Overcoming poetic conceptualism (“Sunny Morning” by Timur Kibirov)

The article is devoted to the analysis of images and motifs, as well as the structural-compositional features of Timur Kibirov’s latest poetry collection “Sunny Morning” (2020). The research aims to comprehend not only the formal features of the poems included in the book, but also the content and semantic layer of Kibirov’s later texts. The structural-compositional features of the collection are considered, the series of motifs are traced in the lyrical texts. The author of the article identifies the main ideological and image dominants of Kibirov’s later texts, outlines the existential space of the persona (the poet’s alter ego), traces the reflection of the hero’s personal ideas about the world and about himself. In particular, the researcher examines the system of “eternal” and “damned” questions that give an idea of the existential dilemmas of the persona in the book “Sunny Morning”. The study is novel in that it is the first to consider the poetical features of Kibirov’s late collection, to identify the axiological perspectives of the persona’s worldview, to reveal his reflections on the Soviet past of the country and himself. As a result, it is proved that Kibirov’s texts, typified by critics as conceptualist, are quite far from the strategies and practices of conceptual experiments. Personal friendship with conceptualist poets did not affect Kibirov’s personal identity, the originality of his poetry, or the recognizability of his individual style.