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wondering what to do with the seven
legs that the morgue has accumulated.
They end up throwing them in the cas-
ket of a homeless man who is to be bur-
ied at the town cemetery. And yet Osipov
enjoys the “hermetic impermeability” of
the hospital, the way all the town’s res-
idents end up in the same place, and the
relative lack of bureaucratic interven-
tion in his work. At one point, Osipov
describes handing out medicines that
he’s acquired abroad to his Tarusa pa-
tients for free.
The Moscow intelligentsia were en-
raptured by Osipov’s unsentimental yet
tender account. Varya Gornostaeva, the
head of the Russian publishing house
Corpus, which later published Osipov’s
books, called the essay “a cardiogram of
Russian life.” As Osipov, who is now
fifty-five, recently recalled, photocopies
of the essay were passed around Tarusa.
Not everyone was pleased. Why did he
have to tell the story of the amputated
legs, or to remind people that many pa-
tients couldn’t afford life-saving drugs?
Osipov heard that the head of the Ta-
rusa district, Yuri Nakhrov, effectively
the local viceroy, called in the hospital’s
director, Irina Oleynikova, for an urgent
meeting. “What’s this?” he said, waving
a copy of Osipov’s essay in front of her.
He pointed to the line in which Osipov
describes the “asexual atmosphere” of
the hospital. Nakhrov wasn’t sure what
asexual meant, but it certainly didn’t
sound right. When I asked Osipov about
the reactions, he told me, “It’s any au-
thor’s dream.” His delivery was wry, but
he was clearly delighted. “You write a
poem and a window breaks—such is the
strength of your word.”I
first visited Tarusa in the summer of
2016, when my girlfriend, Yulia, sug-
gested that we leave Moscow for the
weekend. We stopped in at a museum
dedicated to Marina Tsvetaeva, a be-
loved Russian poet who, in the early
nineteen-hundreds, spent her childhood
summers in the town. Afterward, we
strolled the embankment above the river
and sat on the patio at a café called Che-
burechnaya, which specializes in the che-
burek, a popular Soviet-era snack of mys-
tery meat in fried dough. The houses in
the middle of town are squat and wooden,
with foundations that have sunk into
the dirt and window frames painted inlong-faded colors. We could have trav-
elled a hundred miles or a thousand—
we had left Moscow and entered, well,
Russia. I was charmed.
The next year, Yulia and I rented a
dacha in Tarusa. It was a two-story log
cabin that belongs to a scholar of ancient
Greece, Boris Nikolsky, and his wife,
Masha, a theatre critic, who were going
to Lyon for the year. Before they left,
they invited me for dinner. On the ve-
randa, overlooking a yard of tall grasses,
oak trees, and black-currant and rasp-
berry bushes, a long table had been set
with plates of grilled meat and bowls of
cucumber and tomato salads and bottles
of Georgian wine. Masha introduced a
man with curly silver hair and a cheru-
bic smile, who was smoking a pipe, as
Osipov. We played a game of chess, which
he won handily, and then he asked if I
would take a look at a draft of a trans-
lation of one of his stories, which was to
be published in his first English-language
collection, “Rock, Paper, Scissors.”
The story, “Objects in Mirror,” de-
scribes a day in the life of an urbane
screenwriter turned professor, Andrey
Georgievich, who lives in a Moscow
apartment with his wife and daughter.
Andrey grew up in an anti-Soviet fam-
ily but was among the first in his class
to submit, out of “utter foolishness,” an
application to the Communist Youth.
He is now a successful screenwriter—
“although there’s really no such thing
as a sufficiently appreciated artist,”
Osipov writes. Andrey is the kind of
man often described, in Russian, as an
intelligent—meaning not so much smart
as cultured. He is perhaps a little neu-
rotic. As Osipov put it to me over coffee,
in his kitchen in Tarusa, “He is noble
and wise, but he should spend less time
looking at his own reflection.”
In this story, and in others by Osipov,
I recognized the traits of many Russian
intelligents I have come to know: an em-
pathy for the miserable underclass which
flickers on and off depending on one’s
mood, and a world-weary certainty, often
misplaced, about how things work.
Osipov’s characters are disgusted by the
slovenliness and stupidity of those around
them, and then disgusted by their own
disgust. Another story, “Moscow-Petro-
zavodsk,” is narrated by a doctor from
the capital as he travels by train to a
medical conference in a city in the north-west. He informs on a fellow-passenger
who seems to be experiencing alcohol-
induced hallucinations, only to be ridden
with guilt when the police seize and beat
the man and his travel companion. The
doctor is later shocked to learn that the
two of them were not so deserving of
his concern; as a police colonel informs
him, they had murdered a man and his
teen-age daughter. “How can I be such
a poor judge of people?” he wonders.
In the preface to “Rock, Paper, Scis-
sors,” the oral historian Svetlana Alex-
ievich, who won the Nobel Prize in Lit-
erature in 2015, writes that, even as Osipov
is “filled with love for a simple, human
existence, he is simultaneously struck by
how little this existence actually coin-
cides with his own expectations.” In the
past two decades, Russian literature has
been dominated by surreal, dystopian
tales—an appropriate genre, perhaps, to
describe the convulsions that followed
the Soviet collapse. Osipov’s stories, by
contrast, are quiet, almost documentary.
“There’s something of the late nine-
teenth century in Osipov,” Anna Na-
rinskaya, one of Russia’s leading literary
critics, told me. “He allows himself a
certain moral judgment. He knows what’s
right, in life and in literature.”
For Osipov, life reveals itself most
clearly in Tarusa. “The Cry of the Do-
mestic Fowl,” Osipov’s foreword to
“Rock, Paper, Scissors,” is a love letter
to the town. “The provinces as home:
warm, grubby, ours,” he writes. He de-
scribes a number of “wild birds” who for
him conjure the spirit of the place: the
village woman who, when he was a child
and was desperate for a drink on a hot
day, gave him and his father glass after
glass of cold milk before waving away
payment with an ornery “You out of
your mind, dear?”; the “skinny, smoked-
out man—a bus driver who’s had a heart
attack” whom he once treated and who,
he writes, “could also tell you a thing or
two about me.”
In Osipov’s kitchen, as the late-after-
noon winter sun filled the room with a
warm haze, he described the foreword as
“a list of what I love, of why I’m here.”
He went on, “A certain understanding, a
certain intensity of relations—this is what
defines life in Tarusa.” Around town, and
at the hospital, people’s lives are more
easily decipherable, he explained. Partic-
ular habits or behaviors, like symptoms,Fact Yaffa Osipov 05_13_19.L [Print]_9479237.indd 19 5/2/19 10:37 PM