El crit de l'ocell domèstic

by Maxim Osipov, Максим Осипов

“Vam néixer en una guerra, morirem en una altra”, diu amb serenitat un dels personatges d’aquests contes. De Stalin a Putin, la vida ha transcorregut, preciosa a escala individual, terrible a escala col·lectiva. I el vell Aleksandr Ivànovitx, nascut dins un tren l’any 41, es refugia en un vagó-llit el 2014 després que la seva ciutat hagi estat destruïda per un assaig militar.
¿Com és que els personatges d’Óssipov són tan punyents, tan reals? Óssipov és cardiòleg en un hospital públic, la seva consulta acull una enorme varietat de persones, cadascuna amb el seu feix d’històries. Per sobre l’espatlla del metge, l’escriptor també ausculta, i escriu. En els seus relats, l’instint de fugir i rentar-se les mans del desastre xoca amb el sentiment de pertànyer a una certa família. La família dels ocells domèstics que no fan mal a ningú, que no s’han tornat cruels en contacte amb els predadors. No sempre estan preparats per afrontar les inclemències, i alguns intenten emigrar cap a una part més amable del món.
Però no hi ha part més amable del món. Només hi ha això que en diem casa: un vagó-llit, una habitació rellogada, les golfes d’un teatre, un país cafre, tant se val, mentre hi floreixi una mica de bondat i de poesia. I mentre hi hagi un metge escriptor que sàpiga explicar-ho. A Rússia n’hi ha més d’un, de Txékhov a Óssipov. Tenen molt a veure l’un amb l’altre. Poderosos i humaníssims, el seu crit d’ocell domèstic és capaç de preservar la nostra sensibilitat de cor.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Russia, Russian Literature, Literature, 21st Century, Classics

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Rafa Sánchez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un soberbio conjunto de relatos con una calidad media alta. Globalmente, se pueden considerar una incisiva cata de la sociedad rusa en los primeros años del siglo XXI. En un relato habla de un pequeño pueblo rural, otros son de Moscú, otro habla de un personaje enriquecido y otros de personas enfermas o que están al borde de la pobreza, en general todos son muy interesantes aunque alguno sea más irregular. Creo que Maxim Osipov tiene grandes cualidades literarias y voy a intentar leer más de él. Por cierto, el autor es cardiólogo... otro médico ruso escritor como Bulgákov o Aksionov.

[Nick Grammos · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Pedro · Rating 5 out of 5]

4,5

Diez cuentos en los que prácticamente no pasa nada. Salvo la vida cotidiana.

Las historias son lo que se puede esperar de personas comunes y corrientes, aunque en este caso delineados con una notable precisión, y vividos/narrados por personajes con gran profundidad y exquisitez de matices.

El gran mérito, además de la calidad narrativa, está en la observación profunda y perspicaz de las personas. Tanto que después de leerlos, se podrían reconocer en la vida cotidiana de cada lector.

"Aparte de Súrochka, ya no tiene a nadie más. Alex sabe que será así hasta el final. El suyo o el de ella, no importa".
"Habría que inculcarle el placer de viajar, piensa Súrochka. Porque, si no, lo que le espera no es vida, sino un constante epilogo"
Del cuento Cape Cod.

Excelentes cuentos. Entre ellos, para mi gusto se destaca El complejo

Magnífico.

PD: De modos me quedé intrigado sobre porqué el primer cuento, el que da el título al libro, se llama >"Piedra, papel, tijera" (supongo que se debe relacionar a ese juego circular, casi perfecto en su simplicidad, en el que se rompe la lógica matemática: papel>piedra>tijera>papel).

[Tsung · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Luís Queijo · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[El Biblionauta · Rating 4 out of 5]

La entrega del último Premio Nobel de Literatura a la escritora bielorrusa Svetlana Aleksiévitx constató dos aspectos: Por un lado, una literatura rusa actual rica con temáticas y autores diversos, y por otro, la escasez de traducciones al castellano de autores rusos actuales. Por suerte, Club Editor ya debía tener en marcha el proyecto para publicar El grito del ave doméstica de Maksim Ósipov, con traducción de Esther Arias, cuando se falló el premio. Parece evidente, pues, que las grandes editoriales comerciales obvian autores y literaturas distantes y se concentran en los best sellers y mientras dejan a editoriales pequeñas (y valientes) la edición de autores de gran calidad, pero bastante desconocidos.

La reseña completa en español en http://elbiblionauta.com/es/2016/09/2...
La ressenya completa en català a http://elbiblionauta.com/ca/2016/09/2...

[Delphine · Rating 3 out of 5]

In dertien verhalen schetst Osipov een beeld van de hedendaagse Russische samenleving en de doorwerking van het USSR-verleden. Het is een ontluisterend beeld, in al zijn variëteiten: van de misogyne, xenofobe Rus op het platteland tot de rijke dasja-bezitter die een leeg, parasitair bestaan leidt. Hun leven wordt gedomineerd door de omstandigheden, door hen als ‘lot’ aangeduid.

Fabrieken, productienormen staan voorop en leiden tot schrijnende armoede die door de Russen moedig wordt verdragen. Een verhaal als ‘De Poolse vriend’ baadt in de typische Russische melancholie, terwijl in een verhaal als ‘De mijnstad Eeuwigheid’ de rol van literatuur in het leven wordt onderzocht. Een interessante verzameling, al springt geen enkel verhaal er echt tussenuit.

[E.P. · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Willem Hoekstra · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘De provincie is als een warm en niet al te schoon huis dat toevallig wel je eigen huis is. Je kunt het ook anders bekijken, oppervlakkig, als buitenstaander. Dat is wat veel mensen die er niet uit vrije wil zijn komen wonen doen: de provincie, dat is vieze natte sneeuw, duisternis. Nog het aardigste dat je over de bewoners kunt zeggen is dat ze niet te benijden.’
Prachtige verhalen over de eeuwig gelaten omgang van gewone Russen met hun lot.
Osipov wil zichzelf niet vergelijken met Tsjechov, maar het is wel waar het mij het meest aan doet denken.
Aanrader!!

[Chr*s Browning · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Stuart]

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.

[Nati Korn · Rating 5 out of 5]

בשנים האחרונות יצאו כמה ספרים של אוסיפוב בארה"ב, בעקבות סיפורים קצרים שלו שהתפרסמו בכתבי עת ספרותיים. אני קראתי סיפור שלו ברשת בתרגום לאנגלית והתרשמתי. בקשתי לקרוא עוד, בדקתי ומסתבר שיצא גם קובץ מסיפוריו בעברית, בהוצאת "כתב" הקטנה ובתרגום מצוין של יעל טומשוב, שלא זכה לחשיפה מספקת. אני אהבתי את הסיפורים.

מרבים להשוות את מקסים אוסיפוב לצ'כוב – שניהם רופאים, מחזאים וכותבי סיפורים קצרים. הסגנון של אוסיפוב בקובץ הסיפורים הקצרים הזה הוא דווקא אמריקאי יותר – משפטים קצרים, פרגמנטים שהקורא מאחה לתמונה שלמה, משחק של השתקפויות וניגודים. אבל התוכן, ההקשרים והנימה רוסיים מאוד.

רוסיה בסיפורים של אוסיפוב היא רוסיה של ימי פוטין, של ימינו. לפני שנים קולגה שלי בעבודה, עמדה לנסוע לסנקט-פטרבורג לביקור משפחתי. אחד העמיתים במשרד הביע את רצונו לבקר שם. הקולגה ענתה לו שזה לא מקום בשבילו והסבירה שרוסיה היא מקום אלים מאוד. העמית שאל אם מסוכן ללכת שם ברחוב. הקולגה ענתה שלא בדיוק, קשה להסביר את זה למי שאינו רוסי. האלימות והקשיחות הזאת בהחלט משתקפת בסיפורים השונים. היא נובעת מפערי ההכנסה שבין הסביבה העירונית לפרובינציה הכפרית ושבין האוליגרכים למעמד הנמוך, השחיתות השלטונית (הביקורת בסיפורים מרומזת) והשרידים הנוכחים מאוד של העבר הסובייטי, שעברו טרנספורמציה אבל לא באמת נעלמו. האלימות הזאת יוצרת ניכור ובדידות. אפילו המספר, שבחלק מן הסיפורים הוא בן דמותו של אוסיפוב (שנרמז, שהוא יהודי, אבל אף פעם לא מקבלים אישור ודאי לכך), אינו מרגיש ממש בן-בית ברוסיה למרות שנולד בה. הוא רופא ומשכיל, מעמד ביניים בעייתי. הוא לא ממש ממסד ולא ממש אזרח רגיל. הוא לא עני אבל נאלץ לעבוד בהשלמות הכנסה שאינו מוצא בהן שאר-רוח. הוא איש תרבות החי בתוך הקשרים ספרותיים, אבל לא העשירים החדשים הטובעים בכסף ולא עניי הפרובינציה מתעניינים בכך ממש (אולי למראית עין, רק ליצירת רושם). ההומניות הולכת לאיבוד. אין כאן רומנטיזציה של העוני. האנשים הפשוטים עשויים להיות לבביים במיוחד לזר בן מעמדם אבל גם אכזריים ואלימים – לרוב בעת ובעונה אחת. כולם חושדים בכולם ובנציגי המשטר. כמו שאומר מפקח משטרה (יהודי!) באחד הסיפורים – "רוצחים הם אנשים רגילים".

חלק מן הסיפורים מתרחש בחוץ לארץ. אבל הגיבורים הרוסים הם זרים שם, לא מצליחים להבין את מנהגי הארץ הזרה או שהם בזים לה. הם כמו נמצאים בלימבו מתמשך של שדות תעופה וטיסות שבסופן הם מוצאים עצמם שוב בפרובינציה הרוסית. מצד שני גיבוריו של אוסיפוב גם לא מצליחים לרדת לעומקם של בני התרבות הרוסית. באחד הסיפורים "אוסיפוב" (המספר המוכשר שהיטיב לראות לנפש האדם הרוסי בימינו) מתלונן שאינו יודע לקרוא אנשים ונכשל שוב ושוב לרדת לעומקם של סיטואציות וגולש ללא הרף לשיפוטים הנובעים מרושם ראשוני מוטעה. ההומניות הרגישה שלו היא זו שמטעה אותו! לא כל גיבור עני הוא בהכרח "טוב", לא כל מנוול מהשלטון הוא בהכרח "רע" (אבל בסוף הוא רע). הקיצוניות שולטת. אי אפשר להתחבר באמת עם אנשים אחרים אבל גם אי אפשר להגר בהצלחה.

(בעקבות מלחמת אוקרינה רוסיה עזב אוסיפוב את מולדתו ועבר לארה"ב, גרמניה והולנד.)

[Jay Gertzman · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Reyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maxim Osipov (1963) is een interessante man. Hij werkte als cardioloog in Rusland en de Verenigde Staten en debuteerde in 2007 als schrijver. Vanwege zijn kritische houding jegens het gezag vergeleek NRC-recensent Michel Krielaars Osipov eind 2021 met Aleksandr Solzjenitsyn. De schrijver reageerde dat men hem weliswaar nog met rust liet, maar dat hij vreesde voor het moment dat dat zou veranderen: “[…] zodra ze je eenmaal in het vizier hebben, ben je verloren. De autoriteiten kunnen je dan alles afnemen. Het enige dat je in zo’n geval rest is zo snel mogelijk te emigreren.” Na het uitbreken van de oorlog tegen Oekraïne – maanden na deze uitspraak – verhuisde Osipov naar Duitsland.

Vanwege zijn medische achtergrond is Osipov voorts met Anton Tsjechov vergeleken. Inderdaad kon ik parallellen trekken tussen de verhalenbundel De wereld is niet stuk te krijgen en de Verzamelde verhalen die ik recent van Tsjechov las. Toch vond ik Osipov een ander type schrijver, en zeker niet alleen omdat een revolutie, twee wereldoorlogen en een tijdperk van globalisering en digitalisering tussen hen in staan.

Ik vond het werk van Osipov aanmerkelijk lastiger te lezen. Dat komt omdat hij van de hak op de tak gaat: om zijn vlot geschreven verhalen te volgen is concentratie nodig. Laat ik net een ‘slordige’ lezer zijn! Daarbij hielp het niet dat ook in de verhalen van Osipov een veelheid aan Russische namen voorbijkomt, die ik als West-Europeaan met moeite kon bijhouden.

Het laat onverlet dat ik de ontaarde wereld van de schrijver enorm waardeerde. Soms zijn de verhalen volstrekt banaal, zoals dat van een arts die met de beste bedoelingen een dronken passagier in een vliegtuig ‘verraadt’, soms zijn ze obscuurder, zoals dat van de dochter van een oud-KGB-agent die een halfzus in Duitsland opzoekt in de hoop op ‘gezinshereniging’. Het medische beroep is goed vertegenwoordigd in de bundel; de schrijver lijkt daarnaast een voorkeur te hebben voor kunstmatig geplande plaatsjes in de periferie. Zijn werk zal al met al een tweede lezing waard zijn.

[Els Deveuster · Rating 4 out of 5]

Russische literatuur, ik ben er niet zo in thuis. Mijn ervaring stopt bij Lolita van Nabokov en het recent gelezen School voor zotten van Sasja Sokolov. Ik was toch bijzonder aangetrokken om iets van een huidige Russische schrijver te lezen en kwam bij het boek van Osipov uit.
Na mijn leeservaring met Sokolov wist ik dat ze niet makkelijk te lezen zijn die Russen. Er wordt veel van je als lezer verwacht. Ze geven subtiel en zintuiglijk de zinnen aan en je moet maar interpreteren, lezer.
Er hangt ook een speciale sfeer. Maar heb ik het dan wel juist voor, met mijn geringe kennis over de Russische literatuur ?
Wel de conclusie is zeker : ik ga mij ook toeleggen op de klassiekers evenals de huidige auteurs volgen.
Niet makkelijk maar in ieder geval aantrekkelijk, die Russische literatuur.

Dit boek van Osipov is bovendien een verhalenbundel. Ook geen evidente keuze.
Deze verhalen zijn een eerste bundeling in Nederlandse vertaling. Je krijgt een collage van de Russische provinciale samenleving. Subtiel kritisch, niet uitgesproken, over het regime door verhalen te vertellen van gewone Russen die steeds geconfronteerd worden met moeilijkheden. De personages lijken allen te berusten, de sfeer is somber. Opvallend, bijna ieder verhaal heeft verwijzingen naar CULTUUR : muziek, theater, citaten uit poëzie en toneel, verwijzingen naar literatuur. Cultuur als vlucht uit de dagdagelijkse problemen ?

In plaats van een voorwoord start het boek met een verhaal : De roep van een tamme vogel.
De metafoor van de vogels die gebruikt wordt. Er zijn tamme vogels en die komen onderweg ellende tegen. Ze botsen dan op wilde- en roofvogels. "Het leven is angstaanjagend" Er gebeuren dingen die aan je blijven kleven die je niet meer kwijtgeraakt. De sfeer van wantrouwen van "ik heb dat" en "ik kan dat van jou krijgen". "Iedereen is van mekaar afhankelijk". Iedereen weet hier alles over de andere.
Na de meegemaakte ellende komt er een nieuwe dag en er zijn terug tamme vogels en wilde vogels van alle soorten. De wereld is niet stuk te krijgen. Het begint weer opnieuw.

[Vincent Veerbeek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Een schitterende verzameling verhalen die stuk voor stuk een eigen inkijkje geven in de levens van gewone mensen in het Rusland van de 21e eeuw.

"Zal ons land blijven bestaan zoals het nu is? Dat wat eraan voorafging heeft ondanks al zijn macht minder lang bestaan dan een gewone viool, waarvoor zeventig jaar niks is, helemaal niks, instrumenten van zeventig jaar oud zien eruit als nieuw, zonder ook maar één barstje, vioolbouwers maken er wel eens expres een paar krasjes bij."

[Christel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Knap! Hoe knap?
Lees: Gelukkig ondanks Rusland, een review in de Volkskrant door
Emilia Menkveld, 12 maart 2021
https://www.volkskrant.nl/cultuur-med...

[Simen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Over het leven in twaalf korte (en minder korte verhalen), of over hoe het leven soms een kort verhaal lijkt. 'Kun je echt bij je volle verstand beweren dat het leven geen verhaallijn heeft?' (265).

[Bas Romijn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Perhaps it was the translation into Dutch, but I never got sucked into the book or fell in love with the style that others so highly speak of

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Lawrence · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Jasper Van Der Schaaf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Erudiete, intelligente en ironisch verhalenbundel van de Russische hedendaagdse auteur-en-cardioloog Maxim Osipov, over het dagelijks leven in Rusland in de jaren '10 van deze eeuw. Osipov was in oktober 2021 "writer-in-residence" bij het Nederlands Letterenfonds en woonde dientengevolge een maand boven boekhandel Atheneum op het Spui in Amsterdam. In een filmpje over zijn boek (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjGff...) zegt hij dat onze hoofdstad zijn favoriete stad is, maar inmiddels heeft hij zijn vaderland na de inval in Oekraïne verruild voor Berlijn. Over de Berlijnse Spree rivier schrijft hij: "Het is maar een klein riviertje, het stelt weinig voor, misschien net iets breder dan de Jaoeza. Wie een beetje kan zwemmen, kan er onmogelijk in verdrinken." (p. 114).

In plaats van op het lichaam van de staat richt Osipov de aandacht op het menselijk lichaam in zijn verhalen die vaak in een medisch decor spelen. Daarmee toont hij de kwetsbaarheid van de mens, fysiek, maar vooral ook psychisch. Om die laatst te bezweren staat de taal de mens ten dienste. "Als er regels nodig zijn voor het zetten van komma's, dan zijn die misschien helemaal niet nodig." (p.151, let op de komma in deze zin!) Of: "Rusland hoort bij de langwerpige landen, anders dan bijvoorbeeld de VS of Duitsland, dat zijn landen van het ronde type. (...) Rusland (...) lijkt op een kikkervisje." (p.13). Of: "Toen aan het licht gekomen was dat Schatz een Jood was werd het leven aanmerkelijk zwaarder voor hem. (...) Hij kreeg heel wat te verduren, van de Duitsers en van de andere Russen. Maar echte sadisten waren er niet veel in het kamp. Ook de bewakers waren gewone mensen. (p. 28/29). Het is deze zeer subtiele maatschappij-kritiek die de verhalen zeer de moeite waard maken. Osipov heeft zowel Joods als Orthodox bloed.

Toch is er hoop in het vaak wat provinciale Rusland van Osipov. Naasten, muziek en literatuur brengen troost en Mendelssohns 2e pianotrio levert een geluksmoment op. Maar geluk is een schaars goed in het huidige Rusland: "Alleen al de poging geluk vast te houden betekent het einde ervan. (...) Nee, de muziek is afgelopen en hij is nog steeds gelukkig" (p. 60). "Ik geloof dat een perfect geplaatste komma zijn vruchten zal afwerpen bij mijn jongens en meisjes. (...) Het hoort net zo bij me als slaperige kinderen in de klas, Russische literatuur en Gods schepping." (p. 198/199). Hopelijk zet Osipov nog heel veel komma's, de komende jaren; aan welke rivier hij ook verblijft.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

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?"

[Lili Bammens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Twaalf korte verhalen plus een verhaal "in plaats van een voorwoord" met als titel "De roep van een tamme vogel".
Je hebt allerlei vogels: tamme en wilde vogels, roofvogels. "Tamme vogels ondergaan onderweg een heleboel ellende. Ze komen dan wilde vogels en roofvogels tegen."
Allerhande vogels. Allerhande mensen die elk op hun manier trachten te leven of te overleven in het huidige Rusland. De verhalen zijn soms hard maar hebben vaak ook iets komisch.
Eén van de twaalf verhalen,over een dramaturg en een theatergezelschap in een afgelegen stadje dat Eeuwigheid heet, vond ik net iets te lang. Maar voor het overige heb ik van dit boek genoten.

[Charlotte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perfecte herfstkortverhalen. Toch meer van verwacht, maar dat komt door de vergelijkingen met Tsjechov en Boelgakov. Onterecht ook, met Boelgakov mag je niet vergelijken.

Help onthouden dat ik aan S vraag wat ze bij haar thuis had staan van Osipov, hoe dan ook voor herhaling vatbaar.

Literaire referenties zijn great, wel amper iets van gelezen. Asap mijn Poesjkin, Platonov, Lermontov, Pasternak, Solzjenitsyn bijschaven.

“De provincie is als een warm en niet al te schoon huis dat toevallig wel je eigen huis is.” als geniale opener.

“Bovendien trok ze niet naar mij, maar naar de proza en poëzie. Het komt allemaal omdat je te veel leest, maar daar is een remedie voor: lezen.”

[Lahierbaroja · Rating 2 out of 5]

Conjunto de 10 relatos ubicados en la Rusia postsoviética protagonizados por personajes normales y corrientes.

De longitud y calidad desigual, me quedo con un sentimiento agridulce porque alguno me ha recordado a su compatriota Ulítskaya pero otros me han dejado más bien fría.

Citas y más info en:

https://lahierbaroja.com/2025/06/06/piedra-papel-tijera-maxim-osipov/

[Gust P · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5*