Timur Kibirov (Dmitry Rozhkov, 2011) / Image courtesy of Википедия
[NOTE: For my own
purposes, I recently wrote a biographical statement for Timur Kibirov, a
Russian poet whose work I have been translating and hope to publish as a book
someday. Since no good bio exists for Kibirov in English anywhere online, I am
posting what I came up with here.]
Timur Kibirov (born
Timur Yur'evich Zapoev), who ranks among the most influential of contemporary
Russian poets, was born in 1955 and began publishing his poems in the 1980s. In
the late Soviet period, he was closely associated with underground poets like
Lev Rubinstein, Dmitri Prigov, and Sergey Gandlevsky, and critics have often
identified his work with postmodernism and conceptualism. Mikhail Ardov claims
that “Kibirov has been and remains the best, most talented poet of our
post-Soviet era,” and Andrei Nemzer and Mark Lipovetsky call him “the voice of
an entire generation.” [1]
