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nationalist newspaper published a let-
ter to the editor warning that “genocide
on a district scale” was about to unfold
in Tarusa. A wealthy friend of Osipov’s
hired him a bodyguard. Sucher recalled,
“I told him he was crazy—and to get
the fuck out of there.”
Journalists from the capital visited
Tarusa and portrayed Osipov as a brave,
quixotic hero. A dispatch from the
Washington Post described the battle
over the cardiology ward as a “bright
example of the growing philanthropy
of Russia’s wealthy” but also a “window
into the stifling role Russia’s bureau-
cracy can play.” Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the
Kremlin’s official newspaper, weighed
in with an article titled “Surgical In-
tervention Required,” which, surpris-
ingly, seemed to take the side of Osipov
over state functionaries. “In Tarusa, a
unique medical center appeared not
thanks to, but in spite of, the position
of the local authorities,” the editors wrote.
“Maybe this could explain the source of
the conflict?”
At the height of the uproar, in March,
2008, Osipov met with the governor of
the region, and, soon after, Nakhrov was
forced to resign and Oleynikova was re-
instated as the director. Olga Dobriyan,
whose husband was the head of the dis-
trict council during the standoff, and
who supported Osipov, told me, “The
bosses got scared, and the people were
victorious, which rarely happens in our
times.” Indeed, the episode marked one
of the very few instances during the two
decades of Putin’s rule in which local
initiative resulted in immediate politi-
cal change. Okhotin told me, “Now we’re
part of the landscape, a solid and heavy
tree you can’t uproot just like that.” Osipov
still sees patients from the community
who, back then, were deeply suspicious
of him. But in the examination room,
he said, no one brings up the conflict.
Osipov listens for their heartbeat, and
performs echocardiograms—which he
thinks of, in a way, as unspoken peace
offerings. Tarusa is too small for grudges.T
he title story of “Rock, Paper, Scis-
sors” is set in a “small town, Cen-
tral Russia, away from railways and the
highway,” a place with “a joyless Central
Russian sort of beauty.” The story fea-
tures a woman named Ksenia, whose pel-
mennaya—a homey café specializing inpelmeny dumplings—closely resembles
Tarusa’s Cheburechnaya, which, in real
life, is run by a woman named Natalia
Verzilina. Like Ksenia, Verzilina is an
energetic organizer; she once oversaw
the local Communist Youth branch and
later served as the town’s deputy mayor.
During the hospital dispute, she came
to the defense of the local government.
Osipov told me that he had been curi-
ous about Verzilina as an archetype, a
proxy for the middle management of
Russia’s ruling apparatus. “The chief mo-
tive is very simple: conservatism, a re-
solve to keep things as they are,” he said.
“You could say this force defeated Na-
poleon, and Hitler—and so it will de-
feat Osipov and anyone else who shows
up to change things for better or worse.”
Verzilina lives with her husband,
Evgeny, above Cheburechnaya, in a
handsome pre-revolutionary wooden
house on a narrow alley off the central
square. I recently paid them a visit. In
her living room, she offered me tea and
a tray piled with potato-and-mushroom
pirozhki. The controversy over the hos-
pital felt to her like an unnatural intru-
sion. “Read Dostoyevksy,” she said, in-
voking the novel “Demons,” in which
a fictional Russian town descends into
a frenzy after a mysterious outsider ar-
rives. “It’s like he says: things can hap-
pen independently of our will and de-
sires.” Osipov’s activity, Verzilina said,
made some locals, herself among them,
feel marginalized. People with money
and connections and big-city sophisti-
cation showed up and arranged things
as they thought best. “Maxim’s prob-
lem was that he didn’t have a true feel
for Tarusa,” she said. “And Tarusa’s prob-
lem was that it saw an enemy in Maxim.”
Yet Verzilina insisted that she har-
bored no ill will. Some years back, when
her youngest daughter had accidentally
taken the wrong medication and they
rushed her to hospital, Verzilina was im-
pressed by the doctors at the cardiology
ward. But she and Evgeny thought that
Osipov had breached town etiquette by
including unflattering details of Tarusa
locals in his essays. “Why take another
person’s weakness or flaw and lay it out
for all to see?” Evgeny said.
Unlike Chekhov, who largely turned
away from his medical practice once his
stories began to be published, Osipov
has kept up his work at the Tarusa hos-pital. “If I had enough ideas, or stamina,
to sit and write all day, I might leave
medicine behind,” he told me. But, for
now, it gives him an outlet for when the
writing isn’t flowing, and the hospital
provides a constant supply of charac-
ters and narratives. Moreover, he said,
“there are sick people all over the place.”
It would be wrong to abandon them.
But Osipov is adamant that medicine
is simply a job, not a calling. “I hate the
idea of so-called good deeds,” he said.
“There are, rather, professional deeds.
A surgeon cuts people not out of kind-
ness but because that’s what the pro-
fession requires.”
Osipov’s adopted son, Vasily, stud-
ied medicine at a Moscow university,
and, in 2015, at the age of twenty-eight,
he decided to move to Tarusa with his
wife, to work as a primary-care physi-
cian in the hospital. “Here, you can prac-
tice medicine more freely and simply
do what you think is right,” he told me.
He and his wife built a house next door
to Osipov and Evgenia’s, and recently
had a son, Osipov’s first grandchild.
Maxim and Vasily often make rounds
together at the hospital and, on the
weekends, meet in the yard between
their homes to chat and drink tea. Osipov
told me, “I know it may sound a bit
much, but it gives me a feeling of vic-
tory, that life has achieved a certain har-
mony, assumed a rightful form.”
One afternoon, I stopped by the hos-
pital, a late-Soviet brick facility. Osipov,
wearing a white coat, gave me a tour
of the cardiology ward, which was bright
and clean, with modern diagnostic
equipment in the examination rooms.
His air of competence was at once in-
timidating and reassuring. He told me
that, every now and then, a patient will
ask him to sign one of his books. Just
as he hates it when readers and critics
make a fuss of his medical practice, he
gets uncomfortable when patients bring
up his literary pursuits. “An unpleas-
ant confusion of genres,” he said. “A
doctor should be a kind of neutral crea-
ture: without gender, religious beliefs,
ideas about politics. But a writer is very
much present in this way—it’s all there
to see in his literature.” In the corridor,
a crowd of patients had gathered, wait-
ing to be examined. As I made my way
out of the building, I heard Osipov call
out, “Who’s next?” Fact Yaffa Osipov 05_13_19.L [Print]_9479237.indd 24 5/2/19 10:37 PM