Rock, Paper, Scissors: And Other Stories

by Maxim Osipov, Svetlana Alexievich (Preface by), Boris Dralyuk (Editor), Alex Fleming (Translator), Anne Marie Jackson (Translator)

Overview

The first English-language collection of a contemporary Russian master of the short story, recenly profiled in The New Yorker

Maxim Osipov, who lives and practices medicine in a town ninety miles outside Moscow, is one of Russia’s best contemporary writers. In the tradition of Anton Chekhov and William Carlos Williams, he draws on his experiences in medicine to write stories of great subtlety and striking insight. Osipov’s fiction presents a nuanced, collage-like portrait of life in provincial Russia—its tragedies, frustrations, and moments of humble beauty and inspiration. The twelve stories in this volume depict doctors, actors, screenwriters, teachers, entrepreneurs, local political bosses, and common criminals whose paths intersect in unpredictable yet entirely natural ways: in sickrooms, classrooms, administrative offices and on trains and in planes. Their encounters lead to disasters, major and minor epiphanies, and—on occasion—the promise of redemption.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681373324
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	04/09/2019
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Maxim Osipov (b. 1963) is a Russian writer and cardiologist. In the early 1990s he was a research fellow at the University of California, San Francisco, before returning to Moscow, where he continued to practice medicine and also founded a publishing house that specialized in medical, musical, and theological texts. In 2005, while working at a local hospital in Tarusa, a small town ninety miles from Moscow, Osipov established a charitable foundation to ensure the hospital’s survival. Since 2007, he has published short stories, novellas, essays, and plays, and has won a number of literary prizes for his fiction. He has published six collections of prose, and his plays have been staged all across Russia. Osipov’s writings have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He lived in Tarusa up until February 2022, when he moved to Germany.

Boris Dralyuk is the executive editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His recent translations include Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories and Mikhail Zoshchenko’s Sentimental Tales. He is the editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution and co-editor of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry and Lev Ozerov’s Portraits Without Frames (published by NYRB Classics).

Alex Fleming is a translator of Swedish and Russian literature and children’s fiction. Her previous translations include works by Therése Söderlind and Cilla Naumann, and in 2015 she was awarded the British Centre for Literary Translation’s Emerging Translator Mentorship for Russian. She is based in London.

Anne Marie Jackson has lived for extended periods in Russia and Moldova. She is a co-translator, with Robert Chandler and Rose France of Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me: The Best of Teffi, and with Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, and Irina Steinberg of Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea (both published by NYRB Classics). Her previous translations include works by Alexei Nikitin and Olga Slavnikova.

Svetlana Alexievich is a Belarusian journalist, writer, and historian. The daughter of two teachers, she studied journalism at the Belarusian State University in Minsk and went on to work as a teacher and newspaper journalist. She published her first book, The Unwomanly Face of War, an oral history of women’s experiences in World War II, in 1985, and since then has released five chronicles of Soviet and post-Soviet history, including Boys in Zinc (1991) and Voices from Chernobyl (1997). In 2015, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first time it had been given to a journalist.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents:
 
Preface: The Cry of the Domestic Fowl
 
Moscow-Petrozavodsk
 
The Gypsy
 
Rock, Paper, Scissors
 
Renaissance Man
 
In the Wave of the Sea
 
Polish Friend
 
The Mill
 
After Eternity
 
On the Banks of the Spree
 
Good People
 
Objects in Mirror

Editorial Reviews

★ 04/08/2019

Osipov makes his English-language debut with this masterful and sublime collection, largely set in rural Russian villages. In “Moscow-Petrozavodsk” a young doctor is taking the 14-hour trip from Moscow to Petrozavodsk for a medical conference. When Tolya, a fellow traveler, goes into alcohol withdrawal, the doctor, trying to be helpful, alerts the train crew that Tolya needs medical treatment. Instead, he unwittingly causes Tolya to be thrown off the train and beaten by police at the next stop. Indignant, the doctor pays a visit to Colonel Schatz, a local arbitrator of law and order, who promptly turns the doctor’s simple narrative of justice and injustice upside down. In “On the Banks of the Spree,” Betty is flying to Berlin from her home in Moscow to meet a half-sister for the first time, whose existence is one of several secrets her father, a retired KGB spy, has recently revealed. The title story, the stand-out of the collection, begins as a simple, pastoral tale as Ksenia Nikolayevna Knysh, head of the region’s legislative assembly, plans to build a new chapel in memory of her deceased daughter. At first, the story seems a simple sketch of a mid-level bureaucrat, but when an ethnic Tajik seasonal worker is accused of murder, themes of religious tension and gender injustice break the surface. This collection showcases Osipov’s talent in creating subtle, sophisticated character portraits that carry a good dose of suspense. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Nominated for the 2020 Read Russia Prize

“In these stories, the borders between hope, delusion and dishonesty are hazy and heavily trafficked ... Dr. Osipov is a master of dramatic irony, wringing bittersweet humor from what the reader sees but the protagonist cannot.” —Laura Kolbe, The Wall Street Journal

“Readers are reminded of Chekov repeatedly throughout the collection … This is subtle, honest and unaffected storytelling where the lives of normal people are picked up and examined closely — to remarkable effect.” —Martha Alexander, The Independent

"Osipov makes his English-language debut with this masterful and sublime collection, largely set in rural Russian villages ... This collection showcases Osipov’s talent in creating subtle, sophisticated character portraits that carry a good dose of suspense." —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“This short-story collection … feels like a journey back in time. Osipov, a practicing doctor, has been compared to Anton Chekhov, owing not only to their shared vocation but also to the Chekhovian way in which Osipov delves into the lives of ordinary people in dismal circumstances.” —Sophie Pinkham, Foreign Affairs

“Masterful and often startling stories, suffused with an irony that is as merciless as it is tender.” —Daniel Medin

“Maxim Osipov's stories cut me to the quick, because he does what true writers do: he tries to make sense of life with his own mind, puts his soul into the effort, and, most importantly, presents everything in his own words.” —Sergey Gandlevsky

“Osipov’s prose — remarkable, transparent, Russian, painful and tough, timely and timeless — is imbued with compassion. It may not always console, but it always gratifies.” —Lev Dodin

“Osipov writes not only laconically, but simply, plainly, without going into excessive details but ‘going into’ the essence of contemporary Russian life ... Irony, Robert Musil once noted in his diaries, combines enmity with compassion. And this is what we find in the work of Maxim Osipov.” —Alexander Livergrant, Novyi Mir

"Maxim Osipov’s stories are kaleidoscopic. [He] is continuing Russian literature’s great love story with medicine, a flame lit by writer-physicians Mikhail Bulgakov and Anton Chekhov." —Matthew Janney, The Calvert Journal

From the Publisher

★ 2019-02-04

Stories about the absurdity, corruption, and daily mundanity of modern Russian life.

In his native Russia, Osipov, in addition to being a writer, is a cardiologist, an activist, and the founder of a small publishing company. His first book to be published in the United States is a marvelous collection of short stories in which not very much happens. One story follows a doctor on one of many uneventful trips to the U.S., where he escorts patients, for reasons unspecified. He makes money this way. On his way back to Moscow, a customs official will ask, "What are you traveling with?" and he'll just say, " 'All kinds of crap.' They'll smile as best they can—one of ours, on you go." In another story, a geologist decides to join the priesthood despite the fact that "he didn't even have a decent beard." Even worse: "He couldn't sing for his life. And a priest had to sing well." Osipov clearly carries the weight of Chekhov's and Bulgakov's influence not only in his mix of professions, but also in his sense of humor—which is, to say the least, deadpan. Like Chekhov, too, many of Osipov's stories meander along without a clearly delineated plot or, in the end, a sense of resolution. He is clearly concerned with Russia's place in the modern world. Several stories, including the one about the airport-hopping doctor, comment on the way that Americans, at least superficially, seem to be driven by rules and regulations, a need for order. Back home, all those things have a way of going to hell. What matters to that customs official is not that the forms have been correctly filled in but that the doctor is "one of ours."

Remarkable stories, threaded through with a bleak humor, describe life in the provinces of a Russia attempting to contend with the modern world.

Kirkus Reviews