Viv Groskop

woman has a great responsibility: to give birth. But she doesn’t give birth to ideas – that is the responsibility of men.’

The Russian classics are, admittedly, not the most obvious place to look for tips for a happier life. Russian literature is full of gloomy people wondering how on earth they have ended up in the appalling predicament in which they find themselves, looking around desperately for someone else to blame and then realizing that, in fact, they were right in the first place: life really is extremely inconvenient and annoying, and we are all just waiting to die.

it is in literature – whether novels, plays or poetry – that we really see who we are – and, perhaps even more importantly, who we don’t want to be.

story is the stand-in for human experience. It’s pretend, it’s make-believe.

anything, Tolstoy’s lesson is this: ‘How Not to Live’. These are sometimes cautionary tales rather than manuals for living.

something didn’t quite add up.

Anna realizes that her life with Vronsky is authentic but unachievable, and feels she has no option but to kill herself.

Understanding people was a burden to Tolstoy.

it really the job of novels to tell us how to live? Sadly, in his own life, he came to the conclusion that Anna Karenina had showed him how not to live: he did not want to be the person who wrote entertaining, complex novels. In coming to this realization, he failed to follow his own advice and, instead of being like other happy people, he became uniquely unhappy in his own fashion. The final message of Anna Karenina? It’s all very well looking for answers, but life is, essentially, unknowable. We must search desperately for meaning.

astonished to find that they genuinely spoke about ‘fate’ the whole time, like something out of a bad Bond film.