Lev Rubinstein was born on 19 February 1947 in Moscow. Lev Semyonovich Rubinstein graduated from the Philological Faculty of the Moscow State Correspondence Teacher Training College (nowadays M.A.Sholokhov Moscow State Humanitarian University) and for a long time worked as a bibliographer.
He got engaged in literature in the late 1960s; in the early 1970s he already started developing his own stylistics of minimalism. Under the influence of his work with library cards in the mid 1970s he created his own genre bordering on verbal, visual and performing arts — the genre of “card file”. He became one of the founders and leaders of Moscow conceptualism (along with Vsevolod Nekrasov and Dmitry Prigov).
Lev Rubinstein is a participant of numerous poetic and music festivals, art exhibitions and events. His first publications (in Russian and in translations) came to light in the late 1970s in the West. The author had his works published in Russia in the late 1980s first.
His writings have been translated into all main European languages. In 1994 the writer was a grant-holder of DAAD in Berlin. Lev Rubinstein is the winner of Andrey Bely Award of 1999.