Compleat Catalogue of Comedic Novelties

Author: Lev Rubinstein

Translators: Philip Metres and Tatiana Tulchinsky

Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse (2014)

Almost ten years ago UDP published Catalogue of Comedic Novelties, a representative selection of Lev Rubinstein’s “note-card poems,” a seminal body of work from one of the major figures of Moscow Conceptualism and the unofficial Soviet art scene of the 1970s and 1980s. These texts form what Rubinstein called a “hybrid genre”: “at times like a realistic novel, at times like a dramatic play, at times like a lyric poem, etc., that is, it slides along the edges of genres and, like a small mirror, fleetingly reflects each of them, without identifying with any of them.” As American scholar Gerald Janecek has noted, the texts are made up of “language ready-mades (commonplace expressions, overheard statements, sentence fragments)” and organized “in such a way that we seem to be observing the creation of a poem from raw material.”

This new edition collects for the first time all of Rubinstein “note-card poems” and includes a preface by American poet Catherine Wagner, an introduction by translator Philip Metres, and a short essay by the author.

Some of these texts have previously been translated into German, French, Swedish, and Polish; now Rubinstein’s complete card-catalog of “comedic novelties” has been re-opened—in a precise and sensitive translation—to the English reader.

"Lev Rubinstein is the true heir of the OBERIU artists of the late 1920s. Like his most illustrious predecessor, Daniil Kharms, Rubinstein creates deadly serious, devastatingly funny comedy that incorporates a broad range of literary forms. In the precise translations of Philip Metres and Tatiana Tulchinsky, this witty and elegant work is available to an English-language public in its full glory for the first time."

–Andrew Wachtel