Anna Karenina Fix Life Lessons from Russian Literature

Life lessons from Russian Literature

As Viv Groskop knows from personal experience, everything that has ever happened to a person has already happened in the Russian classics: from not being sure what to do with your life (Anna Karenina), to being hopelessly in love with someone who doesn’t love you back (Turgenev’s A Month in the Country), or being socially anxious about your appearance (all of Chekhov’s work). In The Anna Karenina Fix, Groskop mines these and other works, as well as the lives of their celebrated creators and her own experiences as a student of Russian, to answer the question “How should you live your life?” or at least be less miserable. This is a charming and fiercely intelligent book, a love letter to Russian literature.

Viv Groskop is an award-winning comedian, writer, and broadcaster. She is the author of The Anna Karenina Fix: Life Lessons from Russian Literature. She writes for the Guardian, Observer, and Financial Times and has a weekly column in the New European. She lives in London.