Here I Am (New Russian Writing) - Hardcover

Rubinstein, Lev

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9 ratings by Goodreads

9785717200585: Here I Am (New Russian Writing)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 5717200587 ISBN 13: 9785717200585

Publisher: GLAS New Russian Writing, 2001

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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.

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From the Back Cover:

Legend has it that a lack of typing paper led to the invention of Lev Rubinstein's unique poetic and performance style. Index cards, on the other hand, abounded in the Moscow public library where he worked for some twenty years when the Soviet Union still existed. Rubinstein typed out separate lines or verses on these cards and organized them in long boxes, sometimes inserting blank cards to indicate meaningful pauses. "What is the purpose of this 'card system' for me?" says Rubinstein. "Primarily it is a material metaphor for my understanding of the text as an object , as a three-dimensional unit, and of reading as a metaphor for my understanding of reading as a labor, as spectacle, and a game."

Needless to say, Rubinstein's 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 snippets of presentation: text fragments (a line of verse, a theoretical remark, a bit of descriptive prose, snippets of phone conversation) on separate index cards.

Rubinstein catalogs remarkable speech fragments, disjointed bits of various discourses and staggeringly bad "traditional" rhymed poetry. These found objects he presents as poems, which the reader or listener feels he must have heard somewhere hundreds of times before without noticing. These brief texts have a modern universality that cannot be lost even in translation.

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.

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