With a front piece like Piedra, paper, tijera or Kilometer 101, Maxim Osipov (Moscú, 1963) created a privileged place in contemporary Russian literature. Her medical education, practice as a cardiologist in Moscow and especially in the provinces offered her a view of the difficult reality of her compatriots, of basic poverty, of abandonment, of the fate of the future.
After Eternity
Maxim Osipov
Translated by Alejandro Ariel González
Asteroid Books, 2025
296 pages. €22.95
The challenge with administration and bureaucracy in the defense of decent healthcare is a great source of inspiration in its aspects. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 hastened the exile in Germanywhere he now resides.
After Eternity It offers six aspects that arise from pure everyday experience. The text in the title of the article is explained starting with the content of the notebook, which the patient may forget during the consultation with the doctor.
It tells about the incredible adventure of his many years as a literary director of a theater in a remote place, in a mining village beyond the Arctic Circle. It’s not something else that pops up at you on the first page the words “corruption” and “sobornar”It is possible that in this play and in this chaos, the members of this company also debated whether it would be necessary to stage a classic that would be recorded in another era, whether by Sophocles or Shakespeare.
The micro-world of this theatrical giant, between ideas, functions, critics, loves, incidents of misfortune and a remarkable gallery of characters, is elaborated in detail with the grace of dialogues and a certain charge of profound depth. a dark and impossible administration that employs everyone. The residents’ explanation expressed in phrases like “My son has been here for twenty years. What will happen? I’m not doing anything, I’m avoiding the army”.
As Osipov reads, he feels a sense of being as he watches the capricious explanation of the circumstances of life
The final part of the story shows the complete dismantling of humans for their use for military purposes, our story about fate, but also the wisdom that in the years when the jubilant lives in Tarus and receives, between beautiful descriptionsa guide to what his existence consisted of.
As Osipov reads, he feels that he is witnessing a capricious explanation of life’s circumstances: as it happens in “Piezas sobre un plano”, from which the figure of a young man who is used to everything emerges in connection with a tournament of players, about which old North American men argue. a new view of the cultural life of the USSR: persecution and imprisonment of university students, dismissals and their consequences, secret unpleasantness of the past, emigration to the United States during the times of perestroika…
Sometimes a ball celebration in the environment of mathematics and subray actors the absurdity of lifeas in “El cine en casa”.
The return of the two friends in “Luxembourg” denounces Soviet institutional anti-Semitism and portrays a mother figure whose life consisted of an incredible survival between her parents.
I heard about the matonism of some of the new people associated with politics in Russia in the last 90 years in the short but explosive “Great Opportunities”, with the tragedy of exilewhich also appears in the last story (“En tanto”), with this director of the department of classical languages who despises the “civilized” way to one of his fellow tachado dissidents.
The indifference to the horror was well articulated: “A plane was hijacked, there was an injury, a detention… Is it bad? It can be. I’ll say it sure is. But has it ever been better?”.
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