The Anna Karenina Fix: Life lessons from Russian literature by Viv Groskop

Comedian and broadcaster Viv Groskop presenting her book on Russian literature.

Viv Groskop has discovered the meaning of life – and it’s all in Russian literature. As she knows from personal experience, everything that has ever happened in life has already happened in these novels: from not being sure what to do with your life (Anna Karenina) to being in love with someone who doesn’t love you back enough (A Month in the Country by Turgenev) or feeling you’re never quite in the right place at the right time (all of Chekhov’s work).  As she rattles through the lives and work of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, Pasternak – to name just a few – Viv Groskop provides an enormously entertaining introduction to Russian literature.

Whether you’ve read all the Great Russian novels, or only watched the TV adaptation of War and Peace, this is a book that will enrich your life, help you feel that you are not alone, and make you laugh a lot along the way. A Pushkin House trustee, Viv presents a unique one-off lecture specially for Pushkin House. (Mostly in English with some bits of well-meaning Russian.)

Viv Groskop is an award-winning comedian and broadcaster. She is the author of I Laughed, I Cried (Orion) and writes regularly for The Guardian, The Times and The Mail on Sunday. A contributing editor at Russian Vogue for ten years, she graduated from Selwyn College, University of Cambridge, with First Class Honours in French and Russian and has a MA with Distinction in Russian Studies from the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, University College London.