Join Maxim Osipov in conversation with Robert Chandler about his new book, Kilometer 101, a collection of eleven short stories and non-fiction essays written over fifteen years which demonstrate Osipov’s penetrating insight, fearless realism and stoic humanism in his approach to life in modern Russia. The publication has been edited by Boris Dralyuk and translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk, Nicolas Pasternak Slater, and Alex Fleming
Osipov’s book takes its title from a Soviet-era law stating that former convicts could live no closer than 101 km to a major city. Osipov’s great-grandfather ended up in a 101st-kilometre town, Tarusa, following his imprisonment on spurious accusations that he was plotting to kill Maxim Gorky. Osipov himself moved to Tarusa in 2005 to live and work as a cardiologist, and remained there until he fled last year via Armenia and Germany to avoid complicity in Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.
While written prior to the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it’s impossible to read Kilometer 101 in detachment from today’s context. Osipov brings alive the reality of life – or, rather, spiritual death – in Putin’s Russia. He questions how it is possible to anaesthetise oneself (often with alcohol, violence or apathy) against what is occurring around you without becoming a complicit part of the system, and how to continue some semblance of normal life while surrounded by senseless cruelty.
The themes of emigration, exile and the idea that life must be better elsewhere emerge throughout the book. We see the experience of those who left Russia for abroad; the internal emigration of those who retreated to the provinces either by choice or force, or headed to the big city in search of something better; and also a kind of self exile, an abandonment of oneself during hopeless times.
Despite the bleakness, Osipov illuminates the humanity, compassion and hope that do still exist under a crushing system. His sympathetic portraits of normal people’s lives, inspired by his work as a doctor in provincial communities, have a precision and honesty that have garnered comparisons to Chekhov.
About the speakers
Maxim Osipov (b. 1963) is a Russian writer and cardiologist. In the early 1990s he was a research fellow at the University of California, San Francisco, before returning to Moscow, where he continued to practice medicine and also founded a publishing house that specialized in medical, musical, and theological texts. In 2005, while working at a local hospital in Tarusa, a small town ninety miles from Moscow, Osipov established a charitable foundation to ensure the hospital’s survival. Since 2007, he has published short stories, novellas, essays, and plays, and has won a number of literary prizes for his fiction. He has published six collections of prose, and his plays have been staged all across Russia. Osipov’s writings have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He lived in Tarusa up until February 2022, when he moved to Germany.
Robert Chandler’s translations from Russian, mostly for NYRB Classics, include works by Alexander Pushkin and Nikolay Leskov; several collections of stories and memoirs by Teffi; and novels and stories by Vasily Grossman, Andrey Platonov and Hamid Ismailov. He is the editor and main translator of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida and Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov. Together with Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski, he has co-edited The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry. He has also translated selections of Sappho and Apollinaire. He runs regular translation workshops in London and teaches for an annual literary translation summer school, currently titled BRISTOL TRANSLATES. His most recent publication is Pushkin’s Peter the Great’s African and his next will be Vasily Grossman’s The People Immortal, both co-translated with his wife Elizabeth.