Kedrin D. B. Brief biography. Kedrin Dmitry Borisovich. Dmitry Kedrin: biography and interesting facts from the life of Borisovich Kedrin biography

Dmitry Kedrin was born on February 4, 1907 in the Donbas village of Berestovo-Bogodukhovsky mine in the family of a miner.

The woman whom he began to call mother at the end of his life was his aunt, and the surname he bore belonged to his uncle. The grandfather of Dmitry Kedrin on the maternal side was the noble pan Ivan Ivanovich Ruto-Rutenko-Rutnitsky, who lost his family estate in cards. A man of strong temper, he did not marry for a long time, but at the age of forty-five he won his daughter Neonila, who was fifteen years old, at cards with his friend. A year later, with the permission of the Synod, he married her. In marriage, she gave birth to five children: Lyudmila, Dmitry, Maria, Neonila and Olga. All the Rutnitsky girls studied in Kyiv at the Institute of Noble Maidens. Dmitry committed suicide at the age of eighteen because of unhappy love. Maria and Neonila got married. The eldest daughter Lyudmila remained with her parents, ugly and sat up in girls, and the youngest - charming, romantic, Olga, her father's favorite.

To marry Lyudmila, Ivan Ivanovich did not spare a hundred thousand rubles dowry. Lyudmila's husband was Boris Mikhailovich Kedrin, a former military man, expelled from the regiment for a duel, living on debts. Young moved to Yekaterinoslav. After the departure of the Kedrins, Olga confessed to her mother that she was pregnant. Moreover, it is not known whether she said who the father of the child is or not. And the mother, knowing her husband's tough temper and absurdity, immediately sent Olga to Neonil in the city of Balta, Podolsk province. Neonila took her sister to a familiar Moldovan family, not far from Balta, where Olga gave birth to a boy. It happened on February 4, 1907.

Neonila persuaded her husband to adopt her sister's child, but he, fearing complications in the service, refused. Then Olga went to the Kedrins in Yuzovo. Fearing the wrath of her father and shame, she left the child in a Moldavian family, where the boy had a nurse. Olga managed to persuade Boris Mikhailovich Kedrin to adopt her child, and here, in Yuzovo, more precisely, at the Bogodukhovsky mine, the predecessor of present-day Donetsk, the priest christened the child for a lot of money, recording him as the son of Boris Mikhailovich and Lyudmila Ivanovna Kedrin. At the time of the christening, the boy was already about a year old. They named him Dmitry - in memory of the brother of Olga and Lyudmila, who passed away early.

Little Mitya was brought to Dnepropetrovsk, then Yekaterinoslav, in 1913. Here his grandmother read poems by Pushkin, Mickiewicz and Shevchenko to him, thanks to which he forever fell in love with Polish and Ukrainian poetry, which he later often translated. Here he began to write poetry, studied at the College of Communications and for the first time at the age of 17 published Poems about Spring. He wrote in the newspaper "The Coming Change" and in the magazine "Young Forge", gained recognition and popularity among young people. He was respected for his talent, recognized on the street, and here he survived his first arrest for "non-information."

A typical accusation for that time turns into 15 months of imprisonment for Dmitry Kedrin. After his release in 1931, he moved to the Moscow region, where his Dnepropetrovsk friends-poets M. Svetlov, M. Golodny and other writers had previously settled. He worked in the newspaper of the Mytishchi Carriage Works, collaborated as a literary consultant with the Moscow publishing house Young Guard. His wife was Lyudmila Khorenko, who was also in love with his friend, design engineer Ivan Gvai, one of the creators of Katyusha.

Dmitry Kedrin, Lyudmila Khorenko and Ivan Gvai.

Here is how Svetlana Kedrina wrote about this, based on the stories of relatives, in the book about her father “To Live in spite of everything”: “Ivan really liked Milya (Lyudmila Khorenko), and at first he even tried to lure her, but one day my father recalled him aside and said: "Listen, Vanka, leave Mil alone, she is very dear to me." - "I'm sorry, Mityayka, I didn't know that it was so serious with you," Gwai answered embarrassedly.

Kedrin was internally independent, while remaining an idealist and romantic. He tried to imagine the Bolshevik revolution for himself as a completely natural and even desirable path of development for Russia. He tried to combine the incompatible in himself. However, they could not deceive themselves. The poet felt his loneliness: “I am alone. My whole life is in the past. There is no need to write for anyone. Life weighs more and more ... How much more? Goethe said the truth: "Man lives as long as he wants to."

Who knows how his life would have turned out if he had not moved to the capital, where all the hardships and humiliations began, the main of which were constant domestic disorder and the inability to publish a book of poetry.

During the Moscow period of his life, Kedrin did not have not only an apartment or a room, but even his own permanent corner. He often moved from place to place, huddled with his family in miserable and cramped rooms, partitioned off with plywood or curtains, he had to live among the eternal noise and screams of his neighbors, the crying of his daughter and the grumbling of his aunt. With a sad and anxious mood, Kedrin once wrote in his diary, referring to his wife: "And you and I are doomed by fate to heat someone else's stove in someone else's house." In this environment, he managed to be a hospitable host and write amazing poems.

In 1932, he wrote the poem "Doll", which made the poet famous. They say that Gorky was moved to tears when reading this poem:

How dark is this house!
Break into this hole damp
You, my time!
Mark this beggarly comfort!
Here men fight
Here women steal rags,
They swear, they gossip,
Foolishness, crying and drinking ...

The gloomy picture of the present was contrasted with the bright pathos of future transformations. The pathetic lines made a special impression on Gorky:

Is it for that, tell me
To be horrified
With a hard crust
You ran into the closet
Under the intoxicating father's game, -
Dzerzhinsky was tearing himself up,
Gorky coughed up his lungs,
ten human lives
Did Vladimir Ilyich work?

Alexey Maksimovich was sincerely touched, he was able to appreciate the skill of the author, and on October 26, 1932, he organized a reading of "The Doll" in his apartment in the presence of members of the country's top leadership.

Read by Vladimir Lugovskoy. Gorky smoked continuously and wiped away his tears. Voroshilov, Budyonny, Shvernik, Zhdanov, Bukharin and Yagoda listened. The leaders (except for the well-read Bukharin) did not understand anything in poetry, but they liked the poem and was approved. Moreover, this poem was approved by the most important reader and critic of those years: “I read“ Doll ”with pleasure. I. Stalin.

"Krasnaya Nov" printed "The Doll" in No. 12 for 1932. The day after the publication, Kedrin woke up, if not famous, then authoritative. But the highest approval did not help Kedrin too much, and he could not go out with his poems to the reader - all his attempts to publish the book failed. In one of his letters it was written: “To understand that you will never tell others that big, beautiful and terrible thing that you feel is very hard, it devastates to the ground.”

The rejected works Kedrin put on the table, where they gathered dust until the next arrival of his friends, his faithful listeners and connoisseurs. He worked tirelessly, received pennies, denied himself everything. He told his wife: “A poet should publish at least occasionally. The book is a summing up, a harvest. Without this it is impossible to exist in literature. Non-recognition is actually a slow murder, pushing towards the abyss of despair and self-doubt.”

Dmitry Kedrin in the late 1930s turned to the history of Russia in his work. It was then that he wrote such significant works as "Architects" ("under the influence of which Andrei Tarkovsky created the film "Andrei Rublev" - notes Yevgeny Yevtushenko)," Horse "and" Song about Alyona Staritsa ".

Kedrin made his first attempt to publish the book in GIHL shortly after his arrival in Moscow, but the manuscript was returned, despite the good reviews of Eduard Bagritsky and Iosif Utkin. In the future, the poet, who decided for himself that if the book was not published in 1938, he would stop writing, he was forced to exclude many things from it, including those that had already received recognition. After thirteen returns of the manuscript for revision, several title changes and manipulations with the text, this only lifetime book of Kedrin, Witnesses, which included only seventeen poems, saw the light of day. Regarding her, the author wrote: “She came out in such a way that she cannot be considered anything other than a bastard. It has preserved no more than 5-6 poems that are worth this high name ... ".

Love for Russia, for its history, culture and its nature, permeated such of his poems of the late 1930s and 1940s as “Beauty”, “Motherland”, “The Bell”, “I see everything as a field with buckwheat ...”, "Winter". He will even prepare a whole book with the title "Russian Poems".

Once in a young heart
The dream of happiness sang loudly.
Now my soul is like a house
Where did the child come from?

And I give the earth a dream
I don’t dare, I rebel…
So distraught mother
Rocks the empty cradle.

An unsuccessful attempt to publish them dates back to 1942, when Kedrin handed over the book to the Soviet Writer publishing house. One of its reviewers accused the author of "not feeling the word", the second - of "lack of independence, an abundance of other people's voices", the third - of "unfinished lines, sloppy comparisons, unclear thinking". And this at a time when Kedrin's poetry was highly appreciated by such writers as M. Gorky, V. Mayakovsky, M. Voloshin, P. Antokolsky, I. Selvinsky, M. Svetlov, V. Lugovskoy, Y. Smelyakov, L .Ozerov, K.Kuliev and other writers. “He stood under the Kremlin wall for a long time,” wrote the poet’s daughter Svetlana Kedrina, “admiring the monument to Minin and Pozharsky and tirelessly circled and circled around“ Basil the Blessed ”. This temple haunted him, excited his imagination, awakened his “genetic memory”. He was so handsome, so defiantly bright, he struck with such completeness of lines that after each meeting with him Dmitry Kedrin lost his peace. Admiration and delight were the impetus that forced my father to study all the literature available in the Lenin Library about the construction of churches in Russia, about the era of Ivan the Terrible, about the Church of the Intercession. My father was struck by the legend about the blinding of the architects Barma and Postnik, which formed the basis of the poem “The Architects” he created in four days.

Kedrin never saw most of his poems printed, and his poem "1902" had been waiting for its publication for fifty years.

Kedrin was engaged in translations of famous authors. From the end of 1938 to May 1939 he translated Sandor Petofi's poem "Knight Yanosh". But here, too, failure awaited him: despite the laudatory reviews of colleagues and the press, this poem was not published during Kedrin's lifetime. The next attempt also failed: "Knight Yanosh" by Petofi, together with "Pan Tvardovsky" by Adam Mickiewicz, were included in that unpublished book of poems by Kedrin, which he handed over to Goslitizdat, leaving for the front in 1943. Only nineteen years later, Petofi's poem saw the light of day.

Prior to that, in 1939, Kedrin traveled to Ufa on the instructions of Goslitizdat to translate the poems of Mazhit Gafuri. Three months of work turned out to be in vain - the publishing house refused to publish the book of the Bashkir poet. In the late 1970s, Kaisyn Kuliyev wrote about Kedrin: "He did a lot for the brotherhood of peoples' cultures, for their mutual enrichment, as a translator."

While working on the historical poem "The Horse", Kedrin studied literature about Moscow and its architects, about building materials of that time and methods of masonry for several years, re-read many books about Ivan the Terrible, made extracts from Russian chronicles and other sources, visited places related to with the events he was about to describe. Such works are utterly time-consuming, but despite this Kedrin enthusiastically worked on them, and in the form of large poetic forms. Among them, the brilliant drama in verse "Rembrandt" stood out, the preparation for which the author took about two years. This work was published in 1940 in the magazine "October" and a year later they became interested in the theatrical environment, including Solomon Mikhoels, but the war prevented the production. Subsequently, "Rembrandt" sounded on the radio, went on television, performances and an opera were staged several times.

In the first years of the war, Kedrin was actively engaged in translations from Balkar (Gamzat Tsadasa), from Tatar (Musa Jalil), from Ukrainian (Andrey Malyshko and Vladimir Sosyura), from Belarusian (Maxim Tank), from Lithuanian (Salome Neris), Lyudas Gira). In addition, his translations from Ossetian (Kosta Khetagurov), from Estonian (Johannes Barbaus) and from Serbo-Croatian (Vladimir Nazor) are also known. Many of them have been published.

From the very beginning of the war, Kedrin vainly knocked on all thresholds, trying to be at the front in order to defend Russia with weapons in his hands. No one took him to the front - for health reasons, he was crossed out from all possible lists. From a poem dated October 11, 1941:

… Where are they? To Samara - wait for victory?
Or die? .. Whatever answer you give, -
I don't care, I'm not going anywhere.
What to look for? There is no second Russia!

The enemy was at a distance of 18-20 kilometers, from the side of the Klyazma reservoir, artillery cannonade was clearly audible. For some time, he and his family found themselves literally cut off in Cherkizovo: trains did not go to Moscow, the Writers' Union was evacuated from the capital, and Kedrin did not sit idly by. He was on duty during night raids on Moscow, dug bomb shelters, and participated in police operations to capture enemy paratroopers. He did not have the opportunity to publish, but he did not stop his poetic work, he actively engaged in the translation of anti-fascist poems, and wrote a lot himself. During this period, he wrote the poems "Housing", "Bell", "Coal", "Motherland" and others, formed into a cycle called "Day of Wrath". In one of his most famous poems, Deafness, he confessed:

War with Beethoven's pen
He writes amazing notes.
Her octave iron thunder
A dead man in a coffin - and he will hear!
But what kind of ears are given to me?
Deaf in the thunder of these fights,
Of all the symphony of war
All I hear is the soldiers crying.

Finally, in 1943, he achieved his goal: he was sent to the front, to the 6th Air Army, as a war correspondent for the Sokol Rodina newspaper. And before leaving for the front in 1943, Kedrin gave a new book of poems to Goslitizdat, but it received several negative reviews and was not published.

War correspondent Kedrin wrote poems and essays, feuilletons and articles, traveled to the front lines, visited the partisans. He wrote only what the newspaper needed, but he understood that "impressions accumulate and, of course, they will result in something." The pilots of the 6th Air Army kept Kedrin's poems from the front in their breast pockets, tablets and route maps. At the end of 1943 he was awarded the medal "For Military Merit". Kedrin wrote in 1944: “... Many of my friends died in the war. The circle of loneliness is closed. I'm almost forty. I don't see my reader, I don't feel him. So, by the age of forty, life burned out bitterly and completely senselessly. Probably the reason for this is the dubious profession that I have chosen or that has chosen me: poetry.

After the war, all the pre-war hardships returned to Kedrin, which he still patiently endured and once wrote in his diary: "How many Mondays in life and how few Sundays."

The Kedrin family - Dmitry Borisovich himself, his wife Lyudmila Ivanovna, daughter Sveta and son Oleg - continued to live in Cherkizovo on 2nd Shkolnaya Street. And Dmitry was full of big creative plans.

In August 1945, Kedrin, together with a group of writers, went on a business trip to Chisinau, which struck him with its beauty and reminded him of Dnepropetrovsk, youth, Ukraine. Upon his arrival home, he decided to seriously discuss with his wife the possibility of moving to Chisinau. And early in the morning of September 19, 1945, not far from the railway embankment, on a garbage heap in Veshnyaki, his body was found. The examination established that the misfortune happened the day before, at about eleven o'clock in the evening. How the poet ended up in Veshnyaki, why he came to the Kazansky railway station, and not to Yaroslavsky, under what circumstances he died - remains a mystery. Svetlana Kedrina quoted lines from her diary in which her mother described the morning of September 18, 1945, that last morning: “Mitya was looking at a book. I don't know if he read it or thought about it. And I thought: is this man really my husband? Is he really so tender and affectionate with me, are his lips kissing me? .. And I went up to him. "What, honey?" - asked Mitya and kissed my hand. I clung to him, stood up and walked away. A few minutes later, Mitya left home for the train to Moscow ... I walked him to the door, Mitya kissed my hands, on the head. And he came out ... into eternity from me, from life. I never saw Mitya again. Four days later I saw his photograph, the last and so terrible. Mitya was dead. What horror was in his eyes! Ah, those eyes! They are now all imagining me ... ".

The widow tried to restore the picture of her husband's death, because the certificate of his death indicated a fracture of all the ribs and the left shoulder, but she was advised to take up the upbringing of her children. The poet’s daughter Svetlana Kedrina recalled: “Shortly before his death, a close friend from Dnepropetrovsk, who in those years became a big man in the Writers’ Union and helped our family a lot, came to him and suggested that dad report on his comrades:“ They know that everyone considers you decent people and hope that you will help them ... ". Father let his friend off the porch, and he, standing up and dusting off his trousers, said with a threat in his voice: “You will regret it again” ...

She also recalled how on September 15, 1945, her father went to Moscow on some business (and they lived then in the near Moscow region) and, returning, said in shock: “Say thanks that you now see me in front of you. Just now, at the Yaroslavl station, some hefty fellows almost pushed me under the train. Well, people recaptured it."

Now, long after the death of Dmitry Kedrin, it can be assumed that he became a victim of repression. Arriving in Moscow in 1931, he did not honestly write in his questionnaire that in 1929 he was imprisoned "for failure to report a well-known counter-revolutionary fact", which put himself at risk. To this was added his noble origin, and after the war - his refusal to work as a secret agent. He was not touched by the repressions of 1937, but even then he was blacklisted by the secretary of the Union of Writers Stavsky, who allowed himself to say to Kedrin: “You! Noble offspring! Either you learn the first five chapters of the "Short Course" of the history of the party and pass the test to me personally, or I will drive you to where Makar did not drive the calves! - Retelling this conversation to his wife, Dmitry Kedrin could not hold back the tears of resentment and humiliation ...

The assumption of the literary critic Svetlana Markovskaya is known.

- According to the official point of view, Kedrin was killed on Stalin's order. In Moscow, I heard a different story from writers. Taking advantage of the fact that Dmitry was rarely published, his comrades-in-arms began to ... steal poetry from him. Once Mitya noticed this and in conversations with members of the SPU threatened to tell everything to the board. In order to prevent a scandal from flaring up, it was removed. They also talked about some dark story connected with his arrest in Dnepropetrovsk.

Dmitry Kedrin was buried in Moscow, at the Vvedensky (or, as it is also called, German) cemetery in the Lefortovo region.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, assigning Kedrin the role of “recreator of historical memory”, wrote in the preface to one of his collections of poems: “What a state of internal transference through time! What a grasping look through the thickness of years!” - and further: "People of many generations, united in humanity, are walking along the Kedrin pages."

A documentary film "Ambush Regiment" was filmed about Dmitry Kedrin.

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Text prepared by Andrey Goncharov

Used materials:

Alexander Ratner in the poetic almanac "Parallel"
Andrey Krotkov "Autumn Man"
And materials of the historical and artistic journal "Solar Wind"

In the cemetery near the house
Spring has already arrived:
overgrown bird cherry,
Stinging nettle.

On chipped stone slabs
Lovers at night blue
I kindle the flame again
Nature is inextinguishable.

So rubs between the millstones
Immortal Grinding of Centuries:
Probably new ones soon
Children will cry in the village.

Poet.

It's not about the cult, it's about rock.

Let the times are not the same now -

There are accomplices in vice

As were brothers in Christ.

The woman whom he began to call mother at the end of his life was his aunt; the surname he bore belonged to his uncle.

The grandfather of Dmitry Kedrin on the maternal side was the noble pan Ivan Ivanovich Ruto-Rutenko-Rutnitsky, who lost his family estate in cards. A man of strong temper, he did not marry for a long time, but at the age of forty-five he won his daughter Neonila, who was fifteen years old, at cards with his friend. A year later, with the permission of the Synod, he married her. In marriage, she gave birth to five children: Lyudmila, Dmitry, Maria, Neonila and Olga.

All the Rutnitsky girls studied in Kyiv at the Institute of Noble Maidens. Dmitry committed suicide at the age of eighteen because of unhappy love. Maria and Neonila got married. The eldest daughter Lyudmila remained with her parents, ugly and stayed up in the girls, and the youngest - charming, romantic, Olga, her father's favorite.

To marry Lyudmila, Ivan Ivanovich did not spare a hundred thousand dowry. Lyudmila's husband was Boris Mikhailovich Kedrin - a former military man, expelled from the regiment for a duel, living on debts. Young moved to Yekaterinoslav.

After the departure of the Kedrins, Olga confessed to her mother that she was pregnant. Moreover, it is not known whether she said who the father of the child is or not. And the mother, knowing her husband's tough temper and absurdity, immediately sent Olga to Neonil in the city of Balta, Podolsk province. Neonila took her sister to a familiar Moldovan family, not far from Balta, where Olga gave birth to a boy. It was February 4, 1907.

A typical accusation for that time turns into 15 months of imprisonment for Dmitry Kedrin. In 1931, after his release, he moved to the Moscow region, where his Dnepropetrovsk friends-poets M. Svetlov, M. Golodny and others had previously settled. He worked in the newspaper of the Mytishchi Carriage Works, collaborated as a literary consultant with the Moscow publishing house Young Guard.

His wife was Lyudmila Khorenko, who was also in love with his friend design engineer Ivan Gvai, one of the creators of Katyusha.

Here is how Svetlana Kedrina writes about this, based on the stories of relatives, in the book about her father “To Live in spite of everything”: “Ivan really liked Milya (Lyudmila Khorenko), and at first he even tried to lure her, but one day my father recalled him aside and said: “Listen, Vanka, leave Mil alone, she is very dear to me.” “I’m sorry, Mityayka, I didn’t know that it was so serious with you,” Gwai answered embarrassedly.

Kedrin was internally independent, while remaining an idealist and romantic. He tried to imagine the Bolshevik revolution for himself as a completely natural and even desirable path of development for Russia. Tried to combine the incompatible in himself. However, they could not deceive themselves. The further, the more the poet felt his loneliness: “I am lonely. My whole life is in the past. There is no need to write for anyone. Life weighs more and more ... How much more? Goethe said the truth: "Man lives as long as he wants to."

With a sad and anxious mood, Kedrin once wrote in his diary, referring to his wife: "And you and I are doomed by fate to heat someone else's stove in someone else's house." In this environment, he managed to be a hospitable host and write amazing poems.

In 1932, he wrote the poem "Doll", which made the poet famous. They say that Gorky was moved to tears when reading this poem:

How dark is this house!
Break into this hole damp
You, my time!
Mark this beggarly comfort!
Here men fight
Here women steal rags,
They swear, they gossip,
Foolishness, crying and drinking ...

The gloomy picture of the present was contrasted with the bright pathos of future transformations. The pathetic lines made a special impression on Gorky:

Aleksei Maksimovich was sincerely touched, the author's skill was able to appreciate, and on October 26, 1932, Gorky organized a reading of "Dolls" in his apartment in the presence of members of the country's top leadership.

Read by Vladimir Lugovskoy. Gorky smoked continuously and wiped away his tears. Voroshilov, Budyonny, Shvernik, Zhdanov, Bukharin, Yagoda listened ... The leaders (except for the well-read Bukharin) did not understand a damn thing about poetry, but they liked the poem and was approved. Moreover, this poem was approved by the most important reader and critic of those years: “I read“ Doll ”with pleasure. I. Stalin.

"Krasnaya Nov" printed "The Doll" in No. 12 for 1932. The day after the publication, Kedrin woke up, if not famous, then authoritative.

However, even the highest approval did not help Kedrin much, and he could not go out with his poems to the reader - all his attempts to publish the book failed. In one of his letters it was written: “To understand that you will never tell others that big, beautiful and terrible thing that you feel is very hard, it devastates to the ground.”

He told his wife: “A poet should publish at least occasionally. The book is a summing up, a harvest. Without this it is impossible to exist in literature. Non-recognition is actually a slow murder, pushing towards the abyss of despair and self-doubt.

Dmitry Kedrin in the late 30s turns in his work to the history of Russia. It was then that he wrote such significant works as "Architects" ("under the influence of which Andrei Tarkovsky created the film "Andrei Rublev" - notes Yevgeny Yevtushenko)," Horse "and" Song about Alyona Staritsa ".

Love for Russia, for its history, culture and its nature, permeates such of his poems of the late 30s and 40s as “Beauty”, “Motherland”, “Bell”, “Everything seems to me a field with buckwheat ...”, "Winter". He will even prepare a whole book with the title "Russian Poems".

Once in a young heart

The dream of happiness sang loudly.

Now my soul is like a house

Where did the child come from?

And I give the earth a dream

I don’t dare, I rebel…

So distraught mother

Rocks the empty cradle.

“He stood under the Kremlin wall for a long time,” writes the poet’s daughter Svetlana Kedrina, “admiring the monument to Minin and Pozharsky and tirelessly circled and circled around“ Basil the Blessed ”. This temple haunted him, excited his imagination, awakened his “genetic memory”. He was so handsome, so defiantly bright, he struck with such completeness of lines that after each meeting with him Dmitry Kedrin lost his peace. Admiration and delight were the impetus that forced my father to study all the literature available in the Lenin Library about the construction of churches in Russia, about the era of Ivan the Terrible, about the Church of the Intercession. My father was struck by the legend about the blinding of the architects Barma and Postnik, which formed the basis of the poem “The Architects” he created in four days.

Kedrin never saw most of his poems printed, and his poem "1902" had been waiting for its publication for fifty years.

In the late 70s, Kaisyn Kuliev wrote about Kedrin: "He did a lot for the brotherhood of cultures of peoples, for their mutual enrichment, as a translator."

While working on the historical poem "The Horse", Kedrin studied literature about Moscow and its architects, about building materials of that time and methods of masonry for several years, re-read many books about Ivan the Terrible, made extracts from Russian chronicles and other sources, visited places related to with the events he was about to describe. Such works are utterly time-consuming, but despite this Kedrin enthusiastically worked on them, and in the form of large poetic forms. Among them, the brilliant drama in verse "Rembrandt" stands out, for which the author took about two years to prepare. This work was published in 1940 in the magazine "October" and a year later they became interested in the theatrical environment, including S. Mikhoels, but the war prevented the production. Subsequently, "Rembrandt" sounded on the radio, went on television, performances and an opera were staged several times.

From the very beginning of the war, Kedrin vainly knocks on all thresholds, trying to be at the front in order to defend Russia with weapons in his hands. No one takes him to any front - for health reasons, he is crossed out from all possible lists. From a poem dated October 11, 1941:

… Where are they? To Samara - to wait for victory?

Or die? .. Whatever answer you give, -

I don't care, I'm not going anywhere.

What to look for? There is no second Russia!

The pilots of the 6th Air Army kept Kedrin's poems from the front in their breast pockets, tablets and route maps. At the end of 1943 he was awarded the medal "For Military Merit".

Kedrin wrote in 1944: “... Many of my friends died in the war. The circle of loneliness is closed. I'm almost forty. I don't see my reader, I don't feel him. So, by the age of forty, life burned out bitterly and completely senselessly. Probably the reason for this is the dubious profession that I have chosen or that has chosen me: poetry.

After the war, all the pre-war hardships returned to Kedrin, which he still patiently endured and once wrote in his diary: "How many Mondays in life and how few Sundays."

In August 1945, ode Kedrin, together with a group of writers, went on a business trip to Chisinau, which struck him with its beauty and reminded him of Dnepropetrovsk, youth, Ukraine. Upon his arrival home, he decided to seriously discuss with his wife the possibility of moving to Chisinau. And early in the morning of September 19, 1945, not far from the railway embankment, on a garbage heap in Veshnyaki, his body was found. The examination established that the misfortune happened the day before, at about eleven o'clock in the evening. How the poet ended up in Veshnyaki, why he came to the Kazansky railway station, and not to Yaroslavsky, under what circumstances he died - remains a mystery.

Svetlana Kedrina cites lines from her diary in which her mother describes the morning of September 18, 1945, that last morning:

“Mitya looked at the book. I don't know if he read it or thought about it. And I thought: is this man really my husband? Is he really so tender and affectionate with me, are his lips kissing me? .. And I went up to him. "What, honey?" Mitya asked and kissed my hand. I clung to him, stood up and walked away. A few minutes later, Mitya left home for the train to Moscow ... I walked him to the door, Mitya kissed my hands, on the head. And he came out ... into eternity from me, from life. I never saw Mitya again. Four days later I saw his photograph, the last and so terrible. Mitya was dead. What horror was in his eyes! Ah, those eyes! They are now all imagining me ... "

The poet's daughter Svetlana Kedrina recalls:

“Shortly before his death, a close friend from Dnepropetrovsk, who in those years became a big man in the Writers' Union and helped our family a lot, came to him and suggested that dad inform on his comrades: “They know that everyone considers you a decent person and hope that you help them…” Father let his friend off the porch, and he, standing up and dusting off his trousers, said with a threat in his voice: “You will regret it again” ...

She also recalls how on September 15, 1945, her father went to Moscow on some business (and they lived then in the near Moscow region) and, returning, said in shock: “Tell me thank you that you now see me in front of you. Just now, at the Yaroslavl station, some hefty fellows almost pushed me under the train. Well, people recaptured it."

Now, long after the death of Dmitry Kedrin, it can be assumed that he became a victim of repression. Arriving in Moscow in 1931, he did not want to hide and honestly wrote in his questionnaire that in 1929 he was imprisoned "for failure to report a well-known counter-revolutionary fact", which put himself at risk. To this was added his noble origin, and after the war - his refusal to work as a secret agent. He was not touched by the repressions of 1937, but even then he was blacklisted by the secretary of the Union of Writers Stavsky, who allowed himself to say to Kedrin: “You! Noble offspring! Either you learn the first five chapters of the "Short Course" of the history of the party and pass the test to me personally, or I will drive you to where Makar did not drive the calves! - Retelling this conversation to his wife, Dmitry Kedrin could not hold back the tears of resentment and humiliation ...

The assumption of the literary critic Svetlana Markovskaya is known.

Dmitry Kedrin was buried in Moscow, at the Vvedensky (or, as it is also called, German) cemetery in the Lefortovo region.

Prepared from:

Alexander Ratner in the poetic almanac "Parallel"

And materials of the historical and artistic journal "Solar Wind"

* * *

In the cemetery near the house

Spring has already arrived:

overgrown bird cherry,

Stinging nettle.

On chipped stone slabs

Lovers at night blue

I kindle the flame again

Nature is inextinguishable.

So rubs between the millstones

Immortal Grinding of Centuries:

Probably new ones soon

Children will cry in the village.

KEDRIN Dmitry Borisovich (02/14/1907 - 09/18/1945), Russian poet, translator. Orphaned at an early age, Kedrin was brought up by a well-educated grandmother, a noblewoman, who introduced him to the world of folk art, introduced him to the poetry of Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Shevchenko. Already in 1923, having left his studies at a technical school, he began working in a newspaper, writing poetry, and was fond of poetry and theater. By the end of the 1920s, Proletkult’s “iron poetry” breaks with certain tendencies, in his poems there is a tendency towards epic and historicism (“Death Man”, “Execution”, “Request”). His father was a railway accountant, his mother was a secretary in a commercial school .

Kedrin studied at the Dnepropetrovsk Institute of Communications (1922-1924). After moving to Moscow, he worked in the factory circulation and as a literary consultant at the publishing house "Young Guard".

He began to publish in 1924. Despite the fact that Gorky himself wept when reading Kedrin's poem "The Doll", the first book "Witnesses" was published only in 1940.

Kedrin was a secret dissident during Stalin's time. Knowledge of Russian history did not allow him to idealize the years of the "great turning point". Lines in "Alena Staritsa" - "All the animals are sleeping. All people are sleeping. Some clerks execute people” - were written not sometime, but during the years of terror.

In 1938, Kedrin wrote his most famous poem, The Architects, under whose influence Andrei Tarkovsky created the film Andrei Rublev. The "terrible royal mercy" - the eyes of the creators of St. Basil the Blessed, gouged out on the orders of Ivan the Terrible - echoed Stalin's mercy - the ruthless reprisal against the builders of a socialist utopia. It is no coincidence that Kedrin created a portrait of the leader of the Huns - Attila, a victim of his own cruelty and loneliness. (This poem was published only after Stalin's death.)

The poet wrote with pain about the tragedy of Russian geniuses who were not recognized in their own Fatherland: “And he built the Horse. Who decorated the villas in Luca with carvings, in Urbino whose big hands of the cathedral brought out the pillars? Kedrin glorified the courage of the artist to be a ruthless judge not only of his time, but also of himself. "How badly this god is drawn!" - this is what Kedrinsky Rembrandt exclaims in the drama of the same name.

During the war, the poet was a war correspondent. But knowledge of history helped him understand that victory is also a kind of temple, whose builders can gouge out the eyes.

Unknown killers threw Kedrin out of the vestibule of an electric train near Tarasovka. But it can be assumed that this was not just an accident. "Deacons" could well send their henchmen.

Best of the day

In 1929 arrest follows. Since 1931, after his release, Kedrin settled in the Moscow region, served as a literary consultant in the publishing house "Young Guard". The problems of his work are expanding, he is interested in “living and museum history”, that is, the connection of history with modernity. In 1938 Kedrin created a masterpiece of Russian poetry of the 20th century. - the poem "Architects", a poetic embodiment of the legend about the builders of St. Basil's Cathedral. The verses “Alena-Staritsa” are dedicated to the Moscow holy fool warrior, and the poem “Kon” (1940) is dedicated to the semi-legendary nugget-builder Fyodor Kon. The historical and patriotic theme prevails in Kedrin's poetry and during the war years, when he was released from military service due to sight, he seeks his appointment to the front-line newspaper "Falcon of the Motherland": "Duma about Russia" (1942), "Prince Vasilko Rostovsky" (1942) , “Ermak” (1944), etc.

During the war, Kedrin declares himself as a major lyric poet: “Beauty”, “Alyonushka”, “Russia! We love dim light”, “I keep imagining a field with buckwheat...”. He begins to create a poem about women of tragic fate - Evdokia Lopukhina, Princess Tarakanova, Praskovya Zhemchugova. Orthodox motifs sound more and more distinct in his poems. Upon returning from the front, Kedrin notices that he is being followed. The premonition of trouble did not deceive the poet: three months after the end of the war, he would be found killed near the railroad tracks.

Youth years in Ukraine

Neonil's grandmother, a very well-read woman who passionately loved poetry, instilled in Dmitry a love of poetry, was engaged in the literary education of her grandson: she read from her notebook Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, as well as in the original - Shevchenko and Mickiewicz. Grandmother became the first listener of Kedrin's poems.

Among the poet's ancestors were noblemen, Kedrin's daughter Svetlana even calls him "a pure-blooded nobleman". Kedrin was barely 6 years old when the family settled in Yekaterinoslav (now Dnepropetrovsk). In 1916, 9-year-old Dmitry was sent to a commercial school. On the way to the school along the green Nadezhdinskaya (now Chicherinskaya) street to a wide avenue, he always stopped on the boulevard where the bronze Pushkin towered. “From the monument to Pushkin, my craving for art begins,” the poet later recalled.

In his youth, Kedrin did a lot of self-education. He studied not only literature and history, but also philosophy, geography, and botany. On his desk were volumes of fiction, an encyclopedic dictionary, Brehm's Animal Life, and works from various fields of science. Even at the commercial school, Dmitry succeeded in epigrams and poems on the topic of the day. Seriously engaged in poetry began at the age of 16.

The revolution and civil war changed all plans. He began to publish in 1924 in the Yekaterinoslav provincial Komsomol newspaper "The Coming Change". One of the first published poems was called "So ordered Comrade Lenin".

In Moscow and at the front

In 1931, following his friends, the poets Mikhail Svetlov and Mikhail Golodny, he moved to Moscow. Kedrin and his wife settled in the semi-basement of an old two-story house on Taganka in Tovarishchesky Lane. He honestly wrote in his questionnaire that in 1929 he was imprisoned in Ukraine "for not reporting a well-known counter-revolutionary fact." The fact was that his friend's father was a Denikin general, and Kedrin, knowing this, did not report him to the authorities. For this "crime" he was sentenced to two years, spent 15 months behind bars and was released early. With this event, as well as with Kedrin's refusal to be a secret informer of the NKVD (sexot), a number of researchers associate the subsequent problems of the poet with the publication of his works, as well as the mystery of the death of Dmitry Borisovich under circumstances that have not yet been clarified.

After the birth of their daughter, in December 1934, the Kedrin family moved to the village of Cherkizovo, Pushkin District, near Moscow, where the poet first had a “working room”, a nook behind a curtain.

He worked in the factory newspaper "Forge" of the Mytishchi plant "Metrovagonmash", then as a literary consultant at the publishing house "Young Guard" and at the same time as a freelance editor at Goslitizdat. Here he publishes such poems as Gorky noticed "Doll" (1932), "Moscow Autumn" (1937), "Winter" (1939), the ballad "Architects" (1938), the poem "Horse" (1940). Kedrin's works are very psychological, addressed to historical, chamber and intimate themes, he glorified the creators - the creators of timeless true beauty. The poet was almost indifferent to the pathos of contemporary pre-war reality, for which the Secretary General of the Writers' Union of the USSR V. Stavsky severely criticized Kedrin and, according to the poet's relatives, even threatened him. Critics advised Dmitry Borisovich to run away from historical topics.

Neighbors and acquaintances in Cherkizov noted that Kedrin gave the impression of a silent, reserved, self-absorbed thinker: even during a walk, he often did not greet, did not answer greetings, did not enter into conversations with anyone. The poet did not part with a notebook and a pencil, he worked hard on the texts of his works.

I met here<на фронте>with exceptionally interesting people... If you only knew how much daring courage, calm courage they have, what wonderful Russian people they are... Moscow, in our writing environment.

From Dmitry Kedrin's letters to his wife

Immediately after the war, in the summer of 1945, together with a group of writers, he went on a creative business trip to Moldova. On the way home, a neighbor in the compartment accidentally broke a jug of honey that Dmitry Borisovich was carrying to the children, which was interpreted by eyewitnesses as a mystical sign of imminent trouble. On September 15, on the platform of the Yaroslavsky railway station, for some unknown reason, unidentified persons almost pushed Kedrin under the train, and only the intervention of passengers at the last moment saved him. Returning home to Cherkizovo in the evening, the poet, in a gloomy foreboding, said to his wife: "This looks like persecution." He had three days to live.

Doom

At the head of the grave of Dmitry Kedrin, a 300-year-old oak grows, the oldest on the Vvedensky Mountains, which became the motive for a philosophical poem by Svetlana Kedrina dedicated to the memory of her father.

Creation

One of the most significant works of Kedrin is the poetic drama Rembrandt () about the great Dutch artist. The poem was first published in three issues of the October magazine in 1940. At the same time, the author was ordered to shorten the text of the drama, and Kedrin complied with the editorial requirement. Therefore, the reader for a long time was familiar with the text only in its journal version, which was reprinted more than once. The full author's text of the drama was first published in SD Kedrina's book about her father only in 1996. In 1970-1980, the production was performed in several theaters in Russia as a drama and once as an opera. The poem was read on radio and television.

In the same genre of drama in verse, Parasha Zhemchugova was written before the war. According to the memoirs of the poet's daughter, Kedrin worked on the tragic story of a serf actress for about ten years. The almost completed thing disappeared without a trace in the fall of 1941 - along with a suitcase of manuscripts in a mess, when a family with two children was preparing for an evacuation, which fell through at the last moment.

In 1933, Kedrin begins and only seven years later finishes the poem "The Wedding" (first published more than 30 years later) - about the all-crushing power of love, which even the heart of Attila, the leader of the Huns, could not resist, who died on the night of his wedding, unable to stand surging and previously unknown feelings. The action of the poem unfolds against the background of a large-scale picture of the change of civilizations and contains the historiosophical understanding of the ongoing changes, characteristic of Kedrin.

In 1935 Kedrin wrote "The Dowry", a version of the sad fate of the poet Ferdowsi. According to the literary critic Yuri Petrunin, Kedrin equipped the poem with autobiographical overtones, enhanced its sound with his own experiences and gloomy forebodings.

The gift to penetrate into distant epochs, to be in them not an archivist researcher, but a contemporary, an eyewitness to events that have long sunk into oblivion is the rarest, exceptional property of Kedrin's talent. In history, as a rule, he was not interested in princes and nobles, but in working people, creators of material and spiritual values. He especially loved Russia, writing about her, in addition to "Architects", poems - "Horse", "Ermak", "Prince Vasilko of Rostov", "Song about Alena the Elder". At the same time, unambiguous symbolism is inherent in Kedrin's poetry: the lines in “Alena Staritsa” “All animals sleep. All people are sleeping. Some clerks execute people" - were written at the height of the Stalinist terror and are quoted by all researchers of the poet's work.

Dmitry Borisovich was not only a master of the historical poem and ballad, but also an excellent lyricist. One of his best poems “Do you want to know what Russia is - Our first love in life?” , addressed to the origins of the Russian spirit, is dated September 18, 1942, when the poet was waiting for permission to go to the front.

Kedrin's poetry was highly appreciated by such writers as M. Gorky, V. Mayakovsky, M. Voloshin, P. Antokolsky, I. Selvinsky, M. Svetlov, V. Lugovskoy, Ya. Smelyakov, L. Ozerov, K. Kuliev and others . Before the war, Kedrin published poems in the magazines October, Novy Mir, Krasnaya Nov, with poems in the collections Day of Soviet Poetry, Winners. However, when it came to publishing a book, literary critics were merciless to the poet.

Kedrin made his first attempt to publish his poems as a separate edition at the State Fiction Literature Publishing House (GIHL) shortly after his arrival in Moscow in 1931. However, the manuscript was returned despite positive reviews from Eduard Bagritsky and Iosif Utkin. Trying to find a compromise with the publishing house, Kedrin was forced to exclude many works from it, including those that had already received recognition. After thirteen returns of the manuscript for revision, several renamings, the only lifetime poetic collection - "Witnesses", which included only 17 poems, was published in 1940.

In 1942, Kedrin handed over the book "Russian Poetry" to the publishing house "Soviet Writer". However, the collection did not see the light of day due to the negative review of reviewers, one of whom accused the author of "not feeling the word", the second - of "lack of independence, an abundance of other people's voices", the third - of "incomplete lines, sloppy comparisons, ambiguity thinking". Decades later, literary scholars characterize Kedrin's creative palette in a completely different way: his poetry of the war years was nourished by intonations of confidential conversation, historical and epic themes, and deep patriotic impulses.

Soviet editions of Dmitry Kedrin.


Kedrin in the Library of Soviet Poetry.	Leningrad edition of "Children's Literature".	Perm "thick" edition of Kedrin with a circulation of 300,000 copies.

Leaving for the front in 1943, Kedrin gave a new book of poems, The Day of Wrath, to Goslitizdat, but it also received several negative reviews and was not published. The probable reason for the refusal was that Kedrin reflected in his poems not the heroic side of the war, but the meager life of the rear, the nights in the shelter, the endless lines, the endless human grief.

Many of my friends died in the war. The circle of loneliness is closed. I'm almost forty. I don't see my reader, I don't feel him. So, by the age of forty, life burned out bitterly and completely senselessly. This is probably due to the dubious profession that I have chosen or that has chosen me: poetry.

Along with original work, Kedrin did a lot of interlinear translations. From the end of 1938 to May 1939 he translated from Hungarian the poem "Janos the Knight" by Sandor Petofi, then from the Polish poem "Pan Twardowski" by Adam Mickiewicz. In 1939 he traveled to Ufa on the instructions of Goslitizdat to translate Mazhit Gafuri's poems from Bashkir. In the first years of the war, before being sent to a front-line newspaper, Kedrin did a lot of translations from Balkar (Gamzat Tsadasa), from Tatar (Musa Jalil), from Ukrainian (Andrey Malyshko and Vladimir Sosyura), from Belarusian (Maxim Tank), from Lithuanian (Salomeya Neris, Ludas Gyra). His translations from Ossetian (Kosta Khetagurov), from Estonian (Johannes Barbaus) and from Serbo-Croatian (Vladimir Nazor) are also known. Most of these translations were published after the death of the poet.

Prior to the release of Kedrin's collection in the Poet's Library series (1947), his work was known only to a few connoisseurs of poetry. S. Shchipachev at the Second Congress of the SP in 1954 spoke out against the hushing up of Kedrin's work.

In his work, along with song poems about nature, there is a lot of journalism and satire, and narrative poems, often of historical content. In his clear and precise verses, where the measure is skillfully observed in the figurative recreation of the spirit and language of past eras, the suffering and exploits of the Russian people, the meanness, ferocity and arbitrariness of autocracy are reflected.

Family

Wife - Lyudmila Ivanovna Kedrina (Khorenko) (January 10, 1909 - July 17, 1987), originally from Krivoy Rog, from a peasant family. They met in 1926, got married in 1930. She was buried next to D. Kedrin at the Vvedenskoye cemetery in Moscow (plot No. 7). The Kedrins have two children - Svetlana and Oleg (1941-1948). The last address of Kedrin is the village of Cherkizovo, Pushkinsky District, Moscow Region, 2nd Shkolnaya Street, house 5. A memorial plaque was installed on the house.

The daughter of the poet Svetlana Dmitrievna Kedrina (b., the village of Cherkizovo, Moscow Region), a poet, prose writer, artist, is known for her work on the study of her father's work. In 1996, in Moscow (Yaniko publishing house), her book of memoirs about her father, Living in spite of everything, was published. For the reprint of this book in Ukraine, Svetlana Kedrina in 2007 was awarded the Literary Prize. Dmitry Kedrin in the nomination "Prose".

In the mid-1930s, watching the persecution of Osip Mandelstam, Nikolai Zabolotsky, Pavel Vasiliev, Kedrin wrote a caustic epigram:

Poets have a strange lot,

The weak oppress the strong.

Music on poems by Kedrin

Kedrin's texts are used in Moses Weinberg's Requiem (-).

Composer David Tukhmanov in the 1980s composed the song "Duel" based on Kedrin's verses. Composer Igor Nikolaev wrote a song based on Dmitry Kedrin's poem "Babka Mariula".

Kazan composer Rustam Zaripov writes to Kedrin's verses: "Voice", a vocal poem (in the original - "Record") and the cycle "Five choirs to the verses of Dm. Kedrin (for mixed choir a capella).

In 1991, in Moscow, the Melodiya company released a giant vinyl disc by the Ufa musician and writer Sergei Krul “Everything involuntarily wakes up in memory ...”, which, in addition to songs and romances to verses by Rubtsov, Blok, Zabolotsky and Zhigulin, included two ballads on Kedrin's poems - "Heart" and "Blood". In April 2007, the same author recorded the CD "Plate" (8 songs) and donated it to the poet's daughter Svetlana Kedrina.

Based on the poem “Wedding”, the group “Aria” wrote the song “Attila”, released on the album “Phoenix” in 2011. The text of the song tells about Attila, the leader of the Huns.
Composer N. Peiko wrote the vocal cycle “Pictures and Reflections” on Kedrin's verses, and Peiko's students (Vulfov, Abdokov) also wrote on Kedrin's verses.

Compositions

Witnesses, 1940
Rembrandt. Play, 1940
Selected, 1947, 1953, 1957
Poems and poems, 1959
Beauty, 1965
Selected Works, 1974, 1978
Architects, 1980
Poems. Poems, 1982
Nightingale decoy, M., "Book", 1990

Sources

Cossack V. Lexicon of Russian literature of the XX century = Lexikon der russischen Literatur ab 1917. - M .: RIK "Culture", 1996. - 492 p. - 5000 copies. - ISBN 5-8334-0019-8

From the bibliography

"Live Against Everything"(the secret of the birth and the secret of the death of the poet Dmitry Kedrin). - M.: "Yaniko", 1996. - S. 228. - ISBN 5-88369-078-5.
"Live Against Everything"/ Compilation, foreword by A. Ratner. - Dnepropetrovsk: Monolith, 2006. -368 p., ill.
"Four Winds", 2005.
"Transformation", 2008. (poems about people of difficult fate, about nature and about the long road to the Temple.)
"My Island", 2009. (poems about the motherland and spiritual quest, about joyful and sad, about the nature of creativity, about spring and autumn.)

"Network Literature" > Alexander Mikhailovich Kobrinsky:

Notes

Dmitry Kedrin. Kedrin Dmitry Borisovich
Lib.ru/Classic: Kedrin Dmitry Borisovich. Yuri Petrunin. Intentions and accomplishments
The fate and fate of the poet | Number 05 (2007) | Literary Russia
TV channel "Culture". Kedrin Dmitry. Seeing a lot, knowing a lot, knowing hatred and love
Dmitry Kedrin. Foreword by Lyudmila Kedrina. // Poems and poems / Ed. D. Demerdzhi. - Dnepropetrovsk: Dnepropetrovsk regional publishing house, 1958. - S. 3-10. - 104 p.

There are two secrets associated with the name of the poet Dmitry Borisovich Kedrin - the secret of birth and the secret of death.

The woman whom he began to call mother at the end of his life was his aunt; the surname he bore belonged to his uncle.

The grandfather of Dmitry Kedrin on the maternal side was the noble pan Ivan Ivanovich Ruto-Rutenko-Rutnitsky, who lost his family estate in cards. A man of strong temper, he did not marry for a long time, and at forty-five he won his daughter Neonila, who was fifteen years old, at cards with his friend. A year later, with the permission of the Synod, he married her. In marriage, she gave birth to five children: Lyudmila, Dmitry, Maria, Neonila and Olga.

... I have always been proud that half of Kedrin's life was spent in my native Dnepropetrovsk, then Yekaterinoslav, where little Mitya was brought in 1913. Here his grandmother read to him poems by Pushkin, Mickiewicz and Shevchenko, thanks to which he forever fell in love with Polish and Ukrainian poetry, which he later translated; here he began to write poetry, studied at the technical school of communications, for the first time at the age of 17 he published “Poems about Spring”; here he collaborated in the newspaper "The Coming Change" and in the magazine "Young Forge", gained recognition and popularity among young people; here his opinion and talent were respected, recognized on the street; here, finally, he survived his first arrest for "non-information".

Kedrin never forgot about Dnepropetrovsk, he dedicated poems to it, starting from the early ones, in which the city arose, a “silent giant” with factory smokes, smells of metal, and, of course, the Yekaterinoslav Bridge with its “granite sadness” ... And now from poems war period:

Out into the yard

Schoolgirl in a sailor suit

Hooting over the garden

First bumblebees.

May passes...

We are in Dnepropetrovsk

It must already be

The cherries have blossomed.

Hello city of iron and steel

Withstood the battle with a dashing enemy!

The barbarians didn't trample you

Forged German boot.

Recalling his life, Kedrin wrote from the front: "Apart from childhood, a person has nothing joyful."

Today, as in the poet’s childhood, Chicherinskaya Street, which overlooks the Pushkin monument, where Kedrin lived, rustles with acacias, a memorial plaque dedicated to him hangs on the facade of the transport technical school, Kedrin Street drowning in greenery pleases the eye, and the literary award bearing his name is highly rated.

Imagine a thin, graceful, short man with kind brown eyes behind thick horn-rimmed glasses, wavy light brown hair thrown back to his left temple, and a soft, pleasant chesty voice; besides, he is polite, modest, intelligent, delicate and educated, but suspicious and vulnerable, detached from the surrounding life and completely helpless in everyday life. And most importantly - immensely talented as a poet. This is Dmitry Kedrin, whose life is framed by the mysteries of birth and death.

Dmitry Kedrin entered my destiny when I was sixteen years old. My friend, like me, an aspiring poet, met me on the street and aloud, choking with delight, read several poems by Kedrin, turning my soul over with them. I don’t remember how later I ended up with a small collection of Kedrin’s poems, but I still remember the shock from his “Doll”, “Duel”, “Capercaillie”, “Architects”. I was especially struck by the poem "Conversation". I dare say that no poet has said this about a pregnant woman:

...deep under the heart, in your golden darkness

Not life, but only the ovary of life is tied in a knot.

I then read “Conversation” to all the girls I met, I still remember by heart and from time to time I repeat to myself.

And my friend borrowed that small Kedrin collection from me to read, then gave it to someone, that one - further, and as a result I was left without a book, rare at that time.

In 1931, Kedrin was drawn to Moscow, where his Dnepropetrovsk friends-poets M. Svetlov, M. Golodny and others had already settled. Who knows how his life would have turned out if he had not moved to the capital, where all the hardships and humiliations began, the main of which were constant domestic disorder and the inability to publish a book of poetry.

This essentially large child in the Moscow period of his life did not have not only an apartment or a room, but even his own permanent corner. How many times did he move from place to place, wherever he huddled with his family, in what miserable and cramped rooms, partitioned off with plywood or curtains, he did not have to live, among the eternal noise and screams of neighbors, the crying of his own daughter and grumbling aunt. With a sad and anxious mood, Kedrin once wrote in his diary, referring to his wife: "And you and I are doomed by fate to heat someone else's stove in someone else's house." And in this environment, he managed to be a hospitable host, write amazing poems, mentally pushing the walls of his next temporary home in order to be transported to other times and countries. Probably because, being at the front, he so easily got used to an ordinary dugout.

But the biggest misfortune was that Kedrin could not go out with his poems to the reader - all his attempts to publish the book eventually failed. It was not in vain that he remarked in one of his letters: “I don’t want to be small, they won’t let me into big ones.” And there is another thought: “To understand that you will never tell others that big, beautiful and terrible thing that you feel is very difficult, it devastates to the ground.”

Years passed, and the book was still missing. He told his wife: “A poet should publish at least occasionally. The book is a summing up, a harvest. Without this it is impossible to exist in literature. Non-recognition is actually a slow murder, pushing towards the abyss of despair and self-doubt.

Kedrin made his first attempt to publish the book in GIHL 1 shortly after his arrival in Moscow, but the manuscript was returned despite good reviews from Eduard Bagritsky and Iosif Utkin. In the future, the poet, who decided for himself that if the book was not published in 1938, he would stop writing, he was forced to exclude many things from it, including those that had already received recognition. After thirteen returns of the manuscript for revision, several title changes and manipulations with the text, this only lifetime book of Kedrin, Witnesses, which included only seventeen poems, saw the light of day. Regarding her, the author wrote: “She came out in such a way that she cannot be considered anything other than a bastard. It has preserved no more than 5-6 poems that are worth this high name ... "

The second attempt, and also unsuccessful, dates back to 1942, when Kedrin handed over the book Russian Poems to the Soviet Writer publishing house. One of its reviewers accused the author of "not feeling the word", the second - of "lack of independence, an abundance of other people's voices", the third - of "unfinished lines, sloppy comparisons, unclear thinking". And this at a time when Kedrin's poetry was highly appreciated by such writers as M. Gorky, V. Mayakovsky, M. Voloshin, P. Antokolsky, I. Selvinsky, M. Svetlov, V. Lugovskoy, Ya. Smelyakov,

L. Ozerov, K. Kuliev and others.

Before leaving for the front in 1943, Kedrin gave a new book of poems to Goslitizdat, but it received several negative reviews and was not published.

Kedrin never saw most of his poems printed, and his poem "1902" had been waiting for its publication for fifty years. It is in it one of the chapters ends with the prophetic words:

Shaking chains, wandering

in space earth,

The wild homeland of perishing mankind.

Lord, how far-sighted this short-sighted man was!

And here is another of his records, relating to 1944: “... Many of my friends died in the war. The circle of loneliness is closed. I'm almost forty. I don't see my reader, I don't feel him. So, by the age of forty, life burned out bitterly and completely senselessly. Probably the reason for this is the dubious profession that I have chosen or that has chosen me: poetry.

When poets are not published, they begin to translate famous authors, rightly believing that they, these authors, will certainly be published, regardless of the personality of the translator. This rule was followed by Kedrin, who from the end of 1938 to May 1939 translated Sandor Petofi's poem "Knight Yanosh". But here, too, failure awaited him: despite the laudatory reviews of colleagues and the press, this poem was not published during Kedrin's lifetime. The next attempt also failed: "Knight Yanosh" by Petofi, together with "Pan Tvardovsky" by Adam Mickiewicz, were included in that unpublished book of poems by Kedrin, which he handed over to Goslitizdat, leaving for the front in 1943. Only nineteen years later, Petofi's poem saw the light of day.

Then, in the first years of the war, while waiting to be sent to a front-line newspaper, Kedrin was actively engaged in translations from Balkar (Gamzat Tsadasa), from Tatar (Musa Jalil), from Ukrainian (Andrei Malyshko and Vladimir Sosyura), from Belarusian (Maxim Tank), from Lithuanian ( Salome Neris), Lyudas Gyra). In addition, his translations from Ossetian (Kosta Khetagurov), from Estonian (Johannes Barbaus) and from Serbo-Croatian (Vladimir Nazor) are also known. Many of them have been published.

In the late 70s, Kaisyn Kuliev wrote about Kedrin: "He did a lot for the brotherhood of cultures of peoples, for their mutual enrichment, as a translator."

... Kedrin rushed to the front from the very first days of the war, but high myopia kept him in the rear, where it was incredibly difficult for him both as a man and as a poet. Everyone was at the front, but he… However, foreseeing the course of events with the authenticity of a historian, Kedrin fought in the rear as well. The arsenal of his weapons was very diverse - a song and a fairy tale, a heroic epic and classical poetry. And in May 1943, having achieved his goal, he went to the North-Western Front to the Red Army newspaper "Falcon of the Motherland".

The pilots of the 6th Air Army kept Kedrin's poems from the front in their breast pockets, tablets and route maps. At the end of 1943 he was awarded the medal "For Military Merit".

Soon the front-line weekdays ended, and all the pre-war hardships returned to Kedrin, which he still patiently endured and once wrote in his diary: “How many Mondays in life and how few Sundays.”

... Usually I read poetry with a pencil in my hands, in my own way marking the verses I like as a whole and individual lines. I wouldn’t have enough pencil for a collection of Kedrin’s poems, and therefore, having thrown it away, I don’t know how many times I re-read the last of the poet’s published books in the hope of finding new previously unknown poems in it. But no less I rejoice at the old, well-known ones, reading which I feed my soul with the light of Kedrin's thoughts.

What an incredibly wide range of forms Kedrin worked in - from the quatrain:

You say our fire is out

You say that we have grown old with you,

Look how blue the sky is!

But it is much older than us.

To the huge poetic canvas "Rembrandt"!

And no matter what form he chooses, one cannot tear oneself away from his lines. How amazingly accurate his observations are:

Oblique ribs of the striped booth,

Official jumping bullfinch.

Kedrin notices every detail and writes it down with ease:

On an airy thin ladder

Dropped and hung

Above the window - bad weather messenger -

Parachutist spider.

Immediately crash into the memory of his comparison:

... the sky was cut backhand

Searchlights, like swords.

Or else:

Women are breathtakingly beautiful

Like roses soaked in alcohol.

They can be cited endlessly, because most of Kedrin's poems consist of such lines...

It was October, but it seemed to everyone March:

It snowed and melted, and fell first.

Like a fortune teller over a deck of cards,

History was mysteriously silent.

Somebody else, but Kedrin knew what the silence of history means. Interestingly, all of the above was written during the war years, when, despite the dangerous and exhausting work in a front-line newspaper, the poet's talent rose to a new, perhaps the greatest height in his life.

During the same period, he wrote the poem "Beauty", beginning with the words:

These proud foreheads of the Vinci Madonnas

I met more than once with Russian peasant women.

Who after Nekrasov could say that about Russian women?!

The level of Kedrin's creativity did not depend on the time, each of his poems, dated by any year of his life, is equally attractive to the reader, who expects a miracle from the author and is not disappointed in him.

And how major is the last poem of the poet "Invitation to the Cottage", from which it seems to breathe the freshness of the sea breeze:

It's been a wonderful rain today

Silver stud with a diamond cap.

I cannot but mention the special intonations of Kedrin's poems. Often his lines are sweeping, wide, folded, as it were, from two parts. To read them, you need to inhale the air twice. It seems that such a rhythm stretches the line, distances the words, dissolves them, like ice floes in a river in spring. In fact, the effect is the opposite: as you read, you move from word to word, like from one coal to another, more red-hot, the glow grows, and the line leaves a burn.

Probably, there is no poet who, after communicating with fellow writers, would not recall the brilliant lines of Dmitry Kedrin:

Poets have this custom -

Converging in a circle, spitting on each other.

I think he wrote them after another negative review of the manuscript of his book, or after the umpteenth time in a row with publishing clickers. Worried about the fact that the book was not published, Kedrin believed that “the beautiful is born more easily from encouragement than from scolding” and had no doubt that “the artist should not be pulled, but tasted by him.”

I confess that I adore Dmitry Kedrin so much that it costs me an extraordinary effort to interrupt the quotation of his lines. However, I’ll take another liberties by noting that Kedrin spoke better about himself and about his fate than anyone in more than six decades that have passed since his death:

Oh slow people

You are a little late.

Mentally, Kedrin simultaneously lived, as it were, in two dimensions - the present and the past, trying to compare them, to understand one through the other. I have no doubt that if he had not been a poet, he would have become an equally excellent historian. “History and poetry,” writes Svetlana Kedrina, “that was what always saved my father, gave a sense of life, victory over death, a certain degree of freedom.”

Kedrin knew how to travel in time against its flow, to be transported back for centuries, to guess the essence of events that have become history, to clearly represent the people who lived then, to show how modern “things of bygone days” are.

Readers of Kedrin walk with these people, touching the past of their people, reviving the memory of it, thinking about the glorious and tragic fates of their predecessors.

But it is impossible to penetrate into one or another distant era, as into space, without long and scrupulous preparation. Therefore, for example, while working on the historical poem "The Horse", Kedrin studied literature about Moscow and its architects, about building materials of that time and methods of masonry for several years, re-read many books about Ivan the Terrible, made extracts from Russian chronicles and other sources visited places associated with the events he was about to describe.

Of course, such works are utterly laborious, but despite this, Kedrin enthusiastically worked on them, and, interestingly, they all appeared in the form of large poetic forms. Among them, the brilliant drama in verse "Rembrandt" stands out, for which the author took about two years to prepare. Fortunately, this work was published in 1940 in the magazine "October" and a year later they became interested in the theatrical environment, including S. Mikhoels, but the war prevented the production. Subsequently, "Rembrandt" sounded on the radio, went on television, was staged more than once as a performance and even as an opera. I have no doubt that modern directors will still turn to Kedrin's masterpiece.

... In August 1945, Kedrin's ode, together with a group of writers, went on a business trip to Chisinau, which struck him with its beauty and reminded him of Dnepropetrovsk, youth, Ukraine. Upon his arrival home, he decided to seriously discuss with his wife the possibility of moving to Chisinau. Before leaving, Kedrin bought a large jug of honey at the bazaar, which one of his fellow travelers broke on the train. A simple woman riding on the next ledge said to Kedrin: “Well, dear man, there will be trouble. It’s bad if you break a jug of sweets, especially if it’s with honey.”

On September 15, 1945, some hefty fellows almost pushed Kedrin, who was returning from Moscow, under the train. It's good that people fought back. And three days later he did not return from Moscow. They found him early in the morning on September 19, 1945, not far from the railway embankment on a garbage heap in Veshnyaki. The examination established that the misfortune happened the day before, at about eleven o'clock in the evening. How the poet ended up in Veshnyaki, why he came to the Kazansky railway station, and not to Yaroslavsky, under what circumstances he died - remains a mystery. The last stanza of his poem "Capercaillie" comes to mind:

Maybe the day is also desired in happiness,

At the hour when I will sing, grief.

And death will strike me unexpectedly,

Like his shot - in the capercaillie.

... “At the end of the 70s,” recalls Kedrin’s daughter Svetlana Dmitrievna, “the Mytishchi newspaper Path to Victory received a letter from a former “camp” who wrote that he was in the camp with the poet Dmitry Kedrin, who died in the spring either 1946 or 1947. The new legend began to acquire details. Yes, I have thought about this a lot myself.

Firstly, in the morgue, mother was shown only a photograph by which she recognized her father. Secondly, neither she nor my brother and I saw dad dead. And only his comrades in the morgue saw him.

In my mother's notes, I recently read that the coffin was not opened at the cemetery.

Having learned about the letter of the former “camp resident”, my mother firmly told me: “Know, Svetlana, that your father’s grave is at the Vvedensky cemetery. Let your children, grandchildren and everyone who loves your father's poetry know this.

For me, it became law. I go alone or with children and clean the graves of my dear and close ones - mom, dad, brother Oleg. But sometimes I imagine a nameless grave somewhere in Siberia, over which tall grasses rise in summer, and cruel evil blizzards howl in winter, and goosebumps run down my skin.

Now that the crimes committed during the Stalinist era have been revealed, there is no doubt that the poet Dmitry Kedrin was a victim of a cult. After all, having arrived in Moscow in 1931, he did not want to hide and honestly wrote in his questionnaire that in 1929 he was imprisoned "for failure to report a well-known counter-revolutionary fact", which put himself at risk. To this was added his noble origin, and after the war - his refusal to work as a secret agent. The repressions of 1937 did not touch him, but even then he was on the black lists of V. Stavsky 2 ”.

... The above reflections of Svetlana Kedrina are taken from her book “To live in spite of everything”, in which she talks about the earthly path of her father. The first edition of this book was published in Moscow in 1996, in fact, it was carried out by a closing printing house, and therefore there was no need to talk about the culture of the publication. Also, there were only a few photographs in the book. That is why, almost ten years after its publication, I offered Svetlana Dmitrievna to prepare a second edition of this book and undertook to publish it in Dnepropetrovsk at my own expense.

The publication of book 3 was timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the birth of Dmitry Kedrin. Unfortunately, out of a hundred years, he lived a little more than a third, but by what he did during this time, he showed how much more he could have accomplished in Russian poetry. And still we will be grateful to heaven for the fact that this man walked the earth.

The book was illustrated with rare photographs, most of which were published for the first time. In addition, as a compiler, it seemed interesting to me to supplement the book with information about the poet's heirs, especially since all of them are creative personalities and talented in various ways.

I cannot but say a few words about the author of the book, the poet's daughter Svetlana Dmitrievna Kedrina, who, from my point of view, accomplished a filial and literary feat. She skillfully used archival materials, letters and notes of her father, his works, and most importantly, her memory, so that from all this mosaic a vivid and exciting picture of the poet's life was formed. I am sure that any father would be happy to know that his daughter will write about him so warmly and in detail.

Svetlana Kedrina is also a poet, a member of the Writers' Union of Russia. She has many beautiful poems, but I want to quote only one of her small white poems about her father:

In life

He didn't have

Roofs over your head.

After death - in the minds

300 year old oak

State protected.

If it

Protected people...

It remains to be added that the book "To live in spite of everything" was published at the end of 2006 in a thousand copies, and in 2008 - an additional circulation of 1200 copies, which were sent to all schools in the Dnepropetrovsk region. I was happy: now all my countrymen from childhood will know about Dmitry Kedrin something that will attract them even more strongly to his poetry, supplement and explain it.

Dmitry Kedrin is my Teacher, for over forty years now he has been giving me lessons in kindness, honesty, frankness and love. I never stop reading his poetry. Read for yourself and discover them for others.

Working on the book, I again touched the fate and poetry of Kedrin, met and became friends with the successors of his family.

I really hope that readers and admirers of the great Russian poet Dmitry Kedrin will gratefully accept this book, who stepped with us into the twenty-first century from the twentieth century, in which, in one of the most terrible years, in 1937, he courageously and, as always, great wrote:

Live in spite of everything! Live in spite of resentment

And fortunately, in spite of what runs from you!

Live as a dirty worm! Live as a beggar with a disability!

And yet, damn it, do not die, but live!

Bending yourself to pieces with an areal buffoon,

Rope dancer to break on weight -

And yet to catch up with unknown happiness

And take him by force, like a woman in the forest!

1GIHL - State publishing house of fiction.

2 Before the war, secretary of the Writers' Union.

3 Svetlana Kedrina. Live in spite of everything. / Compilation, foreword by A. Ratner.

Dnepropetrovsk: Monolith, 2006. -368 p., ill.

Alexander Ratner ,

especially for the almanac "45th parallel"

Dnepropetrovsk

January 2009

Illustrations:

photographs by Dmitry Kedrin of different years;

L.I. Kedrin and S.D. Kedrin, early 80s;

grave of D.B. Kedrin at the Vvedensky cemetery;
Alexander Ratner and Svetlana Kedrina, Moscow, 2007;

great-granddaughter of Dmitry Kedrin Daria, granddaughter Lisa, A. Ratner and grandson Dmitry, Moscow, 2008.

	Portal "Literature"
	Portal "Personalities"
	Dmitry Kedrin at Wikiquote
	Dmitry Kedrin at Wikimedia Commons
	Project "Russian history"

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Kedrin D. B. Brief biography. Kedrin Dmitry Borisovich. Dmitry Kedrin: biography and interesting facts from the life of Borisovich Kedrin biography

Best of the day

Youth years in Ukraine

In Moscow and at the front

Doom

Creation

Family

Music on poems by Kedrin

Compositions

Sources

Links

From the bibliography

Notes

Alexander Ratner ,

especially for the almanac "45th parallel"

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