Konstantin Voskresenskiy

A Childhood at the Turning Point

Konstantin was born in 1985 in the Moscow suburbs, in an ordinary Soviet family. He was barely a year old when his father, Dmitry Voskresenskiy, was killed under murky circumstances on the Chinese border. The official cause of death was listed as illness. The truth turned out to be different — but proving it proved impossible. This early loss became the foundation of his character: a sense of the world's injustice, and at the same time, the ability to accept the world as it is.

His childhood was spent in Klimovsk, a small town outside Moscow, with Soviet housing blocks and courtyards where children spent dawn to dusk. He fell out of trees and broke his arm. Twice he nearly drowned — first in a swimming pool in Hungary, then on the Oka River, when at twelve he jumped from a metal raft into the water, unable to swim. He escaped from a summer camp through the forest at night, collected bottles, sawed a neighbour's tree branch for chocolate he never received, and tried busking on guitar in the Moscow metro.

The Engineer: Twelve Years in German and French Companies

After graduating from the Moscow State University of Technology, Voskresenskiy became an automation engineer. For over twelve years, he worked in large Western companies specialising in building automation systems, production line control, technical support, and training for engineering personnel.

As a student, mathematical analysis brought him to his knees; he passed physics on his third attempt; during a mechanics exam, a classmate secretly solved his problems across the aisle. But this very struggle shaped the kind of specialist he became: tenacious, resourceful, capable of finding a solution where the documentation runs out and the production line cannot be shut down for upgrades.

He headed an electronics bureau of forty people at twenty-five, when the average age of his staff was fifty-two. He visited the Hyundai factory in St. Petersburg and the Volkswagen plant in Kaluga, studied world-class manufacturing first-hand — and brought this knowledge to the page in his Technical Support Manager's Handbook and Handbook for Technical and Business Seminar Coaches.

The engineering career quietly turned into a managerial one. Since 2017 he has led customer service teams: first a client support group, then building support and training from scratch at Systeme Electric, and from 2023 heading the customer service department at IEK DIGITAL — ten direct reports, up to thirty in matrix. The figures behind this are plain: first response time cut from four days to two hours without a single new hire, customer satisfaction up from 65 to 90 per cent, complaints down tenfold. Seven people he trained moved up into other departments — he considers this the best result of all. In 2025 he joined the jury of the Crystal Headset industry award. Professional profile — work.konstantin-voskresenskiy.ru.

The Poet: An "Amateur Dilettante" Who Found His Place

He describes his own entry into literature as "amateur." An engineer turned to poetry not because it was expected, but because it became unavoidable. Corporate routine demanded an outlet. Poetry was that outlet.

His first collection — In Your Name — was a lyrical declaration of love: to life, to the people in it, to the world. There followed In Jest or In Earnest, The Dreamer, Personal-Public, and 37 Selected Poems of the Poet. During the COVID-19 pandemic he wrote The Pocket Vaccine Tale: a cheerful verse story about a hypochondriac who falls in love with a nurse. Not escapism — a refusal to lose one's humanity in troubled times.

He readily admits: language has never been his strongest suit. He got his grammar wrong in school. But this very vulnerability is what makes his writing real. It is written by someone who speaks because he has something to say.

The Writer: The Adventures of Kesha the Russian Boy

Voskresenskiy's major prose work is the autobiographical novella The Adventures of Kesha the Russian Boy — a coming-of-age story spanning childhood in Soviet-era suburban Moscow through to the first steps of adult life, set against the backdrop of a country breaking apart and rebuilding itself.

The name "Kesha" came about by accident. His mother named him Innokenty, but his young aunt insisted on a change, and then his grandmother objected in turn. Three names were drawn out of a hat and Konstantin won. The author admits that the first name would have suited him well enough, but the second one is "a good deal more normal."

The book is written without embellishment: parents who drink, a child left to himself, teachers who are unjust, the codes of honour of the courtyard. All of it is told in a voice that cannot be invented, the kind that comes only from having lived through it. And for all that the book is not a bleak one: it is funny, warm and at times piercing. Sergey Smetanin, a member of the Union of Russian Writers, wrote in the foreword that the author handles the material of his own life the way the classics did, Garin-Mikhailovsky and Gorky: without prettifying it, without excusing himself, and without passing judgement either.

The book has been translated into English with the help of Christopher Fawcett, a professional editor from London, and Lee Foden from Gloucestershire, a graduate of Moscow State University. Voskresenskiy describes the process as "rewriting it from scratch": Russian proverbs and cultural codes do not carry over directly, they have to be adapted rather than translated. The English edition is one of the two books of his that an English-speaking reader can pick up today.

In 2026 came A Confession for the Dearest One, written in five days and written straight into sound: two narrators, each reading the book in full. One summer day out of town, in which a man says aloud for the first time everything that has been building up for twenty years. The author makes no secret of how autobiographical it is, or of the fact that he did not write it for a reader.

The Researcher: Literary Scholarship and Non-Fiction

Voskresenskiy is a person of irrepressible curiosity. Intrigued by the structure of his own verse, he produced two volumes of literary analysis examining his poetic devices with academic rigour — a rare genre: a poet investigating his own text from the outside. He then published A Dispute on Literary Analysis: a dialogue-format book in which the earlier conclusions are questioned and rethought.

Home Education — Leaving School to Learn addresses homeschooling from a parent's perspective, written in accessible, unstuffy language. Children's Wisdom is a collection of funny and unexpectedly profound things children say, preserved for history.

The Pioneer: Digital Approaches and Audiobooks

He has conducted unique experiments in audiobook recording: releasing the same book simultaneously in an author's reading and a professional narrator's version; inviting multiple narrators to record a single work, so that different sections are delivered by different voices. The result is an ensemble effect — the book sounds like a conversation rather than a monologue.

His musical project He Is One in His Diversity, created with Petr Svetlichny, is a high-level piece of sound design applied to lyrical poetry. Music and word do not merely coexist here — they interact, building what Voskresenskiy calls "hypertext poetry."

A series of screenplays for stage and screen has been completed — The Adventures of Kesha the Russian Boy as a feature film and as a theatre production, the same story in English, The Pocket Vaccine Tale as an animated film and as a stage production, Children's Wisdom as a theatrical evening, and 37 Selected Poems of the Poet as a poetic journey through five elements. All seven texts are finished and awaiting a director.

The Person

Voskresenskiy lives in the Moscow region. His wife Maria is a teacher of Russian language and literature — a detail he recounts with gentle self-irony, given that Russian was the subject that caused him the most public humiliation at school: for his grammar, for his commas, for the infamous Pushkin put to him in class six lessons running. Fate has a sense of humour.

His daughter Anfisa was born on 9 August 2011. He was present at the birth — by choice — and the experience changed him. "Life is an extremely time-consuming phenomenon. And to be honest, it is almost impossible," he wrote afterwards. He dedicated a sonnet to Anfisa — one of the most personal pieces in his entire body of work.

He plays guitar — the same one he bought in 2000 with money earned working night shifts as a shop watchman. He takes photographs — in 2002 he won a regional contest, Labour Glory of the Moscow Region, with portraits of workers. He smoked rarely — "five or six times a year, no more" — and gave it up in May 2026.

This marriage is ending. The divorce is planned for 2027, and Voskresenskiy says so plainly, without accusations and without detail: twenty-one years were lived honestly, and the fact that two people stopped wanting the same thing makes neither of them guilty. He sees no reason to pretend that everything is as it was. Everything else has been said in A Confession for the Dearest One: the details are there, and he does not intend to repeat them anywhere else.

He is preparing for a second circle of life: for a new family and for a second child, which he wants without conditions. For now — for living alone, for work that will demand more, for new books and for whatever follows them. He puts the immediate task simply: to become a man one would not be ashamed to introduce.

This small ritual is a fine metaphor for everything he does as a writer. Don't rush. Take a breath. Find the first word. The rest will come.

"This is not a memoir. This is the very extraordinary life of an ordinary person from an ordinary family"

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