He hasn't written poetry for a long time

The poet Lev Rubinstein became a staircase designer

The Afisha publishing house has begun active and even provocative exhibition activities. In the summer, 150 stands were installed on Chistoprudny Boulevard with photographs by the French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand, in which our planet was captured from a bird's eye view. It was a project of the Afisha-Mir magazine. And now a gallery has opened in the Afisha editorial office, located in a place no less extravagant than the capital’s boulevard. An ordinary staircase in the six-story office of the Publishing House on Bolshoi Gnezdnikovsky Lane was chosen for the exhibition space. I don’t know how modern artists will master the multi-colored walls of stairwells (in the near future there is an exhibition of the last romantic and at the same time an expert on the latest technologies, Gor Chahal), but the poet Lev Rubinstein, who initiated the new space, coped with the task brilliantly. Now the staircase is decorated with his text “Staircase of Creatures”, which should be read as you go down from floor to floor. Which is quite merciful on the part of the author - getting up short of breath and at the same time listening to the poetic lines would be extremely inconvenient.

The choice of the writer Rubinstein for the first Afisha exhibition was not at all accidental: his work is located on the verge of poetry, fine art and even theater. Since the mid-70s, he has been working in the genre of “card indexes” - disparate excerpts printed on index cards, which are put together into a single whole in the process of the author’s performance. Rubinstein is both a poet (although his phrase-excerpts are quotations from the collective unconscious and are fundamentally devoid of the pathos of lyrical self-expression), and an actor (although reading him dispassionately and reminiscent of the melodic declamation of an announcer), and an artist (although the typewritten text gives the impression of deliberate bureaucracy) . But literally out of nothing this Gesamtkunstwerk is born, a synthetic work that needs to be seen, heard, and read. True, it’s been ten years since Rubinstein moved away from his “card index” exercises, going into essay journalism and singing Soviet songs in intellectual clubs. And so “Afisha” resurrected him in his previous role, once again confirming the visual consistency of Lev Semenovich’s poetry. “He hasn’t written poetry for a long time. Thank God, I got busy with something,” the author said self-critically in one of the seven dozen fragments that made up the current exhibition text. As it turned out, he writes, and how.

It is a pity, of course, that Rubinstein did not perform “The Staircase of Creatures” even at the opening day and this work of his lost its audio component. However, reading the lines written on the wall in the process of going down a narrow staircase, catching a secret compositional connection between seemingly ununited verbal episodes, discovering towards the end previously scattered phrases put together into a single whole from some meaningless and touching pseudo-graphomaniac rhyme (“Here is a rug over the crib breaks free from the chain. Here the slow pig is swaying, singing. Pictures the other half is smoldering, then burning. And Africa, and the pig, and Doctor Aibolit." , is everyone here? Can we begin? ”, followed by a stunning void - a most fascinating activity in which the viewer (reader, sightseer) becomes congenial with the author. When Rubinstein recites his poems, sorting through cards, you find yourself in the complete power of the poet - just as a theatergoer is unable to influence the course of the play, frozen in a velvet chair. But you can, if only you have the will, go up the stairs, re-read some phrase, change the rhythmic structure of the verse. Only for this you need to make an effort. Just as it is required to unravel the author's intention - why the numbered fragments are scattered exactly this way and not otherwise. So you still have to climb in order to finally understand the whimsical but calculated structure of Rubinstein’s verbal installation.

By the way, the “ladder of creatures” included in its title is a philosophical concept caught by the poet on the all-knowing Internet. So in the 18th century, scientists tried to codify the universe - from minerals to animals and humans. And this is a hint to the viewer-reader, a hint of the strict orderliness of the supposedly crumbling text, a demand for his special attention to himself. After all, we are looking at an artifact, and not a staircase sign “No smoking.”

Fedor ROMER