein took solace in historical past. “Within the late Soviet years, my greatest associates and I had been satisfied that this boring Soviet slime would stick with us perpetually,” he stated. “However the reverse occurred.”
He added: “From that point on, I may give one easy piece of recommendation: do not be afraid.”
