Книжный клуб на английском языке

A new English-language book club is launching in Peredelkino. Meeting once a month, it will be hosted by Anastasia Tolstoy - a local resident with a deep literary heritage. Anastasia holds a PhD from the University of Oxford, where she specialised in Vladimir Nabokov and the first wave of Russian émigré literature.

Katherine Mansfield’s Bliss follows Bertha Young, a woman overwhelmed by a sudden, almost radiant happiness as she prepares for a dinner party. Everything in her life seems perfectly arranged - her home, her marriage, her guests - yet as the evening unfolds, subtle tensions begin to surface. In a single, quietly devastating moment, Bertha’s sense of harmony is overturned, revealing how fragile and illusory happiness can be.

Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923), a New Zealand–born modernist writer who spent much of her life in Europe, was a master of psychological nuance. Influenced by Anton Chekhov, she transformed the short story into a form capable of capturing fleeting emotions and inner contradictions. Bliss remains one of her most celebrated works - deceptively simple, yet piercing in its insight into desire, perception, and self-deception.

Our book club will explore how Bliss transforms an ordinary dinner party into a psychological drama of awakening, where ecstasy turns to disillusionment, and the true cost of “perfect happiness” is revealed.

Reading room