Lev Rubinstein, Russian poet and critic of Putin, has died at the age of 76

MOSCOW — Lev Rubinstein, a Russian poet, essayist and political dissident during both the Soviet and Putin eras, died Sunday from injuries sustained after being hit by a car in Moscow. He was 76.

His death was confirmed by his daughter Maria in a short statement on her LiveJournal account. Mr. Rubinstein was struck while crossing a street and was put into a medically induced coma. Authorities in Moscow said the driver had committed numerous traffic violations and “did not slow down,” and that they had opened criminal proceedings against him.

Mr. Rubinstein was considered one of the founders of the Russian conceptualism movement, an avant-garde fusion of art and prose that turned up its nose at the limitations of the socialist realism that prevailed in the 1970s and 1980s .

One of his contributions to the movement were “note card poems,” where each stanza was printed on a separate card. He was inspired by the card catalogs he had encountered as a librarian at his alma mater, the Moscow Correspondence Pedagogical Institute, now known as Sholokhov Moscow State University of the Humanities. But the censors encouraged him to look for another medium.

“I wanted the text to be an object, a literary object and a theatrical object at the same time,” he said in 2020. interview with the literary magazine Pank.

His work was published abroad and distributed within the Soviet Union as samizdat through an underground system of reproduction of work that could pass government censorship. After the collapse of Soviet communism, he continued to write for mainstays of the Russian liberal intellectual press, including Itogi, Kommersant, and more recently the website Republic.

In 1999 he received the Andrei Bely Prize, the first independent literary prize for writing that eschews censorship, for services to 'humanities studies'. His novel 'Signs of Attention' won the NOS Prize in 2012, a Russian award given annually for a prose work.

“He was a living legend,” Boris Filanovsky, a composer who wrote an opera based on some of Mr. Rubinstein's works that premiered in 2011, said in a telephone interview. The two met twenty years ago during a lecture on cultural journalism in Saint Petersburg.

“When he read his lectures,” he added, “it felt as if all the participants were receiving communion.”

Mr. Filanovsky called Mr. Rubinstein “our language consciousness,” likening his role in public intellectual life to that of the American writers Allen Ginzberg and Charles Bukowski and the English actor and author Stephen Fry.

“His lyrics deal with language issues – what we say in Russia now seems to have been stolen from Rubinstein's lyrics,” he said.

In recent years, Mr. Rubinstein continued to write for independent Russian media. He has been outspoken about his opposition to Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine and his support 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 death drew tributes on social media, including from representatives of Memorial, Russia's best-known human rights organization, which was banned by court 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 during the war in Ukraine. But his tragic death in January 2024, just on the eve of the two-year anniversary of the catastrophe, seems bitterly symbolic. Today's Russia has no place for free citizens and independent poets. He rushes through and doesn't stop at the red light to watch them cross the road.'

Lev Semyonovich Rubinstein was born on February 19, 1947 in Moscow. His father, Semyon, was a civil engineer who had served at the front during World War II, known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War. The consequences of that war were visible throughout his youth, he said in one recent interview; he remembered seeing “the people without arms, legs and eyes” when his father took him to the public bathhouse.

His mother, Elena, was born in Ukraine and, as a child, in the city of Kharkov, experienced the Holodomor, the Kremlin-induced famine of 1932-33 that killed millions of people.

After President Vladimir V. Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Rubinstein spoke of a current of “internal imperialism” that was present in Russia, even among the country's intellectuals.

“I admit with shame that there was such an internal imperialism in us – despite the fact that we were not imperialists,” he said in a speech. interview with independent Russian outlet Meduza, published in January 2023. “It took time and effort to overcome this within myself. Now, of course, my friends and I have eradicated this as much as possible.”

Mr. Rubinstein spoke out against Mr. Putin's creeping authoritarianism and opposed the silencing of the independent television channel NTV. He denounced Moscow's wars in Chechnya and Ukraine's illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014. And he actively participated in events organized by Memorial, the rights organization. In March 2022, he joined writers in an open letter condemning the “criminal war” being waged in Ukraine and performed at the closing event at Memorial's headquarters, which has been closed and confiscated by the state.

Complete information about survivors was not immediately available.

When asked a year ago what advice he would give to Russians living amid increasing war repression, Rubinstein took solace in history. “In the late Soviet years, my best friends and I were convinced that this boring Soviet slime would be with us forever,” he says said. “But the opposite happened.”

He added: “From that time on, I can give one simple piece of advice: don't be afraid.”