Writing on cards in Lev Rubinstein's aesthetics and poetics: Origin, biography, social and cultural context
The article raises the problem of Lev Rubinstein's historical poetics of writing on cards, the biographical and social reasons for his appeal to the forms of “card-file book” and catalogues. On the example of the works and public self-presentation of Rubinstein, one of the leaders of Moscow conceptualism, the author analyses the correlation of his positioning as a “deconstructor” of the repressive Soviet discourse, on the one hand, and the poetics of his works, on the other. The methodological basis of the research is works by S.N. Broitman, V.N. Toporov and V.Ya. Propp on cumulation as a principle of plot construction; by A. Yurchak and K.A. Bogdanov on the features of Soviet cultural discourse; by V.I. Tyupa on the types of artistic consciousness in the poetry of the twentieth century; by B. Dubin on the sociology of literature, etc. In the course of the study, the author determines the reasons for the writer's use of the form of a catalogue, describes Rubinstein's principles for creating a system alternative to the Soviet cultural project. Rubinstein chooses a card file as a horizontally organized space without hierarchy: at the subjective level of the poetics of the text, according to him, the roles of the writer and the reader are equalized; at the content level, the line between art and non-art is erased. The article analyses in detail the “card” poetry of the conceptualist, including texts from the archives of the Perm Museum of Contemporary Art “PERMM”, and also examines two prose books - A Whole Year. My Calendar and Cemetery with Wi-Fi. The article concludes that the position of absolute freedom declared by Rubinstein within the framework of the catalogue is not fully implemented. As the article shows, Rubinstein's texts incline towards deindividualizing consciousness, neosyncretism, cumulation and creation of structures, whose parts are subject to equalization. The levelling of differences between the roles of the reader and the writer is largely illusory: it is the the writer that sets the rules for determining the functions of the participants in the process. The role of the writer, standing outside the cards, consistently eliminating aesthetic differences between the classical and unknown writers, establishing the principles of systematization of elements, is comparable to the role of a leader in Soviet culture, and the poetics of the catalogue is typologically close to Varlam Shalamov's prose.