Reflection of National and Psychological Character in Modern Poetry of the Central Asian Region

Abstract

The study aimed to identify poetic ways of representing national and psychological character in modern Central Asian poetry. The study examined a purposively selected set of poems by authors from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan as lyrical models of culturally conditioned mental and emotional structures. The methodological basis included a conceptual analysis of the concepts of national and psychological character, an interpretation of the regional cultural and historical context, and a qualitative thematic analysis of poetic texts. Elements of semantic categorization, thematic clustering and symbolic-figurative analysis were used. The study found that national character in poetry was represented through stable ethno-cultural symbols, archetypal images, and motifs, reflecting collective identity. The psychological character was realized as an internal emotional configuration rooted in cultural memory and conveyed through symbolic imagery, emotional tone, and poetic structure. Across the corpus, recurrent motifs included memory, land, motherhood, and destiny. Within the analyzed corpus, the Kazakh poems foregrounded themes of urban nostalgia and identity crisis; the Kyrgyz poems, everyday spirituality and ancestral continuity; and the Turkmen poems, symbolic representations of endurance, fidelity, landscape, and emotional restraint. The analyzed texts from all three countries revealed tension between modernization processes and cultural tradition. The practical significance of the results lies in their applicability to further research into regional poetics, ethnopsychology, and cultural identity in the literary discourse of the post-Soviet space.