TNY—2019_05_13—PAGE 23—133SC. —LIVE CARTOON—A22355—PLEASE USE VIRTUAL PROOF—R2: REFIT. BW_R 2
ears his senior and was the
v also
y
s
her husband,
ed- enia
y,
and who
time of the
a
In
ether
e
k the
saw patients
oted
ear
ed
c
”
y-
hospital.
en minutes
e the
thing is noisy,- d
y
and so did the
,
e
eated peasants
a
s-
”
,
oals
”
l- not
s ’
er
to
iters,
f a
tthe indoor pool in town. I came to love
Tarusa’s warm and buzzing social life,
with people circulating from one house
to the next. Yulia and I often visited
Marco Bravura, an Italian mosaic art-
ist in his sixties, and his wife, Daniela, a
gifted storyteller and cook. We also be-
came friendly with Narine Tutcheva and
Petr Popov, both architects, known for
staging imaginative theatrical produc-
tions on their back patio every summer.
These people were Osipov’s friends,
too, though over the years he had man-
aged to quarrel with half of the Tarusa
crowd. “He is an independent thinker,
never banal, often unexpected, always in-
teresting,” Boris Nikolsky told me. “But
he can be very abrupt, and takes things
to the extreme.” Osipov once stormed
out of a friend’s house during an argu-
ment over Pussy Riot. (The friend op-
posed their prosecution but, unlike Osipov,
took issue with their protest in a Mos-
cow cathedral.) A fight over the merits
of the Russian annexation of Crimea—
Osipov was staunchly opposed—led to
another similarly dramatic exit.
Maryana, who is a thirty-one-year-
old accomplished violinist and lives in
Frankfurt, gave a concert last winter with
a group of musicians at the House of
Writers. Osipov hosted a dinner in her
honor at a restaurant, and a family friend
stood to give a toast. Osipov had treated
him for a heart condition some years ago,
and the guest expounded on Osipov’s
skills as a doctor. Osipov interrupted,
telling the guest to toast not him but
Maryana and the other performers. It
was a magnanimous gesture, delivered
with more severity than I could imagine
ever mustering. Varya Gornostaeva, who
has published Osipov’s books, told me,
“Russian society is sadly marked by a
certain infantilism. Maxim isn’t so much
a liberal—though he’s that, too—as he
is an adult, a person who can answer for
himself. He’s one of the few grownups.”I
n 2006, Osipov asked Bernard Sucher,
an American businessman in Mos-
cow and an early investor in Osipov’s
publishing house, Practica, to donate
money to the Tarusa hospital for a new
echocardiogram machine. Sucher agreed,
on the condition that, instead of a one-off
payment, they set up a charitable fund.
Osipov’s growing fame as a writer al-
lowed him to attract high-profile figuresto the fund’s board, including Ludmila
Ulitskaya, one of Russia’s best-known
contemporary novelists. When I asked
Ulitskaya about Osipov, she told me that
she was impressed by his perseverance.
“Given the conditions of our country,
the personal initiative of a creative per-
son almost always runs up against huge,
often insurmountable obstacles,” she said.
Money from the fund paid for defibril-
lators, heart monitors, and a number of
electrocardiogram machines, as well as
an apartment in town for a new cardi-
ologist, Artemy Okhotin, from Moscow.
Okhotin, who had done some transla-
tion work for Osipov at Practica, was
drawn to the hospital’s intimate scale. “I
didn’t want to be just one of a hundred
workers in a factory but, rather, in a place
where everything depends on you,” Ok-
hotin told me. He said that when he and
Osipov mentioned that they wanted
to perform transesophageal echocardi-
ography—an advanced heart-imaging
technique in which a probe is passed
through a patient’s throat—their col-
leagues at the hospital looked horrified.
Six months later, the two men were reg-
ularly performing the procedure. “We
didn’t ask if we were allowed,” Okhotin
said. “We decided, and that was that.”
In February, 2008, the fund paid for
a renovation of the hospital’s cardiologyward, which soon became the leading
center of its kind in the region. Four
days after its grand opening, Nakhrov,
the head of the district, fired Irina
Oleynikova, the hospital’s well-liked
director. It seemed clear that the au-
thorities were upset by the attention
given to the hospital, although it was
less clear why. Perhaps, Osipov specu-
lated, they couldn’t believe that he and
his supporters weren’t motivated by cor-
rupt interests or political ambitions. In
any case, provincial bureaucrats have an
ingrained tendency to preserve the sta-
tus quo. “Even the slightest action can
turn into a political mistake, so it’s best
not to do anything at all,” Osipov said.
“Otherwise, well, the Devil knows.”
Soon, allegations spread by Osipov’s
enemies began to circulate among the
locals: Osipov was working for the
C.I.A.; the commotion at the hospital
was a plot to kick off an Orange Rev-
olution. As Osipov later described in
an essay, an elderly woman in town
passed along the rumor that the doc-
tors were performing experiments on
people. One day, in the spring of 2008,
Osipov came across a flyer stuck to a
shop window describing him and Ok-
hotin as “murderers” and accusing them
of leeching money from the hospital
to build themselves luxury homes. A“I can tell it’s new because it’s alive.”Fact Yaffa Osipov 05_13_19.L [Print]_9479237.indd 23 5/2/19 10:37 PM