Viv Groskop’s Au Revoir, Tristesse: Lessons in Happiness from French Literature

What is joie de vivre, and how do you learn to savour the moment? 

British journalist, writer and comedian Viv Groskop got seriously passionate about the subject. Every summer she travelled to France and diligently studied French. In an attempt to capture the essence of the her favourite country’s culture, Viv has written a book that will help you rethink French classics and find something new and relevant in them. 

In her book Au Revoir, Tristesse: Lessons in Happiness from French Literature, Viv Groskop gives us a bold, light and ironic look at twelve significant French works of literature. 

She discusses works such as Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, and talks about Stendhal, Balzac and Camus, with his close attention to the problems of existentialism. Her work is not all serious historical research or linguistic analysis, it is also peppered with a little humour and some amusing observations, otherwise it would not be French at all. 

Take an unexpected look at Choderlos de Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons, absorb the wisdom of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette’s Gigi, and find out what Viv Groskop herself thinks is the secret of happiness in our next lecture. 

Lecturer 

Nina Scherbak, Associate Professor in the Department of English Philology and Cultural Linguistics at St Petersburg University, Master of Arts (the United Kingdom), a writer and screenwriter. She is also a scriptwriter for science television shows, author of fifteen monographs, and books on linguistics, literature, language philosophy, and English literature.

The lecture will be held online in Spanish with simultaneous translation into Russian as part of the celebrations of the 300th anniversary of Russia’s oldest university, SPbU.

Registration