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Rock, Paper, Scissors: And Other Stories

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The first English-language collection of a contemporary Russian master of the short story.

Maxim Osipov, who lives and practices medicine in a town ninety miles outside Moscow, is one of Russia's best-regarded writers. In the tradition of Anton Chekhov and William Carlos Williams, he draws on his experiences in medicine to craft stories of great subtlety and striking insight. Rich in compassion but devoid of cheap sentiment, Osipov's fiction presents a nuanced, collage-like portrait of life in provincial Russia—its tragedies, its infinite frustrations, and its moments of humble beauty and inspiration. The twelve stories in this volume depict doctors, actors and actresses, screenwriters, teachers, entrepreneurs, local political bosses, and common criminals, whose paths intersect in unpredictable yet entirely natural ways: in sickrooms, classrooms, administrative offices, on trains, and in the air. Their encounters lead to disasters, major and minor epiphanies, and—on occasion—the promise of redemption. "Life is scary, whether you're in Moscow, St. Petersburg, or the provinces," Osipov's narrator tells us in "The Cry of the Domestic Fowl," which opens the collection. And yet, he concludes, "[t]he world doesn't break, no matter what you throw at it. That's just how it's built."

The cry of the domestic fowl : in lieu of a foreword
Moscow-Petrozavodsk
The gypsy
Rock, paper, scissors
Renaissance man
The waves of the sea
Polish friend
The mill
After eternity : the notes of a literary director
On the banks of the spree
Good people
Objects in mirror

305 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2009

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About the author

Maxim Osipov

23 books63 followers
Maxim Osipov 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 five 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 left Russia and settled in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

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Displaying 1 - 30 of 73 reviews
Profile Image for Vit Babenco.
1,717 reviews5,356 followers
December 24, 2019
Towns, cities, countries, the entire world and the living of the planet dwellers: rare joys and frequent sorrows, squandered potentials and frittered away lives, luck and misery, knowledge and ignorance, hollowness of existence.
Why don’t they go to Norway?
“Fjords, the water’s so still, so smooth…” He strokes the piano. Maybe a white one would have been nicer. White, like Lora’s skin. Or maybe red, like her hair? He strokes the piano, strokes Lora. He loves smooth surfaces.
It’s a fine piano, says Lora, a very fine piano. The creative type is forced to settle for a less luxurious instrument. What’s there to say? All he can do is shrug. Lora, apparently, considers it unfair that the creative type lacks something he possesses. The piano is just an object – one shouldn’t personify objects. Fortunately, she needs no instrument. She herself is a marvelous instrument.

The stories are dark and merciless and often they are permeated with the blackish sarcasm. But Maxim Osipov is always psychologically profound and precise in details and observations.
Time of change is a roiling time and high tide leaves plenty of garbage on the beach afterward.
Everyone fears death, just as they fear misfortune, yet death is inescapable, which means it is real. And that we did not invent it. At this very moment Ruhshona begins to see death as the most important thing that can exist within a person. She views those who don’t carry death within themselves – who don’t live by it – as empty, like wrapping paper, like candy wrappers. Hollow, soulless people. She can pick them out at a glance.
The short-lived enthusiasm brought on by the changes passes Ruhshona by: she can see that these changes are spiritually unsustainable, and that everyone is now ruled by hollow men, by candy wrappers. A giant chocolate bar has appeared on the facade of the capital’s most important library: a sweet treat a day helps you work, rest, and play. These chocolate bars and their giant posters are the main byproduct of these hollow men and the way they run the country.

History is generous when it comes to bitterness…
But then day will come, and the birds will still be there – fowls of the air, fowls domestic, wild, all of them. The world doesn’t break, no matter what you throw at it. That’s just how it’s built.

Time never stops and the planet keeps moving through the endless space.
Profile Image for Janet.
Author 24 books88.9k followers
February 25, 2021
This short story collection by contemporary Russian author Maxim Osipov, a doctor by trade, reminds me very much of Chekhov, not because of his medical background, but because of his storytelling style. Perhaps even more than Chekhov, Osipov allows his stories to 'collect' or build, slowly and obliquely--becoming a layered palimpsest of anecdotes and characters, until the light goes on inside the reader, and you realize you've just been given, not a linear 'story', but a piece of life. Specifically, Russian life. Post-Soviet life, sometimes located in Moscow but most often in the provinces.

Many of his characters are doctors, but Osipov sees them as very human: petty or hopeful or shirking responsibility, as much as any other fallible human being. Here is the protagonist of "The Gypsy"--who bolsters his income by escorting sick people to treatment in the West, flying to and from Russia in a weekend, never leaving the airports:

"He should probably get up and check on the patient. Maybe it can wait. Not that he's lazy--it's just professional immobility, which he had always despised in ICU docs."

"This strange work also affords opportunities for little scams. For example, you can pretend you're just another passenger, minding your own business. Oh, a fellow passenger isn't feeling well? Well, here you are, a Russian doctor, with medicine and everything. A miracle! Stewardesses give such doctors champagne, do other little favors, help any way they can."

But the difficulty of the new world also results in rampant greed affecting the lives of town such as that in "The Mill" where disaster strikes when a town's single industry, its mill, is wrecked by a businessman (read thug), when he is forced to sell it due to bad business practice, and the rippling effects of that terrible act.

It's also the subject of the title story "Rock, Paper, Scissors," and the greed of its antihero, Ksenia Nikolayevna Knysh in who works to pull all the strings of her provincial town into her own hands. The story centers around her trying to grab the land of the town intellectual, a teacher who (coincidentally) lives next to her, with the ostensible story that she wants to build a church on it, with half an idea that it will curry favor with the priests and perhaps God himself. The story is alternately told between their two points of view.

The teacher writes about his disappointment with his increasingly uninterested students and his unrequited love for Ksenia's daughter, a former student, who left for the city with unfortunate consequences. These stories are all about today's Russia, about the ties of long acquaintanceship and community, and the avarice which disrupts the social fabric. Ksenia rips off her temporary Tajik workers--working them the 'provisional' three months and then firing them before they're allowed to become permanent, and pocketing their wages--but then becomes entranced by the Tajik cook she employs in her restaurant, who exemplifies Islam so purely that for a moment, Ksenia embraces that faith--until her usual self-serving and greed begins to creep back again.

These are Osipov's characters: teachers, doctors, bureaucrats worthy of Bulgakov (another doctor). A literary director of a theater company in a town deep inside the Arctic Circle. The security guard for an oligarch who shoots crows from the windows of skyscrapers. Children of hopeless alcoholics, former KGB agents, old people in need of treatment, women who find true love and die in childbirth, provincial bigwigs working the system, ordinary people bewildered at the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rapacity of the new order, and victim of their own bodily degeneration. In other words, Russia, with all its compassion and confusion and stoicism and strangeness.

Having finished, I just want to start this book over again.

Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich (Secondhand Time) wrote the forward to this book--nice and highly appropriate--stylistic overtones for sure.
Profile Image for Nick Grammos.
262 reviews142 followers
January 24, 2025
Osipov stories could only exist in Russia. There train journeys offer an extensive view of the fabric of Russian life. There's no such thing as just a train journey, you go to meet your fate or your fate follows you. When I recently read Vasilly Grossman's Everything Flows it too describes a long journey and I wondered if I was reading Osipov. Or that Grossman influenced Osipov.

The short story in the hands of some can feel like a saga, a whole town, a whole region, a whole country feels like its part of it.

Worth reading.
Profile Image for Tsung.
300 reviews72 followers
September 21, 2019
Chekov?  Not quite.  I was drawn to this by the multiple comparisons to Chekov and a positive review in the local papers.

Like Chekov, Osipov is a sharp observer of life. He pulls no punches in his storytelling.  It is direct, honest and brutal.  While his writing flows well for each part of the story, there is little to hold everything together.  Many of the characters get brushed aside after getting familiar with them. Ultimately I do not remember anything at the end of each story because it is so disconnected.
Profile Image for Luís Queijo.
314 reviews24 followers
March 18, 2024
Contos sobre a vida quotidiana na Rússia. Sendo, Osipov, considerado um excelente contista, frequentemente, comparado com Chekhov, as suas características mais notórias são a sua perspicácia e sagacidade na observação e descrição de vidas e pessoas comuns. Ainda assim, e para mim, os seus contos são “mornos” raiando o aborrecidos. Talvez porque não me identifique muito com o “modus vivendi” eslavo ou porque seja maçarico na literatura dessas paragens, este livro acabou por me desiludir face à expectativa que tinha por tudo que tinha lido acerca do autor.
Lê-se, mas não passa disso.
Profile Image for E.P..
Author 23 books115 followers
July 11, 2019
In "Rock, Paper, Scissors," we meet a new Russia: one that stands with one foot in the recent Soviet past, one foot in the more distant past of Pushkin and Lermontov, and, well, a third foot in the Millennial post-Soviet present. And maybe a fourth foot in the West.

Like Chekhov (and Bulgakov), Maxim Osipov is a doctor by training and trade, and there's definitely more than a hint of Chekhov in these stories. They mainly feature people of the intelligentsia class: doctors, theater directors, and the like. Although several of the stories are set in or around hospitals, these are not primarily medical tales, but tales of small-town Russian life before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. For the older characters, the USSR is a matter of ambivalent nostalgia; for the younger ones, it's a story told by their parents and grandparents. The Soviet Union, everyone agrees, had its flaws, but the current system does too. Several of the characters believe that things will be much better in the West--but those that actually go to Germany or the US are underwhelmed by it. Religiosity in this new Russia is everywhere, but actual faith seems distinctly lacking.

The writing is elegant and slightly spare in that Chekhovian style, and the translations do it justice. The book is well-edited (not a given with these publications of contemporary Russian literature) and has a number of useful footnotes explaining the Russian cultural references that the characters keep making.

The tone of the stories, as is often the case with Russian literature, is elegiac and slightly melancholy, with that undercurrent of brutality that so much contemporary Russian literature possesses. Indeed, American readers may be taken aback by the frank discussions of things such as abortion, sexual assault, random shooting, and suicide, all of which are described in matter-of-fact, non-judgmental tones.

If you haven't read any contemporary Russian literature, or any Russian literature at all, "Rock, Paper, Scissors" may leave you a little confounded, but that would be the case for almost any work of Russian literature you pick up, and this one is easier reading than most, so it's a good place to start. If you're a long-time aficionado of Russian literature, "Rock, Paper, Scissors," with its contemporary subject matter and clear links to its classical predecessors, will be a welcome addition to your library.
Profile Image for Heronimo Gieronymus.
489 reviews141 followers
May 28, 2019
A great many people in North America no doubt came to be familiar with Maxim Osipov by way of Joshua Yaffa’s profile of the cardiologist and author earlier this month in the NEW YORKER. Such readers were introduced to a man who did not start writing seriously until he was already in his forties and who has continued to practice medicine in a part time capacity despite his growing literary fame. Osipov grew up disillusioned in the Soviet Union, witnessed its collapse as a young man, was a fellow at the University of California (San Francisco) in the early 90s, and subsequently returned to Moscow, where he practiced as a cardiologist and founded a publishing house specializing in texts focusing on medicine, music, and theology (all three domains to one extent or another central to his subsequent plays and stories). Osipov eventually moved to Tarusa, a town 101 kilometers from Moscow where he spent summers as a child (a town where many dissidents found themselves during the Soviet years). In Tarusa, Osipov triumphed over organizational mismanagement and the lethargy of the status quo, managing to establish a charitable foundation ensuring the continuing tenability of the local hospital. By virtue of commitment to his original vocation, Osipov became something like an unwitting humanitarian. If his transition from provincial doctor to literary eminence brings to mind Anton Chekhov—and how can it not?—Osipov balks at the comparison, seeing it as lazy type-casting. Though ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS AND OTHER STORIES does present us with a literary approach steeped in a kind of classicism, redolent of the 19th century, there can be no denying that Osipov’s work seems far more personal than Chekhov’s ever did, not only because much of the material is carried over from the author’s personal experiences, the majority of the stories in some way involving medical professionals, but because of a persistent focus on the difficulty of adequately relating to our fellows, a concern that would seem to be central to Osipov’s own life. In the aforementioned NEW YORKER article, Osipov speaks of a “certain understanding, a certain intensity of relations—this is what defines life in Tarusa.” His fiction is very much about seeking understanding and living through intensities of relations in all their dynamism and scope. A doctor is obligated to think like this. A doctor must sympathize with and provide care for people who very often maximally test the doctor’s patience, tax the doctor’s capacity for empathy. This is a fiction which strives to understand and care for people without pulling the wool over its own eyes, without relying on the support of illusions. In a very brief preface to the volume under consideration, oral historian and Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich praises Ospiov’a stories in the following terms: “The whole time they leave you thinking how difficult it is to love humanity—wonderful, repulsive, and terrifying as it is—but in order to stay human, that’s exactly what you must do: You must love man. Your soul is restless—it is thinking. To inspire such thoughts—that’s something that only true literature can do.” Make no mistake: this mandate to love your fellows is not properly speaking “humanism,” because it is not abstract, it is not about humankind in aggregate, but about individual persons, the Other at hand. When we speak of “humanism” we implicitly speak about Enlightenment values, the supplanting of God by Man, and as such invoke a legacy of hubristic misadventure and apocalyptic arrogance. To love men and women (or any human being), despite their sins and individual liabilities, is not to cosign the whole of the ignoble human experiment, nor is it to absolve those individuals themselves from the necessity of facing the consequences of their own actions. Numerous commentators reflect on the role irony plays in Osipov’s writing (including both Daniel Medin and Alexander Livergrant by way of blurbs on the back of this New York Review Books edition of the collection under consideration), and I think that this irony is very much about situating our humanity—the humanity both of physician and of patient—in terms of our universal folly and none the less doubling-down on love and compassion. There is a warmth here brought to bear in cataloguing our helpless wretchedness. All of this is immediately evident in the collection’s first piece, “The Cry of the Domestic Fowl,” a brief story that the author himself says is intended to articulate all that he loves about Tarusa. The opening paragraph terminates in the following sentence: “That the locals are pitiful is the most flattering thing one can say about them.” To go on to read Osipov is to discover retrospectively how tinged with unusual kindness is that apparently bitter statement. Indeed, shortly thereafter: “We’re compelled, clearly, to love not only those we are close to—our fellow domestic birds—but our wider surroundings, too: the people and the place. And to do this one must notice, recall, invent.” This turns out to be an uncommonly blunt articulation of an author’s modus operandi. Notice, recall, invent. Love. We are introduced to the hospital and its denizens, the good-natured grannies (happy to be so designated), the police and the doctors in their uniforms, unfortunates imperilled by their sundry mischiefs. “Here nobody has any secrets. Just like in heaven.” Your community is not and cannot be any other community than the one that it is. You face your community on its own terms, there is no other way. The chocie would seem to be between either affirmation or an infirmity of spirit. “The world doesn’t break, no matter what you throw at it. That’s just how it’s built.” If all you see is the ugliness, the deficiency, and that which is pitiful, you fail to understand, for to understand is to go deeper, to listen and reveal. Recall Jean Renoir’s pointed aphorism from LA RÈGLE DU JEU: “everybody has their reasons.” We can handicap ourselves when we are too quick to judgment, presuming to know things we cannot possibly know, the subject of the wonderful (deeply ironic) story “Moscow-Petrozavodsk.” A number of the stories in ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS—such as “The Gypsy,” “After Eternity: The Notes of a Literary Director,” and “On the Banks of the Spree”— imagine previously undisclosed private histories, hidden lives revelations concerning which produce new, bracing strata of clarity. Imagination can be used to speculate on the forces that may have brought people to where they are in life, rendering their behaviour not only intelligible but profoundly meaningful. We can use imagination to give people the benefit of the doubt, to enrich ourselves in so doing. To elevate such practices to the level of literary endeavour, even to the level of medical practice, is to situate them in a privileged realm. From “The Gypsy,” a story born of Osipov’s personal experiences transporting patients overseas for medical treatment: “He thinks: I’m engaged in a meaningless activity, while eternity exists—father was right—eternity exists, and the only things that count are those that are projected into eternity, that occupy some part of it. Providing medical treatment to people—no matter which people—is an act projected into eternity, even though his patients don’t live forever, and sometimes not for very long at all.” Medicine and literature can be seen as a reckoning with our lived reality in dialogue with eternity. Later, in the story from which the collection takes its title: “The river, the sky, the sun: these will remain, but all the rest will pass, ground down in the millstones of time—this is what the priest seems to be thinking.” A doctor tends to the living and the dying, is in fact constantly confronted with mortality and the decrepitude of the body, but this projecting into eternity, this mindfulness of impossible scale, elevates the practice, provides a condition for labour to become worship. Osipov thinks his longer short stories are his strongest works, and the title piece is perhaps the perfect example of one such story. Yaffa’s NEW YORKER pieces tells us that the story began as an attempt to write about the kind of person (and one person in particular) he had trouble with in Tarusa. It appears there was a conservative woman in town, owner of a pelmennaya (dumpling restaurant), who had been resistant to his initiatives at the hospital, siding with the entrenched municipal authorities. If Osipov found an adversary in this woman, what he set out to do was give her the benefit of the doubt, to make her not only intelligible but sympathetic. In the story she becomes Ksenia Nikolayevna Knysh, a woman who has lost a daughter, fears interlopers, resents the airs of the so-called intelligentsia, clasps to the status quo, and wields considerable authority. “Once there had been Socialism, and Ksenia had done her duty, believing and not believing, like everybody else. She had her country; she had her daughter. They had ideals, and things to respect and fear. Then Socialism was no more; the country fell apart; new standards emerged.” It is not that Ksenia is ideological but rather that she would prefer not to go against the tide. The story imagines a context in which she not only goes against the tide but does so righteously, forming a bond with her employee, Ruhshona/Roxana, a Muslim Tajik woman named after the wife of Alexander the Great, who has killed an important local political figure after the man has attempted to take liberties with her. It has to be considered another triumph of irony that this manifestation of righteous female solidarity, with its profoundly destabilizing consequences, takes place on International Women’s Day, a celebration to which everybody else in the community pays only cursory lip service. Not only is “Rock, Paper, Scissors” a powerful story, perhaps even incendiary in Puntin’s Russia, it testifies to the intellectual and spiritual generosity of its author, even if many of its truths are unpleasant ones. Unpretty truth and unconditional reverence. Again and again, these are the tools Maxim Osipov deploys to do right by his community, his nation, the world, and eternity. Nothing grim here is bitter. When the better of his characters, those who most resemble their author, become bitter or cantankerous, we can be sure that something is forthcoming, some event or revelation, that will shake them out of it. It has been said that an omniscient person would never be able to judge anybody. Yes, everybody has their reasons. It can be far too easy to forget this as we go about our day, beset by distractions, indignities, and frustrations. It can be nearly impossible sometimes to accord the stranger before our eyes all the joys and tragedies that have made that person's life uniquely theirs. Perhaps I cannot really know you. But I can strive to concede to you your magnitude.
Profile Image for Chr*s Browning.
348 reviews14 followers
April 8, 2019
April 2019 NYRB Book Club Selection
Each story begins in one place with one narrator and often ends in another place with another, snowballing through characters and anecdotes seemingly without focus until they crystallize into single beautiful endings. Not all are as good as each other, but the first five at least are perfect, and "The Waves of the Sea" is the first written work that's made me cry this year. There are few better arguments for taking a chance on works in translation than this collection.
Profile Image for Stuart.
Author 6 books187 followers
Read
November 12, 2019
When I went to my father's town in Ukraine last year, I got the sense that time had stood still for 100 years. Apparently the same is, more or less, true in Russia. These tales of contemporary provincial Russia suggest that Chekhov never died and Putin has pushed Russia back to about 1900. Maybe MRADHA, Make Russia Awful, Desperate and Hopeless Again, should be Putin's campaign slogan. Then again it could have been Stalin's and Czar Nicholas' motto, too. Osipov's stories are blunt but effective.
Profile Image for Jay Gertzman.
94 reviews14 followers
June 14, 2019
What I found exceptional in these stories was the observations, delivered off-handedly by characters in spur-of-the-moment situations that provide rich context. The stories are written in 3rd person point of view, but Osipov—or in Boris Dralyuk’s, Alex Fleming's, and Anne Marie Jackson's translations—the translators, entrance with the idiom in which each protagonist thinks. They make each experience an irresistible conversation between characters and reader.

The observations carry the story in all its complexity. They also resonate to deepen the work. Osipov certainly does that with his title. “Rock, Paper, Scissors” is whimsical, indistinct, with many possibilities each time the game is played. Winning is always in one’s mind—or why play at all? Osipov makes you need to play.

“The Gypsy,” a blind, legless woman, has just made an arduous trip to live out her last days in comfort in America. The Russian doctor who accompanied her remarks that her son, like most Americans, looks pale and distracted. His parents will not live with him and his family, its not done in America: they will be put in ”a good home… It’s all planned out.” The story has brief only mention of the Gypsy woman, during a brief visit to the doctor’s clinic. She is alone, ill, unwanted, and of course distrusted. She will not go to a hospital, she only wants some of the “good pills.” She’s happy. He quickly drains her lungs. She offers to read his fortune. At the end of the piece, the doctor thinks with resigned but still-alive grief of his losing the father who loved and nurtured him. And he finds himself happy. Talk about saying a lot in a little space.

In “Renaissance Man,” observations include loving Russia is like Job loving God; a snotty professor of music being promised “we’ve broken harder men than you”; Moscow being invaded by crows; and the random irritation of a man at a woman blowing a bubble at her lover. It turns the narrative in a shocking direction.

“Good People” is an observation of Bella, an aging actress who can no longer remember accurately, but who has all she needs. No longer performing, she can still read stories to children, speaking from her diaphragm as she was taught. She lives in a room in a communal apartment, and spends her time waiting for her reading assignment (and for her husband to return, which probably will never happen). As the story ends, she looks up to the “happy” clouds, so happy they are about to burst. She doesn’t mind; rain is good for the hair.
Profile Image for Jim.
2,350 reviews775 followers
January 7, 2024
One usually thinks of Russian literature as fairly heavy slogging, but Maxim Osipov's Rock, Paper, Scissors: And Other Stories is at the same time light and compassionate toward its characters. One is reminded of Anton Chekhov, like Osipov a physician (Osipov is a cardiologist).

I particularly enjoyed the longer pieces, including the title story, "Rock, Paper, Scissors," about a Muslim Tadzhik woman who kills the official who is trying to rape her; "Renaissance Man," about an oligarch who has somehow diverged in strange ways from his fellow man; and "After Eternity: Notes of a Literary Director," about a man involved in running a theater in a small town in the northern Urals.

I look forward to reading more books by this excellent author.
644 reviews32 followers
September 6, 2021
I read these stories on two different occasions. My first review is below, and my second follows.

FIRST REVIEW These are wonderful stories. They have humor, irony, bitterness, a cynical eye and a loving eye. They immerse the reader in the present-day world of provincial Russia and sometimes Moscow and environs. The narrators (often a character) are quirky and fascinated by their own stories. The world described is down-to-earth with focused detail and a kind of observation (e.g., of a train conductor) that is scrumptious, delightful, and delighted in. At the same time, the stories are always about serious events -- from the arrests of two murderers to the life of a nouveau riche entrepreneur to the difficulties and loyalties of provincial theater, to the life of a priest, to the viciousness of gossip, and the cruelty of self-interested persons to the relatively innocent. As a friend said, they have a "Russian" combination of hope and cynicism, wariness and innocence. Whether this is "Russian" or not, I will say they share with other Russian fiction I love a sense of place and of the reality of things -- whether a train compartment or a restaurant.

I'd say that Tolstoy certainly has this love of place and of the side-story that is dwelt on with a kind of love that indicates to the reader that the event is worthy. I think, for example, of the time when Andrei's footman in War and Peace spontaneously calls his attention to the spring light, or how Dostoyevsky creates the world of the Brothers K complete with overgrown gardens and meals at the abbot's table. But most of all I was reminded of the exuberant stories of Nicholas Leskov -- the icon painters, the dairy men, the small towns and merchants, etc.

I guess I am willing to say that these stories lie within the tradition of Russian literature. And of course it is a great, great honor to have Svetlana Alexievich write a preface! If she likes these, what's not to like!!!

SECOND REVIEW I still love these stories and read a few of them more than once on this go-round. I found that I appreciated some of the stories more the second time. These include "After Eternity," "Renaissance Man," and "The Waves of the Sea." These three are relatively quiet stories. Other stories continued to be less than quiet -- "The Gypsy," "Rock, Paper, Scissors," and "Moscow-Petrozavodsk." The last of these I had read as a rollicking story, but now I see how the young doctor protagonist comes to learn something about himself amidst the animated action. I thought the weakest stories were "The Polish Friend," "The Mill," and "On the Banks of the Spree." These were less successful in my view because I thought the author was venturing too directly into social commentary, but mainly because I thought that he was writing from an "idea" rather than from the posture of a "story teller."

Russian writing has such a pull. It is populated with persons whose experiences have left them in an unstable world, with few attachments, with few cherished people. We both have fellow feeling for them and admire their pure spunk and noisiness. And the landscape is so vast and both harsh and lovely in turns. It is perhaps this landscape that draws me in as it duplicates in ways the vast landscape of my own country. And my own people have this combination of roughness and spunk and often wonderful kindness and cheer.
Profile Image for Tom.
1,132 reviews
May 15, 2019
Because Osipov is a small-town practicing physician who uses physician narrators or characters with close connections to a physician, comparisons to Checkhov are probably inevitable (and accurate). Take Checkhov's characters, transplant them to present-day Russia (Osipov was born in 1963), little has changed but the technology and hovering presence of a corrupt, citizen-hostile government. Osipov can be funny, too, and Alex Fleming's translation of "On the Banks of the Spree" captures the flow of conversation idiomatic to U.S. ears. I don't know if the Russian version follows the same rhythmic patterns, but whatever the original cadence, humor depends a lot on pacing and timing (same as with horror stories), which seems more innate knack than a skill that can be honed very much. (Think of all the unfunny people you know.) So, a long hats off to Fleming for his fine translation work, which is equalled by contributions from Boris Dralyuk and Anne Marie Jackson. Favorite stories: "Moscow-Petrozavodsk," "The Gypsy," and "After Eternity." "After Eternity" purports to be the notebooks of a former theater worker, left behind in the offices of the doctor who presents these notebooks to us after an introduction of himself, and how he came upon the manuscript. The narrator is, I suspect, the type of physician Osipov can't stand. Here's the narrator on how much he loathes patients who hope they can get his signature for disability benefits: "[Those patients] I refuse ruthlessly: show any sign of yielding and you'll get a stack of requests under the door. Medicine is serious work; we aren't in the hospitality trade, thank you very much. . . " And later, on a different matter: "[I]f one begins hospitalizing patients not for medical reasons but on humanitarian grounds, on the grounds of personal sympathy, what would that lead to?"
Profile Image for Bettie.
9,981 reviews6 followers
maybe
June 16, 2019

Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Stories by Maxim Osipov review – bleakly comic Russian tales These extraordinary short stories of provincial life shine with a dark Chekhovian comedy.
Born in 1963, Maxim Osipov has been publishing his clear-eyed tales of life in contemporary Russia since 2007. His widely admired stories have won several prizes there and this extraordinary collection is his first to be translated into English. In the title story, a provincial teacher tries to make sense of his past. Many of the boys he once taught are now dead (“drugs, war, ‘business’ …”), and the people who control the town are cruel, dishonest, paranoid; nostalgic for old Soviet certainties. The story’s small town is a microcosm of modern Russia, where corruption permeates almost every thread of the social fabric and power is often synonymous with theft.
Profile Image for James Murphy.
982 reviews15 followers
December 18, 2019
I did not care for this. I found the stories uniformly boring and the characters uninteresting. These 2 qualities made the collection an agonizing read.
Profile Image for Emily.
5 reviews
April 11, 2020
Osipov somehow conveys extreme emotion while being entirely dispassionate; the observations in these short stories have a timeless quality about them that belie how recently the stories were published. It becomes clear throughout the book that the author was a practicing doctor (is he still?) but the collection does not read as an ego trip of Osipov's nor as a collection of medical dramas. Indeed, medicine is only sometimes woven in as small, non-fundamental details.
Profile Image for Michael.
59 reviews2 followers
June 26, 2019
The best lens into the contemporary Russian experience (non-fiction included) I've read in a long time. Osipov's stories offer insightful portraits of 21st-century Russians, with maybe a bit too much focus on artists/intellectuals (or those who fancy themselves as such). Standout stories: Rock, Paper, Scissors; After Eternity; Moscow-Petrozavodsk.
Profile Image for Daniela D.
137 reviews7 followers
August 27, 2021
I really enjoyed reading these short stories, there were so many identifiable (for me) elements from Eastern/Russian life. I thought the doc character in almost every story, not always a main one, was a very clever use of the author's background.
Profile Image for Brett Glasscock.
276 reviews12 followers
June 7, 2023
"But then the day will come, and the birds will still be there--fowls of the air, fowls domestic, wild, all of them."

maxim osipov is the master of the character study short story. some of the stories here fall flat, but the ones that work absolutely sing.
Profile Image for Morgan.
72 reviews1 follower
February 6, 2024
3.5.

I enjoyed After Eternity, The Waves of the sea, Renaissance Man and Rock, Paper, Scissors a good amount. But found the other 8 stories somewhat dull; perhaps the shared themes of the stories got a bit repetitive for me. Anyway good prose, sometimes pretty funny and there weren’t any stories below average.
Profile Image for Kimberly Hughes.
101 reviews3 followers
April 30, 2019
This is a book of short scenes and description of characters and doesn't feel like stories at all. I don't think I would enjoy that and wouldn't have read it if I had know just that part, but it is much worse than that sounds because the characters are horrible, not as in poorly written, but as in detestable. The are mostly apathetic except when it comes to subtle racism, being greedy or otherwise immoral, or being completely self serving. Reading the whole thing left not just a bad taste in my mouth but bad feelings overall.



Profile Image for Sistermagpie.
775 reviews7 followers
October 15, 2019
It's hard to describe this collection of short stories except to say maybe that it's very Russian. That is, it's about Russian people in Russia now, with all the idiosyncrasies and flaws of character and society that one can imagine from that. It made me laugh plenty of times, and usually ended without a real note of finality--like Chekhov. The author (also like Chekhov) is a doctor as well as an author so a lot of the stories are drawn from his own work.
Profile Image for Nandan.
229 reviews
October 13, 2019
Chekhovian in profession (practicing doctor) and style (short-stories), Osipov writes about the changed post-Soviet Russia: the hopes and the corruption, the freedoms and the new methods of surveillance, resurgence of religious sentiment and influx of cheap labor from erstwhile Soviet states.
Profile Image for Janine.
1,358 reviews6 followers
November 21, 2019
Delightful collection of short stories about modern Russians. Author poses questions about reality and the fictions of life we create. Enjoyed the author’s great sense of irony and humor.
Profile Image for Balin Davenport.
15 reviews
January 13, 2022
Osipov is tender, but uncompromising in these short stories. An extraordinary glimpse into post soviet Russian life, while exploring the importance of moral behaviour.
Profile Image for Barbara.
44 reviews4 followers
October 1, 2019
I had the great pleasure of attending a bilingual reading with Maxim Osipov reading selections from this book. In one of the Q&A sessions, he was asked how he felt about being compared to Chekhov. After a slight pause and with a slight smile, he replied, "Well, it's somewhat annoying." After Eternity, On the Banks of the Spree, and The Waves of the Sea are stand outs, but I found something touching in all of the stories. I am thankful to NYRB for once again introducing me to an author that would otherwise be unknown to me.
Profile Image for Beatriz.
16 reviews
August 1, 2022
i’ve learned so much about russian healthcare
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