Stone, scissors, paper and other short stories

Russian writer Maxim Osipov, living in exile, is presenting his collection of Stone, Scissors, Paper and Other Stories to the Czech audience for the very first time. In his book, he masterfully portrays the atmosphere of the Russian province over the past few decades. The melancholy of the Russian soul, love of theater and literature, human solidarity and ruthlessness, injustice, pervasive corruption and resignation to any resistance, The reader will find all this in Osipov' s stories. The texts in his short story collection are tragicomic, existential, full of exaggeration and comical or bizarre characters, through which Osipov explores universal themes in his own way, such as the forms of human loneliness, order and freedom. The life the author describes is often bleak, dark, and full of loss, but there is still room for love and ordinary human happiness. It is as if Gogol or Chekhov were speaking to us at times, but at a time when Russian society has already overcome communist totalitarianism, the disruption and humiliation of the 1990s, and the advent of a new dictatorship. The scenery changes, but the big themes and all the figures and figurines remain on stage.

 The stories in this volume feature doctors, an actor, screenwriters, teachers, entrepreneurs, local political bosses and common criminals, whose paths intersect with unpredictable, but in completely natural ways: in a hospital room, in classrooms, offices and police stations, on trains or at the station. Often unexpected encounters lead to disasters, revelations both major and minor, and occasionally, the hope of redemption.

The renowned Russian writer and cardiologist Maxim Osipov was born in 1963, graduated from the Faculty of Medicine and Mathematics and Physics in Moscow, and later worked at the University of California in San Francisco. After returning to his homeland, he continued his medical practice and is a co-author of a book on clinical echocardiography, the most famous manual on this specialization in Russian. He founded the Praktika publishing house, then worked in a hospital in Tarusa, Russia.

 For your prose, essays and plays Osipov received, among others, the Inostrannaya Literature magazine award for 2017, the German International Literature Prize (Berlin, 2018), also the Read Russia award (Moscow / New York, 2020) and the Dutch Europese Literatuurprijs (The Hague 2022). His works have been translated into almost twenty languages. He successfully published the collection Rock, Scissors, Paper and Other Stories in the USA.

 He lived, wrote, and worked as a doctor in Tarus, near Moscow, until March 2022. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he went to Armenia, then to Germany, and since September 2022 he has been living in the Netherlands, where he works as a guest writer and teaches Russian literature at the University of Leiden. In the spring of 2023, he founded the independent literary magazine Fifth Wave, whose name refers to the fifth wave of Russian emigration over the last hundred years or so.