Timur Kibirov

Timur Kibirov (real name: Timur Yuryevich Zapoev) was born on February 15, 1955. His father was an officer in the Soviet army. His mother was a secondary school teacher. He graduated from the History and Philology Faculty of the Moscow Regional Pedagogical Institute. In 1998, he served as editor-in-chief of the publication Pushkin. He worked at the NTV television company and at the Kultura radio station. He translated the poems of Akhsar Kodzati from the Ossetian language (from a literal interlinear translation). Since 1995, he has been a member of the Russian PEN Center. Since 1997, he has been a member of the editorial board of the journal Literaturnoye Obozreniye. Creative work He made his debut in print in the late 1980s. His poetry is associated with postmodernism, Sots Art, and conceptualism. Kibirov is characterized by parody and a tendency toward both covert and overt quotation from classical literature as well as Soviet, ideological, or advertising clichés. Andrei Levkin commented on Kibirov’s work as follows: Timur Kibirov is the most tragic Russian poet of the past ten years at least (considering Brodsky as well). Timur Kibirov’s work is marked by an epic scope. Elena Fanailova says the following about this: Kibirov is one of the few contemporary poets who regularly writes poems and simply very long narrative verses. And that is a great art, practically lost by the generation of Russian postmodernists. In other words, Kibirov has an inclination toward epic scope.