Images of cities in the creative work of the Indian poet Kunwar Narain (1927-2017)

The aim of the study is to outline the place of the poet Kunwar Narain in the Hindi poetry of the 20th century, as well as to identify the main features of the images of cities in his creative work and the author’s worldview behind his approach to depicting urban images. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that “new poetry” in Hindi and the Kunwar Narain’s creative work remain little studied. The paper is the first in Russian Indology to consider in a comprehensive manner the urban images in Kunwar Narain’s creative work and to raise the question about the further development of his creative method following the poet’s exposure to Western modernist trends, which was common among most major Hindi poets in the 1950s and 1970s. As a result, it has been found that the problem of alienation, the spiritual loneliness of a person among a hostile environment, especially urban, which is central in modernism, is not the main one for the poet. The main focus for the author is the image of the city in connection with the themes of travel, homeland and culture. The result of the study amounts to a clarification of ideas regarding how Hindi poetry developed during and following the “new poetry” era: the protest sentiments of modernists have been replaced by a perspective associated with the transition from youthful rebellion against reality to acceptance and attempts to comprehend it.