Cumulation as the organizing principle of Lev Rubinstein’s “file cabinet” poetry

Abstract

The article presents the tendency of contemporary poets to use lists and catalogues in their works in an attempt to “restore” figurative language of cumulation, which has an existentially mythological status rather than a conditionally poetic one. Historical poetics define this language as a sequence of externally dissimilar yet semantically identical phenomena stemming from archaic consciousness. Subject of the present research is the worldview specifics of Lev Rubinstein’s conceptual “Poems on Library Index Cards”, particularly, a complex of motives represented by cumulative structures. The research asserts that, in the “file cabinet” poetry, which embodies the concept of sequence with its very form, the only signified of the cumulative chain is the text prioritizing the autometadescriptive principle. Focusing on the preconditions and consequences of poetic initiation, “mechanics” of a creative act and text origins of reality, the author comes to a conclusion that a human’s life functions only through “regular writing” and lasts as long as the “file cabinet” grows. As the events are played out (the majority of works has some kind of discrete though rather defined storyline), the inevitability of death becomes more and more apparent, however, the “return” (perceived as “resurrection” in another’s consciousness) is predetermined by the possibility to reread the text as many times as one can. Thus, the way the non-classical poetry (including Rubinstein’s works) is rooted in mythological semantics not only does not exclude it focusing on the modern problems but also serves as a tool of their artistic objectification.