How to Know Who You Really Are: Anna Karenina by Lev Tolstoy

(Or: Don't throw yourself under a train)

'All the charm, all the beauty and all the diversity of life are made up of light and shade.'

I came across Anna Karenina when I was in my early teens. It coincided with a time in my life when I was becoming desperate to know more about my origins. As a child, I do not remember a time when I thought that my name was anything other than profoundly weird, unexplained and, ultimately, unexplainable. To come across people with similarly odd names was, to me, deeply comforting. I was never put off by the strangeness of the names in Russian literature. They felt familiar. I felt solidarity with them. I did not mind that I couldn't say them aloud with any confidence because I had grown up not speaking any language other than English. But I had, however, lived with an unpronounceable name, and I knew it was not that big a deal, even if other people said it was. 'Viv Groskop. What kind of name is that?'

Growing up in Somerset in the south-west of England, I come from a family that considers itself ordinary, normal and British. Definitely British. I was told this repeatedly as a child. There was nothing in our family history to suggest we were remotely foreign. My grandad was born in Barry, in South Wales. My grandmother was born in Manchester. My dad was from London. My mother and all her family were from Northern Ireland. No one was born abroad. Did I mention there were no foreigners in our family? My great-grandparents on my mother's side were all from Northern Ireland. On my father's side, they were born in Wales or the north of England. As a young child, I knew some of my great-grandparents. There were no foreigners. As you can see, I think I have made it clear that there were no foreigners in our family.

Everything we did was British. Or English. Best not to ask the difference between the two. Mostly British, as my grandad liked to emphasize his Welshness on occasion. And no one wanted to make my mum, born in County Antrim, feel left out. I spent a lot of time with my (paternal) grandparents as a child. My grandad, a grocer for thirty years, had a pathological dislike of all things foreign, especially food. Things like lasagne, minestrone and garlic were 'foreign muck'. Favourite foods in our house were the sorts of foods you would worship if you were the owner of a grocery shop that prided itself on its selection of processed foods: Angel Delight, Bird's Custard, tinned marrowfat peas. These were much safer than foreign muck.

The only thing to disrupt this picture of canned, processed, unquestionable Britishness was the small matter of our name – to me, quite a puzzle: to be undeniably British and yet be called Groskop. Early on, it struck me that something didn't quite add up. This was even before I found out that most of my grandfather's family had changed the spelling of their name from Groskop to 'Groscop'. Now, we were the only people called Groskop. Another mystery. You are not fooling anyone, Groscops, I would think to myself, careful to change the spelling when I was addressing Christmas cards to elderly relatives, at the same time thinking how odd it was.

The Groscops' cunning disguise always struck me as rather desperate. They had changed their name from something foreign-sounding but plausible to something foreign-sounding and implausible. Meanwhile, we, the Groskops, bore the title with some quiet measure of pride – we hadn't sold out and become Groscops! – but, seemingly, zero curiosity.

My family had no sensible answers about the origin of our name. My grandad would talk about it, if pressed, from time to time, only so that we could tease him about the name 'definitely not being German'. He was in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War and was happy for the name to come from anywhere at all on the face of the earth so long as it was not Germany. I soon gravitated towards languages at school and quickly worked out that he was right: it couldn't be German. We would be Grosskopf. ('Bighead.') And we were not Grosskopf. This, at least, I decided, was some mercy. Then Dutch was mentioned as a possibility. But again, the spelling didn't seem right. There was even a crazy idea that we were South African. The name came from Afrikaans, supposedly similar to Dutch. I struggled to believe this.

The lack of information made me obsessive about origins and names. When I was four years old, we acquired a cat, a cute little tortoiseshell thing. I was allowed to name her. I called her Jane. She brought me a lot of comfort, even though I later became aware that I had saddled the cat with a feline name just as unlikely for her as my human name was for me. (Who calls a cat Jane?) For years, I dreamed of having the surname Smith. This to me was a wonderful, beautiful name, one no one would ever mispronounce or spell incorrectly. And no one would ever ask where you came from.

It wasn't until I was about twelve or thirteen that I picked up a copy of Anna Karenina. I got it in a charity shop, I think, in the mid-1980s. It was an old Penguin Classic. The cover features the painting that has come to be the most frequent stand-in for Anna Karenina: Ivan Kramskoi's Portrait of an Unknown Woman of 1883. I loved that picture, but the name sold the novel to me first. Karenina. A name that is simple and yet one that people hesitate to pronounce. I knew some people said it as 'Carry Nina', but you should say it 'Kar-ray-ni-na', with the emphasis on the 'ray'. I fell in love with her name. And then I fell in love with her face. The moment I saw this stunning woman, all velvet coat, alabaster skin,...