Writers

Maxim Osipov

Born: 1963

Quick Study: Maxim Osipov, a medical doctor, first made a name for himself as a literary writer thanks to short stories and sketches about life in the Russian provinces.

The Osipov File: Maxim Osipov broke into creative writing after a patient and close friend died and he brought about fifty pages of diary entries to the patient’s widow, asking her not to show them to anyone. She didn’t heed his request, even showing his writing to publishers, which has led, over the years, to Osipov publishing a broad array of stories, essays, and plays. He first published short works in the literary journal Znamya in 2007, winning an award from Znamya that same year. His first book-length collection, Can’t Complain (more literally: A Sin to Complain), came out in 2009 and was shortlisted for the NOSE and Yasnaya Polyana awards. Osipov has gone on to publish five more compilations and his work has been translated into about a dozen languages, including English: Rock, Paper, Scissors, translated by Boris Dralyuk, Alex Fleming, and Anne Marie Jackson, and published by New York Review Books, was published in 2019. His play Russian and Literature, which is based on Rock, Paper, Scissors, has been staged in Omsk and St. Petersburg.

Psssst………: Osipov’s earliest book-length writing was co-written with Nelson Schiller: Клиническая эхокардиография (Clinical Echocardiology), published in 1993; a second edition came out in 2005. Osipov’s personal Web site calls it “the best-known Russian-language manual for that specialty”… Osipov founded his own publishing house, Practica, in 1993, where he says he edited many books; Practica primarily published translated medical books…

Osipov’s Places: Born in Moscow… has lived and worked in San Francisco… lives in Tarusa…

The Word on Osipov: In a 2014 interview with Izvestia (English translation), theater specialist, critic, and translator John Freedman called Osipov “a rising star.” Freedman included his own translation of Osipov’s second play, Козлы отпущения (Scapegoats), inspired by Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, in an anthology he edited, Real and Phantom Pains: An Anthology of New Russian Drama (preview).

In her review for The New Republic, Jennifer Wilson writes, “But Rock, Paper, Scissors gestures deeper than simply documenting the struggles people face in finding convenient and reliable healthcare. It explores the narrative function of medicine and the storytelling potential that exists in the doctor-patient relationship. In Osipov’s stories, doctors are frequently vessels by which the stories of their patients are told, after the patient has passed away or after their mental faculties make it difficult for them to recall who they once were.” (Wilson says that her favorite story in the collection is “After Eternity: The Notes of a Literary Directory.”)

Osipov on Osipov & Writing: When Daniel Medin asked Osipov, in an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books, if he could “imagine ever writing a novel,” Osipov answered with simply, “No, I cannot. But this does not mean I will not come up with one someday.”

Osipov Recommends: In that same LARB interview with Medin, Osipov mentioned admiring Platonov, “especially his stories,” and added that Nikolai Zabolotsky “probably affected my style — both his early poems as well as the ones written well after most of the group had died or been killed. I consider him one of the greatest poets of the last century.”

 

Photo credit: Divot, via Wikipedia, Creative Commons


More on Osipov

Major Awards and Nominations:

  • Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Stories – finalist, Read Russia Prize for translation into the English by Boris Dralyuk, Alex Fleming, and Anne Marie Jackson; 2020
  • Can't Complain – finalist, NOSE Award, 2009-2010; finalist, Yasnaya Polyana Award, 2010
  • Nach der Ewigkeit – finalist, Internationaler Literaturpreis, for Birgit Veit's translation into the German, 2018

 

Translations:

  • Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Stories, edited by Boris Dralyuk, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk, Alex Fleming, and Anne Marie Jackson; New York Review Books, 2019

 

Anthologies:

  • “The Song of the Stormy Petrel: A Cautionary Tale,” translated by Boris Dralyuk, in And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again, Restless Books, 2020.
  • Scapegoats, translated by John Freedman, in Real and Phantom Pains: An Anthology of New Russian Drama, edited by John Freedom; New Academia Publishing, 2014.

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