“Let’s Go Farther”: Remembering Lev Rubinstein

Essays in the “Remembrances” series pay tribute to poets who have died in the past year.

In the fall of 2007, Lev Rubinstein was sitting on my couch with my five-year-old daughter, Adele, reading “Ryepka”—“The Turnip”—a classic Russian children’s story, about a grandad farmer who talks to a turnip seed before planting it and encouraging it to grow. “Rasti, rasti, ryepka sladka. Rasti, rasti, ryepka krepka,” he chants, as if casting a spell on the seed. “Grow, grow my sweet turnip. Grow, grow, my strong turnip.”

Rubinstein had flown in from Moscow for a poetry reading in Cleveland, but at that moment, he was playing the role of Russian godfather. When he came into the house, he’d crouched down to get eye level with Adele; he’d held our baby Leila in his arms. On the couch, Rubinstein was a storyteller, turning the page and pausing to see Adele’s reaction. Adele peeked over at him as he made this story—and the language—come alive. I’d been reading the story to Adele in my own rough Russian, but hearing Rubinstein read it felt like listening to a song.

In the wake of his untimely death—after being struck by a car while crossing the street in Russia earlier this year—many praised Rubinstein for his contributions to global poetry and the pro-democracy struggle. For all the talk of Rubinstein’s genius, his conceptualist and avant-garde work, and his advocacy for reform in Russia, I keep thinking back to that tender interaction with my daughter. Rubinstein was gregarious and warm, and his work vibrated with humor, humility, and humanity. During our time together in Cleveland, everywhere we went, he wanted to meet people and ask them about their lives. Everything about his writing is suffused with that curiosity.

Born in 1947 in Moscow, Rubinstein became one of the founders of Moscow Conceptualism. His work, influenced, in part, by his job as a librarian and by international avant-gardists like the OBERIU, Fluxus, and John Cage, circulated through samizdat and underground performance readings in the 1970s and ’80s. Some called him the Postmodern Chekhov for his vividly futurist work, simultaneously ironic and deeply humane. Rubinstein became an essential figure in both Russian and world poetry and his work has been translated into dozens of languages. Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Selected Poems of Lev Rubinstein appeared in English in 2004, followed by Compleat Catalogue of Comedic Novelties in 2014, both co-translated by Tatiana Tulchinsky and me. (An updated edition is forthcoming.)With the fall of the Soviet Union, Rubinstein began a second life as a prose commentator, writing wide-ranging and observant columns of life in Russia. His prose had the same characteristic warmth, and his audience grew. He became the voice of his generation—an essayist who met the call of his time, week by week. One friend, Ekaterina Kadieva, eulogized him, calling him a “fragile little sparrow, who held together and made the Moscow in which we all lived.” In his very last column celebrating New Year’s Day, his wish for his readers was simple yet profound for our polarized moment: “It is friendly curiosity that I wish for all of us. And specifically—in relation to the other, to the incomprehensible, to the new. To the new, yes. Therefore, in the phrase ‘New Year,’ which has been familiar since early childhood, I decisively emphasize the word ‘new.’”

As the Putin regime increased its stranglehold on Russia in the 2000s, Rubinstein found a third life as a democratic activist and dissenter against the government, making his presence known on the streets and in social media. In a pivotal column from 2005, Rubinstein reflected on his Seventies generation’s choice to opt out of politics as a stance against the ideological suffocation of Soviet power. But in the new Russia, Rubinstein found cause to shift his view:

Sometimes politics starts to concern you personally so much that you jump up and rush to the radio or dive head first into the murky swell of the internet, or—even worse—run out into the street waving a piece of textile fabric of the appropriate size and color to suit the occasion and the season. I am not interested in politics. But what is considered politics? If politics is when a local police officer rushes into your apartment to “check your passport,” then it is quite difficult not to be interested in this.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and subsequent crackdown on protests made Rubinstein’s vocal resistance even more urgent. (When he died, some immediately wondered if he’d been assassinated.) Memorial, an international human rights organization founded in Russia, noted that Rubinstein chose to stay in Moscow and continue to write and protest, “not just for himself, but for others who were trying to find the words through which to find themselves again, and maybe, just maybe, resistance through that.”

I’d first discovered Rubinstein’s work in 1992, in an anthology of Russian avant-garde poets called Lichnoe Delo—which could be translated either as “Private Matter” or “Personal File,” or even “Personal Dossier.” Privacy, of course, was dangerous during the Soviet period, the claim to it could lead the internal security service to open a dossier on you. Rubinstein’s poetic texts (a term he preferred to “poems”) in that volume unfurled themselves in multiple numbered series. The first one still thrills me.

Here, everything begins. 
Everything begins here. 
However, let’s go farther.

It is followed by:

Here, no one will ask who you are and where you’re from.
Everything is clear as is.
This is the place where you’re spared persistent cross-examination.
But let’s go farther.

[co-translated with Tatiana Tulchinsky]

Pretty soon, you find yourself in the middle of an imagined realm. And it’s just where you’re meant to be.

Rubinstein had been part of a movement of artistic “happenings” in Moscow since the 1970s, along with fellow artists like Andrei Monastyrski, Ilya Kabakov, and others, which involved the artists taking turns curating experiences for the group. These poetic texts could have been a simulacrum of a series of signs one might have encountered at one of those happenings.

The poet, who worked for a time at the Lenin Library, was known for composing his poetic texts on notecards. Like Williams and his prescription pad, the story goes, Rubinstein needed something to write on and library cards abounded. These cards became his organizing principle. In his words:

Each small card is both an object and universal unit of rhythm, equalizing all gestures of speech—from an elaborate theoretical statement to an interjection, from a stage direction to a snatch of telephone conversation. A pack of cards is a dimensional, spatial object, it is a NON-book, it is the offspring of the “extra-Gutenbergian” existence of possible culture. Reading is work, play, and spectacle. [co-translated with TT]

Back in Cleveland in 2007, as Rubinstein kept reading, holding Adele’s gaze, none of us could imagine how Putin’s death grip on Russia would take hold and intensify. In the story, the turnip grows so big that the grandad can’t pull it out of the ground. He calls for help—first from his wife, who pulls him as he pulls the turnip; then from his granddaughter who pulls his wife, who pulls him, as he pulls the turnip; then from the dog; then the cat; each pulling on the next. The joyful repetitions pile on, as the comic tension rises. Finally, a mouse joins the chain, and, at last, the turnip is freed from the ground. While Russia has long been a society run by dictatorships and tsars, this folk tale is a story of cooperation, a reminder that the smallest creature may be necessary to pull that turnip from the earth.

In an essay from 2013, Rubinstein wrote,

When it is said that “nothing can be changed, because there are very few of us and we are scattered,” I remember Chekhov again, who said: “I believe in individuals, I see salvation in individuals scattered around Russia here and there—whether they are intellectuals or peasants—they have strength, although they are few.” And I believe in it, imagine that. And when I try to explain to myself the reasons for my little-motivated optimism, I repeat the important words of [Russian poet Daniil] Kharms…: “Life conquers death in a way unknown to science.”

I think of the mouse from “Ryepka” now, in our global autocratic time, as each one of us. Each one of us, whose combined powers could draw forth, with our labor, something astonishing, something that could feed us all.