Semantic potentials of L. Rubinstein’s “Catalogue of Comedic Innovations”

The purpose of the study is to offer a new perspective in the interpretation of L. Rubinstein’s conceptual poetry on the example of his early poem “Catalogue of Comedic Innovations” (1976). Unlike the previously undertaken studies, the article focuses not on the formal features of the conceptual poet’s text, on the rhythmic and stylistic structure of his catalog-card poetry, but on its content and semantic potential. The scientific novelty of the work consists in the fact that the authors for the first time propose the consideration of a conceptually discrete text as a whole and unified space, actually literary, permeated with existential searches of the author and his hero alter ego. It is shown that already at the early stage of his work Rubinstein was attached to conceptualism only at the level of form (card poetry invented by him), but in his creative essence he rather gravitated to the tradition of classical Russian literature. In the conditions of the avant-garde trends of Russian poetry of the 1970s, Rubinstein, like V. Mayakovsky, “stepped on the throat of his own song” in an understandable desire to be in line with the search for “Moscow romantic conceptualism” (B. Groys). In the course of the analysis of the poem, it is demonstrated that, contrary to the conceptualists’ manifestational statements about the lack of ideas of “objects” and the total game with the fragments of socialist realist canons, Rubinstein’s poetry already at an early stage demonstrated a capacious semantic potential that goes far beyond conceptual practices.