The Athor as a Technique in the Poetry of L. Rubinstein

This thesis presents an analysis of the poetic work of the Moscow conceptualist Lev Rubinstein, namely of his unique ‘card indexes’, a poetic genre which was invented by himself. The work examines oeuvre for the period from the beginning of the 1970th until the present day based on the usage of qualitative methods of analysis. The data for such scrutiny have been employed on the examples of the poetry of Lev Rubinstein himself, the interviews with him and artists and writers of the movement of Moscow conceptualism, as well as their memoirs, art history articles, and critical literature. The ‘card indexes’ studied include, as the key method, the constant change of discourses, speech registers, quotations and quasi-quotations, as well as self-quotes. By examining these poetic texts, I clarify the main purpose of the study, which is the designation and detection of literary techniques that construct the figure of the Author-compiler and provide his interaction with the polyphonic speech of the entered Other (in poetic works, essays, and journal articles), also considering the historical context.