Lev Semenovich Rubinshtein is one of the most prominent poets of Russian conceptualism and postmodernism. His importance is complemented by his close friendship with two other prominent authors, Dmitrii Aleksandrovich Prigov and Timur Iur'evich Kibirov. Rubinshtein has invented a distinctively personal literary genre, a kind of multirhythmic and multi-discursive poem in the form of the card catalogue. These seemingly spontaneous, yet thoroughly arranged, collections of enigmatic fragments and citations are provisional and aleatory "language cases" (a phrase that serves as the title of one of his books). The poem cards fuse various styles and microgenres within a single work and generate an effect comparable to the "symphonism" of contemporary Russian composers such as Alfred Shnitke or Sofia Gubaidullina. Rubinshtein's poetry bridges the gap between the postmodernist-conceptualist deconstruction of various literary, cultural, political, and colloquial discourses and the tradition of Russian philosophic (metaphysical and existentialist) lyrics. He deconstructs and...