the revolution of marina m by janet fitch

Marina’s half-bloodied, half-elated look into the mirror is the first instance of self-reckoning in the novel, and by far the most benign. This moment leads her into what she calls “he next room of the self” she now approaches the world with new strength, in a body that has known love. “This is what a woman who has just made love looks like,” says Marina as she examines herself in the mirror, while wiping away blood from her nether regions. During his brief return, the two finally consummate their passion in a lusciously erotic scene, which Fitch stages almost cinematically, from the furious kissing and fondling in the back of a sleigh, to the richly adorned apartment Kolya has arranged. Marina is just a girl, and all she thinks about is Kolya, who finally takes notice of her as they share a kiss, right before he goes off to defend his motherland in the World War. These early moments in the book, when schoolgirl Marina is being pursued by her brother’s friend, the older Kolya, read very much like the calm before the storm - they exude a fleeting innocence and sense of normalcy, on both a personal and historical level. Akhmatova’s advice to young Marina could not be more appropriate, given the liminal, shifting reality both women inhabit: “Bravery, in love as in art.” Marina, an aspiring poetess, traverses this rich cultural landscape, at one point even meeting famed poet Anna Akhmatova inside the famous literary watering hole and cabaret, the Stray Dog Café. A student of Russian history and literature, Fitch weaves her narrative into the cultural tapestry of Petrograd during World War I, in the waning days of the Romanov dynasty and the so-called “Silver Age” of Russian poetry.

But as we plunge into Petrograd in the first chapter, that opening prologue is the only reassurance we have. But despite the book’s size and the headiness of the material it tackles, Marina’s unlikely bildungsroman - her growth, her loves, her dreadful losses and disappointments, but, above all, her enduring hope and determination to survive, against all odds - proves so gripping that it’s hard to put the book down.įitch launches us into the novel from the vantage point of exile in San Francisco, so that we know her heroine must have survived it all, somehow. The novel is both story and history, which prove inseparable, as the young life of our heroine, Marina Makarova, is upended first by the Russian Revolution and later by the Civil War.

AT 280,000 WORDS, The Revolution of Marina M., Janet Fitch’s new, virtually monumental work of historical fiction, is long enough to find a place in the Russian canon, which boasts mammoth masterpieces like Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

The revolution of marina m by janet fitch