Russian poet Vladimir Nikolaevich Kosogov was born on September 1, 1986 in the north-west of the Kursk region, in the city of Zheleznogorsk.
In 2010, he graduated from the Faculty of Philology of the oldest educational institution in the city – Kursk State University (formerly Kursk Pedagogical Institute). After graduating from university, he began working as a journalist for the newspaper Argumenty i Fakty (Kursk). A few years later he took the position of editor-in-chief. In 2012, he was among the nominees for the regional journalistic award and received an award in the category “For the relevance of materials.” According to Kosogov, work in journalism does not push aside creativity, but rather goes in parallel, without interfering with it.
He is a member of the Moscow Writers’ Union and the Kursk Writers’ Union. Scholarship holder of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation.
Marital status: married, raising a son with his wife.
“Yellow Notebook”
He leads the literary workshop “Yellow Notebook” together with another Kursk poet Roma Rubanov at the Kursk Literary Museum. The goal of the workshop is to help young poets at the beginning of their creative journey. At meetings of the literary circle, poems are discussed and experience is passed on to a new generation of authors.
The name of the workshop is associated with the famous Russian poet Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet, who lived and wrote for a long time near Kursk, in the village of Vorobyovka. And he wrote down all his poems, thoughts and sketches in his famous yellow notebook. This is where the name of the studio came from.
According to Kosogov, during such meetings with writers, he often criticizes the work of the workshop participants. The position of the poet is that if a person studies and tries himself in poetry, in literature, in poetry, then he must understand what a huge burden of responsibility he takes on.
Kosogov is convinced that if the author wants to convey his poems to a large audience, then he must be prepared for the fact that an unprepared, non-literary audience may perceive them as models. According to him, if they are bad, then a person forms a very mediocre opinion about modern poetry in general. The motto of the “Yellow Notebook” reads: “The task of the community is to ensure that people who write in local almanacs, newspapers, magazines, passing on their poems, pass on the best. And we tried to write better.”
Creative cuisine
Like any already experienced author, Vladimir Kosogov has developed his own creative “kitchen”. For example, he writes quite rarely, and the idea of a poem can first ripen in his head for a long time before being born. Kosogov records his ideas on paper or digital media and then works with the material for a long time and painstakingly. He carries out a serious selection of his work: a maximum of five or six works per year usually become public knowledge. At the same time, much more poems may come from the pen, but, as the author-self-critic himself jokes, he “puts them in the cellar, like pickles, in case they come in handy in a bad year.” As a rule, Kosogov does not like his texts: he has to revise and rewrite them many times before they are published.
As for ways to get inspiration, Kosogov has this point of view: a writer does not necessarily have to be inspired by something, and this is the whole triumph and at the same time the pain of the poet. According to Kosogov, you can wake up, and some rhyme or ready-made line is already spinning on your tongue. Then you go somewhere about your business and suddenly you hear another one. So gradually a work grows in your head and on paper. And after that, the poet’s task is to decorate it, dress it up.
“The poet’s task is not only to create a text, but also to “dress up” it, to make it a poem. This is the work of an experienced writer, a poet who is aware of his creativity, appreciates it and at the same time wants to be heard and understood.”
Regarding the themes of his work, Kosogov usually answers that the basis of a good work is not a theme, but a motive. Not without a drop of poetic magic, which the author himself calls “a sharp stream of smoke that hurts the eyes.”
However, any poet has a favorite so-called poetic habitat. According to Vladimir Kosogov, this is a retrospective of the past. However, the poet believes that this period of his work has already exhausted itself and it is time to look to the future and stop looking back.