The Russian poet Lev Rubinstein, a figure of Soviet dissident and critic of the Kremlin, died this Sunday at the age of 76, according to his daughter, six days after being hit by a car and seriously injured in Moscow.
“My father, Lev Rubinstein, died today,” Maria Rubinstein wrote on her Live Journal blog.
Lev Rubinstein, whose work was praised in Russia and the West, was hit by a motorist while crossing a street in the capital on January 8 and was later hospitalized in very serious condition.
The Moscow Department of Transport stated that the driver did not slow down at a pedestrian crossing and hit the poet, stating that, according to preliminary data, the owner of the vehicle had been involved in 19 traffic violations during the last 12 months.
Born in 1947 in Moscow, a librarian by training, Lev Rubinstein was one of the figures of the Soviet underground literary scene of the 1970s and 1980s, a “new avant-garde” that aspired to be inventive and insolent.
After the end of the USSR, he published in reputable Russian publishing houses and worked as a journalist. He was invited to international poetry festivals and his works were translated into many languages.
The poet had made no secret of his hostile opinions against the Putin regime, denouncing the war in Chechnya, the annexation of Crimea in 2014, political repressions, human rights violations and participating in opposition demonstrations.
In March 2022, together with other Russian writers, he signed an open letter calling the large-scale attack on Ukraine by the Russian army a “criminal war” and criticizing the Kremlin’s “lies.”
The Russian NGO Memorial, specializing in the defense of human rights and the preservation of the memory of victims of Soviet persecution, welcomed “an incisive description of various eras of Russia.”
In a statement, Memorial, actively supported during his life by Lev Rubinstein, states that he expressed in his work “a perception of everyday life that is abrupt and poetic, sad and profound, full of self-deprecation.”
“They did not arrest or torture Rubinstein, they did not poison him,” adds the NGO, banned by the government at the end of 2021. “But his tragic death, shortly before two years of the great catastrophe (the attack in Ukraine), seems symbolic.”
“Today Russia leaves no room for free citizens and poets. It does not see them at pedestrian crossings,” Memorial concludes.
