The prophecy of Lev Rubinstein was announced: “Humanity will learn to control gravity”

His path in literature began at the end of the thaw. In the stagnant 70s, he became one of the founders of Moscow conceptualism and invented a special genre – poems on cards. In our time, Lev Rubinstein remains a truly significant poet and essayist. He looks like his poems. Laconic, light, sharp. The poet Rubinstein is undoubtedly a phenomenon; he was a special person. Just yesterday I was reading poetry at another creative evening, and today I died from the consequences of DBT. He somehow left suddenly, accidentally, leaving us with his eloquent minimalism.

We first met 16 years ago. One September evening I happened to find myself in a theater cafe, where a cheerful group of artists and writers was buzzing. The round table was headed by Lev Semenovich: they celebrated the publication of his book “Vocabulary” – a dictionary consisting of sharp essays on political culture. Friends immediately introduced me to the poet. Short and lean, with smart, ironic eyes. His friendly evening was like him – warm, light and witty. Rubinstein then presented the book, where on the flyleaf he wrote: “Dear Masha in good memory.” He wrote to so many people. Memory is the basic unit of the eternal, which he thought about in the wake of the current.

He lived through several eras, because he was born in 1947. He spent his childhood in Mytishchi, near Moscow. He graduated from the philological department of the Moscow State Correspondence Pedagogical Institute (now the State Pedagogical Institute). He worked as a librarian in the institute library. The poet turned the library cards he worked with there into “canvases” for his works, which were composed of phrases into a fragmented, postmodern canvas-text.

Two years ago, at the “First Avant-Garde Factory” festival in Ivanovo, we met again by chance and talked for an hour and a half about classical and modern literature, about our time, which is written with a “poster pen.” Then Lev Semenovich said: “I don’t take time into account. I’m just reading poetry. I read poetry and prose, including funny ones.” And he added at the end: “The near future is a bit dark. But in general I’m an optimist. My wife says that my optimism often leads to idiocy. I think we’ll get out.”

We spoke with optimism both about conceptualism, which no longer exists, and about conceptualists who are still alive. They also remembered his famous “card index”, thanks to which Rubinstein became famous in the early 1970s. Poems on library cards became a phenomenon of the Soviet era – and a phenomenon that was dubbed literary minimalism, a new form of writing. He probably borrowed the very idea of ​​writing down fragments of his works on cards from Nabokov. But Nabokov ended up collecting ordinary text from the cards, and Rubinstein – into a pile. He produced not just a finished text, but an art object. “Regular Letter” – a collection of card works covering the period from 1976 to 2006 – is more than a book, it is also a work of visual art and conceptual thought.

“The era of cards is over,” Lev Semenovich told me in the fall of 2022. – Cards were incredibly popular in the 1970s and 80s: everyone traveled with them in their pockets, wrote down quotes on them, or learned languages ​​with them. Today these are already museum exhibits. And I am a modern writer. The Internet appeared when I was already an adult writer. Then social networks appeared. These are the same cards – only on some other turn. So it was natural for me to enter the online space. The social network genre is close to me, because many of my card texts are organized according to the same principle – free flow from one island to another, fragmentation of text and thinking…

And yet, I plucked up the courage and asked Lev Semenovich to write the last card. Special. Come up with a dream. An author’s holiday, invented only by him. He could choose any day of any month that he liked. At the “Postcard” exhibition at the Museum of Decorative Arts, Lev Rubinstein became one of 13 artists who composed the future, or more precisely, the future calendar (each work turned into a postcard). We imagined that the 2060s are just around the corner, we live in a new world where the stars have become closer, and the technology is phenomenal, where any miracles happen. A month after that conversation, Lev Semenovich wrote three cards by hand – on the same old library cards from the 1970s. As it turns out, he has been carefully storing their stock at home since Soviet times. Rubinstein came up with “Parachute Day” and described it this way:

“June 3, 1785 Fr. Blanchard demonstrated the first parachute. Therefore, this day will be declared Parachute Day. When humanity learns to control gravity, the parachute in its current form will become something of a decoration – it is really beautiful. And it will also be perceived as a harbinger of free aeronautics. On this day, people will freely soar in the air, decorating themselves with colorful pieces of parachute silk fluttering in the wind, and holding colorful umbrellas in their hands, stylized as parachutes.”

I don’t know whether Lev Rubinstein comprehended gravity, whether he now floats freely in the air, but he experienced a worthy life. And most importantly – as his friends, artist Leonid Tishkov and his wife, writer Marina Moskvina, said – “his words remained in our Universe – the words of a poet, lonely and eternal, like stars in a black frosty sky.” And, indeed, they remained.

Artist Alexander Shaburov:

We met Lev Semyonovich in the late 1980s at the Alternative festival in Sverdlovsk, where they performed with pianist Batagov. The last time we saw each other was the week before the New Year at the opening of the Tsiolkovsky bookstore on Povarskaya. He was irrepressible and ageless, he was everywhere and everywhere. I remember I was sick with something a couple of years ago, and then continued to behave in exactly the same way, without changing at all. Previously, there was Prigov, who was also not lazy about going everywhere and could formulate his point of view on any occasion.

Here’s an anecdote from Rubinstein.

Either he himself or one of his friends came to give lectures at some foreign university. They settled him on campus and left him alone. He went outside, and there was almost no one there either. He went into the city – the streets were empty. I saw a bar and thought: I’ll at least talk to the bartender. I walked in, sat down at the bar, and didn’t know where to start. He sees a box of matches on the counter, and on the label there is an image of this very town. Well, he thinks, I’ll start with matches, and then word by word. Says to the bartender: “Wonderful matches!” He looked at him with a puzzled look and answered: “Like matches, nothing…” And he didn’t say another word.

And for another six months we applied this formula to everything that came our way: “like a book, nothing”, “like a play, nothing”, “like an exhibition, nothing” – and laughed.

I also remembered New Year’s greetings from Rubinstein:

“HAPPY NEW G.

LET EVERYTHING BE X.”

When Rubinstein was hit by a car, I sent him a text message to tell him to get better. Realizing that he won’t see her, since she lies in an unconscious state, rather, just to express support. I look, and he has some kind of circle on there that looks like a watch. I looked at what it was. It turned out that he had a mode enabled in which messages disappear after 7 days.