DR. ANTON CHEKHOV was dead at 44, in 1904, and collections of his short stories didn't begin appearing in English until 1915. More than a hundred years after Chekhov's death, in 2009, Dr. Maxim Osipov published his first short story when he was 45. He has published six collections of stories since then. This first book in English, featuring 12 stories from those volumes, is going to make a splash. It's not his fault, is it, that his readers will be put in mind of Chekhov, but as we meet the sad, amusing down-on-their-luck contemporary characters, whose physical and emotional ailments and histories are diagnosed with a light touch, who else are we supposed to think of?
I'll let you in on a secret: we experience a thrill, almost a pleasure, upon encountering a serious, rare illness, especially if we're the first to diagnose it, if it's curable, or if it's not directly related to our speciality. This affords us a chance to demonstrate our powers of observation, the breadth of our knowledge. In the case of poor Alexander Ivanovich, however, I experienced no thrill. It's not that he was in perfect health (he wasn't, not at all), but that, during our brief acquaintance, I had come to like the old man.
Osipov has a soft spot for the kindly souls that quietly survive on the strength of their humility and goodwill. In “After Eternity: The Notes of a Literary Director,” the doctor-narrator shares with us the notebook of reminiscences “poor Alexander Ivanovich” has left behind in the examination room:
At night, when they'd turn off the upper light, I'd lie in the dark, remembering the little songs my mother used to sing to me, going over the funny phrases and rhymes I'd learned in childhood. How little I know myself: here, it turns out, is what I needed all along! I had singed my fingers on Glashenka and decided not to risk it again. No, in truth, I didn't decide any such thing — just lived the life I was born to live.
Is Osipov's attraction to these good folks their generosity of spirit, their modesty about their suffering, or their acceptance that what has happened was what had to happen? Hard-pressed good people are rewarded with life and a deep well of reflection: “I sometimes reflect on how lucky I was, how fortunate … As for the shadows that fell on my life, the dark patches I went through — I'd brought them on myself.” Osipov's cynical and outraged characters, on the other hand, bumble and stumble into self-pity, but they are few and far between.
My favorite of the stories might be “The Gypsy.” The protagonist, a provincial doctor, resignedly yet dutifully tends to patients at the local clinic. Among his patients is an ornery gypsy woman, whom he has to defend from his snarling nurse. For extra cash, once a month or so, the doctor himself is a weekend gypsy, accompanying ill, emigrating Russian patients on planes to their new homes in America:
At first, when he had just started working for the company, he expected to see the full range of human emotions; emigration was a major step, after all. But he soon realized that this was no different from working in a crematorium or at the registry office: there was a limited set of reactions.
More knowledgeable, he can't but feel less hope than the patients: “He nods and thinks: You should have left sooner … Now the old woman will die with the help of the finest medical technology. There's no helping her. But he says: ‘You made the right decision.'”
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