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the magazine, officials in Moscow halted
the printing of further issues and ordered
existing copies to be removed from book-
shops and libraries. At an emergency
Party meeting, Tarusa Pages was deemed
a “hive of ideologically harmful writing.”
The furor only enhanced Tarusa’s repu-
tation as a sanctuary. A young, relatively
unknown Joseph Brodsky came to visit;
so did his fellow future Nobel recipient
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the chronicler
of the gulag. Rumor had it that as many
as eleven K.G.B. agents were assigned
to the town to keep track of all the po-
litical undesirables.
Osipov told me that, when he was
growing up, dissidents and people with
anti-Soviet leanings were “simply part
of the scenery.” His father, an engineer
turned writer, and his mother, a mathe-
matician, took him to Tarusa for months-
long stays in the summer. One of his ear-
liest memories is of sitting on his father’s
shoulders at the funeral for Paustovsky,
who died in 1968, when Osipov was four.
Hundreds of people came to the cere-
mony, the crowd spilling out across the
hillside. When Osipov was eight, he spent
the summer playing in Tarusa with Sol-
zhenitsyn’s stepson, Dmitri, clambering
up to the roof of Osipov’s great-grand-
father’s house. One evening, young Dmi-
tri offered Osipov his first sip of wine.
As a boy, Osipov was a voracious reader,
and, after making his way through Nico-
lai Gogol’s “Dead Souls,” he discovered
“The Three Musketeers,” by Alexandre
Dumas, and “The Pickwick Papers,” by
Charles Dickens. He was riveted, and in-
furiated. “I understood that Paris and
London, these are real places, not made-up
cities—but that I was destined never to
see them just because someone in power
said so,” he said. “I remember at seven or
eight years old I would wake up in the
middle of the night, my heart beating
with hatred for the Soviet state.”
A year later, the local authorities or-
dered his great-grandfather’s house in
Tarusa to be torn down to make way for
a new children’s center. The family was
promised a new plot of land in town,
but, once the bulldozers had cleared away
the rubble, they were given only mea-
gre compensation, paid in rubles. One
afternoon in February, I went with
Osipov to the site where the house once
stood, where an ugly brick edifice in a
field of knee-high snow was now boardedup. “It looks atrocious,” Osipov said, with-
out rage or sadness. We opened the gate
and sloshed around the yard, stopping
for a moment under a large, drooping
linden tree, the only thing that remained
from the years he spent here as a child.
When Osipov was a student in the
eighties, the humanities remained tainted
by Soviet ideology, so he decided to study
medicine. He also thought of his great-
grandfather’s experience in exile: “You’re
a doctor in wartime, you’re a doctor in
prison, you’re still a doctor,” he said. After
graduating from medical school, he left
with his family for a research fellowship
at the University of California, San Fran-
cisco, where he studied cardiology. He
was in California when his father died;
five months later, the Soviet Union col-
lapsed, and he returned to Russia. His
country was in ruins, and he wanted to
do his part to help rebuild it.
In the nineties, while working as a
cardiologist in Moscow, Osipov stum-
bled on a side gig: escorting ailing Rus-
sian émigrés travelling to America. He
would sit on a plane for eight or ten
hours, drop off the passenger, and come
right back. Each trip paid five hundred
dollars—more than five times the aver-
age monthly wage for a doctor in Rus-
sia at the time. Years later, Osipov re-
turned to the experience in his story
“The Gypsy,” which features a doctor
who flies to Portland, Oregon, with an
elderly patient from Siberia. “Strange
people, strange work—but lucrative,”
Osipov writes. After missing his return
flight, the doctor lies on the airport floor,
exhausted, and has a waking dream in
which he talks to his dead father, just as
Osipov had once done in the Sacra-
mento airport on a long layover. “How
did it turn out this way?” the doctor won-
ders. “Making these pointless trips be-
cause my real job doesn’t pay, lying around
on a red floor, envying people with stern
faces who have their lives figured out?”I
n 1996, by the time Osipov built his
dacha, Tarusa was a Russian provin-
cial town much like any other, with shut-
tered communal farms and a slowly
dwindling population. But a few peo-
ple with a connection to the city’s ear-
lier history remained. Osipov said that
he spent many afternoons “chattering
and boozing” with the well-known
painter Eduard Steinberg, who wastwenty-five years his senior and was the
son of Arkady Steinberg. Osipov also
grew close to Viktor Golyshev, who by
then had become one of the country’s
leading literary translators, and who re-
galed Osipov with stories of his sum-
mers as a young man in Tarusa.
In 2000, Osipov’s sister, her husband,
and one of their sons were murdered
during a robbery at their Moscow apart-
ment. Soon after, Osipov and Evgenia
adopted the couple’s surviving son, Vasily,
who was twelve at the time, and who
had been with them at the time of the
robbery. “It was, to state the obvious, a
giant catastrophe, which entirely up-
ended all our lives,” Osipov told me. In
the following years, the family often vis-
ited Tarusa, where Vasily and the cou-
ple’s daughter, Maryana, played together
in the yard.
In time, Osipov began to go there
by himself, especially after he took the
job at the hospital. Osipov saw patients
on Fridays and Saturdays and devoted
the rest of his time to writing. A year
and a half after his first essay appeared
in Znamya, he published an elegiac
follow-up called “Complaining Is a Sin,”
in which he describes receiving an early-
morning summons from the hospital.
“Cold, fog,” he writes. “Ten minutes
later, you run into the office, shove the
plug into the socket, everything is noisy,
you put on a robe, look at the canvas-col-
ored twilight outside the window, and
say to yourself, ‘One, it won’t get any
better, and, two, this is happiness.’ ”
Osipov’s legend grew, and so did the
inevitable comparisons to Chekhov, who,
in the eighteen-nineties, at his estate
outside Moscow, often treated peasants
for free and helped contain a cholera
outbreak. “Both anatomy and belles-
lettres are of equally noble descent,”
Chekhov once wrote to his publisher,
adding that they share “identical goals
and an identical enemy—the Devil.”
Osipov bristles at the comparison. “All
it illustrates is the inclination to type-
cast people,” he said. But it is hard not
to find something Chekhovian in Osi-
pov’s precision and pitiless honesty.
During our year in the Nikolskys’
house, Osipov sometimes came over
for dinner, and he and I often met to
play billiards at the House of Writers,
a cultural center on the grounds of a
Soviet sanitarium, or to swim laps atthe indoor pool in to
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