Synopses & Reviews
Rubinstein succeeds in arranging his fragmented text in such a clever way that they invariably trigger off a series of associations, even in the reader who fails to catch all the allusions weaved in by the author. Thus his texts begin to speak to any reader anywhere and in any language, but they speak in a different way.
Review
"Rubinstein is a master of displaying the tawdriness of tawdry speech. No matter what is said it all appears as an imitation of someone--no one---else's speech: it is not we who speak this way, this is how 'they speak us'." --Micheal Epstein, Emory College
Review
"Rubinstein's 'texts' can be compared with computer hyper-texts, where each message conceals a larger context and where you unavoidably leave certain files unopened on each page as you go on. His poetics can be described as that of fatally missed opportunities and in this sense he brings to mind Chekhov, a fact that has been noted by many critics." --Ekaterina Degot in
Commersant DailyReview
"These monologic poets (Rubinstein in particular) parody what might be called the idiocy of daily life by treating this idiocy as something incredibly serious and important. They seem to be writing a kind of personal and sociological mythology. In their more complex gestures to bracket mass culture in ironic and parodic terms, they can be likened to some of the poets of the New York School and pop artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein." --Andrew Wachtel, NWU
"Rubinstein is a master of displaying the tawdriness of tawdry speech. No matter what is said it all appears as an imitation of someone--no one---else's speech: it is not we who speak this way, this is how 'they speak us'." --Micheal Epstein, Emory College
"Rubinstein's 'texts' can be compared with computer hyper-texts, where each message conceals a larger context and where you unavoidably leave certain files unopened on each page as you go on. His poetics can be described as that of fatally missed opportunities and in this sense he brings to mind Chekhov, a fact that has been noted by many critics." --Ekaterina Degot in Commersant Daily
Review
"These monologic poets (Rubinstein in particular) parody what might be called the idiocy of daily life by treating this idiocy as something incredibly serious and important. They seem to be writing a kind of personal and sociological mythology. In their more complex gestures to bracket mass culture in ironic and parodic terms, they can be likened to some of the poets of the New York School and pop artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein." --Andrew Wachtel, NWU
Synopsis
He can be likened to some of the poets of the New York School, also Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein...
About the Author
Born in 1947, Rubinstein studied language and literature at Moscow University. He first made a name for himself in the '70s as a central figure in the Moscow conceptualist movement. Needless to say, his unorthodox poems were not printed in the official literary journals of the time, but circulated instead in samizdat, in boxes or ring-bound. At the same time, Rubinstein began performing his poetry in private settings for audiences of one to a dozen people. Not until the early '90s did his poems begin appearing in Russia's "thick journals". The acclaim was instant. But the standardized format meant sacrificing Rubinstein's preferred form of presentation: text fragments a line of verse, a theoretical remark, a bit of descriptive prose, snippets of phone conversation, a stage direction, an expletive on separate index cards.