The Anna Karenina Fix by Viv Groskop: book review

The Anna Karenina Fix: Life Lessons from Russian Literature (2017) explains, in a witty way, how all of life’s biggest questions – What if my love is unrequited? or What is the purpose of my life? or Why do bad things happen to me? – can be answered in a Russian classic. Readers can throw away their self-help books and delve into a dense Dostoevsky. As Groskop says, the protagonists have suffered so that you don’t have to.

‘Russian classics are, admittedly, not the most obvious place to look for tips for a happier life,’ the author adds. An example of this is the first line of Anne Karenina: ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’ – and the novel is about unhappy families.

Groskop has 11 self-help themes and an associated Russian novel with each thematic answer. For Groskop’s first theme on how to know who you really are, she chooses Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1878). She says Tolstoy ‘depicts people who are a mess because that’s normal, honest and real’ and, in doing so, he tells us what notto do to lead an authentic life. Groskop interprets his meaning in her analysis of Tolstoy’s book, which she does for each theme and in each different Russian classic.

She writes of reading about enduring mental hardships, fate (personal and historical), coincidence, and the soul in Doctor Zhivago (1957) to learn how to deal with whatever life delivers. She says to read Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country to survive a bout of unrequited love; Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) to learn how to keep going when things go wrong; and Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842) in order to avoid hypocrisy.

In Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters (1900), Irina, Masha, and Olga want nothing more than to go to Moscow. The novel is about the feeling that the grass is always greener where the sisters are not; no matter where they are, happiness is always somewhere on the horizon. Or as Ivan Denisovich would say in Solzhenitsyn’s novel: ‘we always think the other person is holding a bigger radish.’

I studied Russian literature at university (in the English language), and have a great love for all forms of Russian literature by all authors, so I love the way Groskop exposes her passion and the lessons she has learned from the classics. Concluding with Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869), Groskop says that it echoed the plotline of her own life: ‘lots of bits that I didn’t want to look at or know about; lots of bits I didn’t understand until I had children of my own; lots of bits that only made sense once I had realized that life does not have to be exciting and dynamic in order to be interesting.’

Amid all of the literature analysis and self-help advice are anecdotes of her time in Moscow learning Russian. The real life examples of the themes in Russian literature are witty, comical, and beautifully told. Russian literary heroes and heroines are depicted in friends, teachers, and lovers. This book is a wonderful interplay of fiction and reality. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and now I want to re-read Russian literature all over again.

Postscript: Viv Groskop does not include all Russian novels, for as she states, she omits Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat, even though ‘it sums up Russian literature in a nutshell.’

MARTINA NICOLLSis an international aid and development consultant, and the authorof:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom(2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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