La nuova poesia russa: il poema Sortiry di Timur Kibirov

Timur Kibirov’s poem “Sortiry” (Crappers) was written in the Summer 1990, just at the eve of the fall of the Soviet Empire and tells Soviet reality from a very peculiar point of view together with the author’s life from childhood to ripe age. The poem, written in ottava rima as Pushkin’s poem “Little House in Kolomna” is built as a parody on the epic poem and includes the genre’s brand: the introduction outlining the subject of the poem and the invocation. The subject is extravagantly rich and he ponders it on the most generous scale. His language and his ideas display even-handedness and he says things we cannot afford not to take note of. This paper constitutes the first systematic investigation of the poem. Kibirov’s hyperthophic intertextuality resonates with the invariable structure of the mock-heroic octave, which was passed down from author to author together with a more or less stable set of formal-semantic leitmotifs. On the surface, Kibirov’s centoism is the child of postmodernism, which proclaimed “the death of the author” and which appropriates alien texts as elements of the author’s own language. The poetic word becomes alienated from the narrator: in a language woven from collectivized texts, the personal utterance is out of place and insincere. In this situation, Kibirov has achieved the near impossible: while not breaking with the practice of the postmodern, the author of “Crappers” dared to speak “in his own voice” in the language of lexicalized texts.