He often says that every poet is a philosopher, but not every philosopher is a poet. With his work, he proves the absolute truth of this statement. About who Konstantin Kedrov is in his primary essence, a poet or a philosopher, even people who have known him for a very long time argue without arriving at an unambiguous conclusion.
Doctor of Philosophy, inventor of the terms “metacode” and “metametaphor” expresses his views on the world order in the form of a logical and thought-out theory, the ideas of which permeate all his poetic lines accordingly.
From the roots
He was born in 1942, in Rybinsk, Yaroslavl Region, where his parents, who worked in the local drama theater, were evacuated. Father - director and actor Alexander Berdichevsky, a student of Meyerhold, mother - actress Nadezhda Yumatova. On the mother’s side, the clan goes back to the noble Chelishchev’s branch, among which were associates of Alexander Nevsky and Dmitry Donskoy.
The poet’s cousin was an outstanding Russian artist, one of the founders of surrealism, Pavel Fedorovich Chelishchev. Konstantin Kedrov even inherited several paintings of Chelishchev, which he had to sell when he was out of work.
The ability to create words was noticed by Konstantin from early childhood - the family remembered his attempts to rhyme at the age of 6 years. Therefore, his desire to obtain a literary education was logical - after school he entered the Moscow State University in 1961, at the Faculty of Journalism.
Moscow - Kazan - Moscow
From the very first poems that Konstantin Kedrov wrote as a teenager, it became clear his fascination with the work of Russian futurists of the beginning of the century - V. Khlebnikov, A. Kruchenykh and others, a penchant for finding new forms in poetry, freedom in choosing themes for poetry. In 1958, the newspaper Komsomolets Tatars published a selection of verses by Kedrov, among which were the lines:
Every country speaks of freedom
The freedom of France orders to kill the freedom of Algeria.
But does freedom really have a homeland?
Freedom is the motherland of the whole world.
Give me the only freedom - the freedom not to kill!
Such ideas were too distracted from ideologically verified publications of that time, therefore, a year after studying at Moscow State University, Kedrov was asked to transfer away from the capital - to Kazan University. But even there he was expelled from the faculty of journalism, allowing him to graduate from the historical and philological faculty as a volunteer. Kedrov did not have the right to a scholarship, a dormitory, etc.
He miraculously completed this course, and the topic of his thesis was also extraordinary: "Lobachevsky’s geometry, Einstein’s theory of relativity, and Velimir Khlebnikov’s poetry."
He returns to Moscow in 1968 and enters graduate school at the Literary Institute, which he graduated in 1973, defending his Ph.D. thesis. From 1974 to 1986, Konstantin Kedrov worked as a teacher at the Department of Russian Literature at the Literary Institute, but poetry became the main business of his life.
Avant-Garde Community
At that time, publishing and reading poetry was allowed only with the permission of the Writers' Union, and only with works that passed a total test for compliance with communist ideology. Therefore, the work of Kedrov - avant-garde in form and independent in content - was semi-legal. Nevertheless, soon a circle of young poets was formed around him, united by a common outlook on life and poetry.
Among them were: Alexey Parshchikov, Alexander Eremenko, Ilya Kutik, Alexey Khvostenko. Konstantin Kedrov, whose biography is the subject of our review, was subsequently closely associated with other prominent contemporary poets - Andrei Voznesensky and Heinrich Sapgir. He became the creator of the true manifestos of new Russian poetry - these are the poem Computer of Love (1983), the book Poetic Cosmos (1989), etc. The concept of metametaphorism unifying their work becomes clear.
Metametaphor
This term was first introduced by Kedrov in the late 1970s. He defined it as an inversion - inversion, insider - of the concepts "man - space". It is associated with the metaphysical search for poetry at the beginning of the century, when in any phenomenon of temporary mortal life an inextricable connection with the eternal, global, universal was seen. Konstantin Kedrov - poet - expressed it like this:
Man is the wrong side of heaven
The sky is the inside of man.
The philosopher Kedrov in the article "Starry Sky" (1982) introduced the concept of metacodes. This is a further development of the concept of the unity of all that exists, a single genetic code that underlies the universe. On the basis of the most modern scientific achievements, proclaiming the similarity of principles by which the macrocosm and the smallest elementary particles, born of a single Big Bang, are arranged, he brings the philosophical base to the poetic search for new avant-garde artists.
Dragonfly Voluntary Society
The experimental, word-making, extraordinary nature of Kedrov’s poems found expression in the creation of an amazing poetic community, indicated by the acronym DOOS. She first appeared in 1984 as an abstract poetic image. Subsequently, she received a transcript and meaning, originally associated with the line from the fable of I. A. Krylov “Dragonfly and Ant”: “Did you all sing? This is the matter ... ”The proclamation of singing as the main thing for a creative person, not connected with either a political or moral sense, was voiced loudly only after the collapse of the Soviet system.
DOOS, changing in composition, has existed for more than 30 years. Its permanent members are Kedrov and Elena Katsyuba. At different times, Voznesensky and Sapgir, Igor Kholin and Vadim Rabinovich, Kirill Kovaldi and Alexei Khvostenko and many others belonged to him. They were published in the Journal of Poets founded by DOOS and in a variety of poetry collections published under its auspices.
The freedom of thinking, the search for new forms, based on the creation of words - palindromes, anagrams, games, a combination of texts and visual images - all this is common for poems by poets of the DOO group. Metametaphor organically enters into them as the basis of a single poetic view.
Dean of the Academy of Poets and Philosophers
The formation of Kedrov’s creative worldview was influenced by his acquaintance with the great philosopher, student of Pavel Florensky, Alexei Fedorovich Losev. The poetry of Kedrov was highly appreciated by Andrey Voznesensky, Sergey Kapitsa, Yuri Lyubimov.
The poet and philosopher Kedrov is widely known throughout the world. Konstantin Alexandrovich was awarded various international prizes; there is evidence that he was a nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Konstantin Kedrov, whose personal life is not consciously advertised by him, actively responds to the most important events in the country's politics and art. He regularly publishes in the media, participates in public events.
He is the dean of one of the oldest non-governmental educational institutions under the leadership of Natalia Nesterova. In its name - the Academy of Poets and Philosophers - two main components of the life of the Russian thinker Konstantin Alexandrovich Kedrov united.