The historical context of L. Rubinstein’s “Questions of literature”

Based on the material of L. Rubinstein’s poem “Questions of Literature” (1992), represented, on the one hand, by the conceptual poet himself as a spatial perforation with auditory and public reading of catalog cards, on the other hand, in the perception of modern researchers as a traditional text presented in print on the pages of the collection “Regular Writing” (1997), the authors of the work show that the form of presentation of a conceptualist work not only affects its perception and scientific and critical interpretation, but also radically transforms them. In modern conditions, when the practices of various kinds of conceptualist happenings are fading, the perception of Rubinstein’s “catalog” poetry not in the form of a public performance, but in the usual book format actualizes the deep vectors of its reading, makes you look at the cards as a solid single text and see in it the components of a traditional literary work. In the course of the study, it is shown that a different perspective of representation, and therefore perception, allows contouring the traditional components of the literary text itself that were not previously visible in the visual object-performance - the image of the lyrical hero, the image of the author, the forms of plot-plot construction, compositional features, etc. To this end, the principles of traditional literary analysis were applied for the first time to the understanding of Rubinstein’s conceptual poem. By partially examining the textual components, the poetics of Rubinstein’s conceptualist poem, the authors demonstrate the refutation of the idea of the “meaninglessness” of the text declared by the conceptualists, discover its “genetic” connection with Russian literature and with the events of modern history.