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.

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.

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

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 condu...

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.

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. Specifica...

Osipov is tender, but uncompromising in these short stories. An extraordinary glimpse into post soviet Russian life, while exploring the importance of moral behaviour.

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.

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

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...

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.

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 o...

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...

April 2019 NYRB Book Club SelectionEach 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 col...

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 a...

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

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.

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....

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.

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...