“Rock, Paper, Scissors and other Stories” by Maxim Osipov (translated by Boris Dralyuk, Alex Fleming, and Anne Marie Jackson)

This is a collection of short stories written by a Russian cardiologist who moved from Moscow to the provincial town of Tarusa. His grandfather lived in political exile in Tarusa, forbidden to live closer than ninety miles from the Russian capital. The younger Osipov spent childhood summers there, hanging out with Solzhenitsyn’s son, among other children of internal exiles. Osipov has been compared to Chekhov because of his background practicing medicine in small town Russia, but his prose reminds more of Shalamov in its deceptive simplicity and biting truths.

Osipov’s stories shed light on the modern mindset of Russia in a wry, yet hopeful manner. Most of his stories deal with life in the countryside. He writes of the outer provinces, “You can fall for this place just as easily as a woman can fall for a loser.” Comparing life in the country to the capital, he opines, “But where Moscow doesn’t believe in tears, as they say, around here tears are the only things we do believe in. When the need is great, we make an exception.” Despite nothing much changing, Osipov’s provincial characters often exhibit a nostalgia for the good old days. “Ksenia tries to guess how old he is, whether he would have known life in the Soviet Union. If so, he shouldn’t have skipped school; he’d at least know some Russian. What a country they had all shared!” In another story, a character reveals the widening gap between the urban dacha owners and the full-time provincials, “When it’s hot, the less sophisticated among them walk around half-naked. They wouldn’t do that in Moscow. And the more cultured ones don’t mean to offend us, yet somehow they still do. The Petersburgers are a bit different: they at least introduce themselves by their name and patronymic, whereas the Muscovites seem only to have first names nowadays. Somewhere out in the big cities dissertations are being defended, books are being published; something real is happening, with intellectuals slapping one another in the face, but here—how could anyone take our homely, warm, slightly mud-flecked life seriously?”