“We're both interested in the history of the 20th century, but he's lived it, and I've been a spectator.”
Clive James

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31 January 2010 marks the 20th anniversary of Vitali Vitaliev’s defection from the Soviet Union to the West. In Life as a Literary Device Vitaliev offers readers not only a glimpse into how literature has affected his life, but also a survival manual for the Western world, a way of life much removed from that lived in the USSR.

At once a highly entertaining account of a life that has encompassed roles as diverse as “Clive James’ Moscow man” to researcher and writer for QI and many newspapers, Life as a Literary Device is also a serious treatise on the power of literature.

The 20th anniversary of Vitaliev’s defection highlights his profound insight into the differences of life in the West and in the Soviet Union (indeed, Vitali claims that life in the West is in many ways harsher than life under the Soviet regime) and also offers a personal lens through which to view the USSR and its eventual collapse in 1991.

Life As A Literary Device is both a summation and a new beginning for Vitaliev – an analysis of how literature has helped him to survive in the modern, and Western, world.

From the author:

“Life as a Literary Device has neither beginning nor end; nor does it fit in with any existing literary genre: partly a memoir, partly a novel, partly a meditation, partly a poem, partly a diary, partly a dream, partly a survival kit, partly one extended metaphor…” for writer's life, i.e. indeed a 'literary device'. I keep looking back at my life: at the places I visited, the pieces I wrote and the people I met. Memory is like a scrap book – a cut-andpaste job.”