New York Review of Books Review

"I was in love with the Future, in love with the idea of Fate. There's nothing more romantic to the young - until its dogs sink their teeth into your calf and pull you to the ground": So says the young Marina Makarova early on in Janet Fitch's third novel, "The Revolution of Marina M.," a vast, ambitious historical tale in which the comingof-age of a quintessential revolutionary heroine dovetails with the events of October 1917. Marina ticks all the boxes for the prototypical heroine of novels set in this period: Her parents are liberal aristocrats, while she is a radical poetess - gorgeous, redhaired and curvaceous. Her friends, who include a dashing counterrevolutionary officer lover, a lesbian Bolshevik girlfriend and a bank-robbing baron with a taste for S-and-M, straddle all sides of the struggle. Over the course of more than 800 pages, Fitch conveys the importance of sex for a young woman's development with Rabelaisian earthiness, and Marina's liberation (at least until the novel plunges into the aforementioned S-and-M) reflects ideas and experiences that were quite common for her generation. Like Marina, the real women who became revolutionaries often hailed from noble families, perhaps the most famous of them being the Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai, the Communist daughter of a czarist general. Women in this milieu endured prison sentences and Siberian exile but also enjoyed love affairs with male revolutionaries (some of whom they married). Kollontai especially was a trailblazer who, in tracts such as her 1921 essay "Theses on Communist Morality in the Sphere of Marital Relations," advocated free love in powerful, forward-thinking axioms: "Sexuality is a human instinct as natural as hunger or thirst." She believed that marriage was an oppressive bourgeois concept based on the presumption of female dependence on men, a notion that would be rendered obsolete under socialism, when both sexes would depend only on society. After the revolution, female Bolsheviks like Polina Zhemchuzhina, the wife of a Soviet foreign minister, and Dora Khazan, the wife of a Politburo member, became People's Commissars (or their deputies), or ministers in the Soviet government. Even so, Russian male chauvinism was deep, and Stalin distrusted these female activists both for their Jewishness and for their gender, ultimately firing and arresting several of them, including Zhemchuzhina. In Fitch's fictional version of this historical moment, following a confusing prologue set in Carmel, Calif., we begin in World War I Petrograd where Marina escapes her father's salon to be kissed in the cloakroom by an attractive officer and childhood acquaintance named Kolya Shurov. Afterward he goes back off to war, but in feverish Petrograd, revolution seethes. Their romance does not end there: When Kolya returns once again, he picks Marina up outside her school and takes her on a sleigh ride that leads to her first sexual experience. The passage inaugurates Marina's awakening; from here on out, she says, "I could not stop thinking about sex." As hunger, war and government incompetence herald the February Revolution, the teenage Marina joins the crowds in the streets, feeling the thunder of history in the making. "What is history?" she asks. "Is it the trace of a footstep in wet cement?" She goes on to answer her own question: "History is the sound of a floor underneath a rotten regime, termite-ridden and ready to fall." She witnesses everything from women's protests for food to the toppling of Czar Nicholas II. But never has the pace of the Russian Revolution progressed more sluggishly than it does in Fitch's hands. "Gunfire sounded throughout the following day," and we learn all the quotidian ways Marina finds to pass the time: "I played poker with the girls" and "rounds of chess with Mina"; "taught Dunya to waltz"; "won a bet with young Shusha by walking on my hands"; and "stood in the small kitchen, chopping cabbage." The metaphors come like Cossack charges, and one is never enough: "The crown of Russia had gone from most precious object to poisoned apple, a rotten, stinking potato nobody wanted." Since Marina plays no part in high politics, we learn of major events indirectly. The leader of the new provisional government, Premier Prince Lvov, proposes a document that "granted freedom of speech and assembly, the right to strike, a constituent assembly elected by universal and secret ballot, men and women alike," and much more. The author kindly lists all the measures outlined by this "daring piece of work," which nevertheless touches our protagonist's life only obliquely. But Marina does stand in the audience at the Cirque Moderne to hear Leon Trotsky herald Russia's "new epoch," describing him as "a caldron melting the crowd into a single substance, and we threw ourselves in." In the chaos of mid-1917, as the provisional government minister Alexander Kerensky becomes the dominant figure, Marina falls in love with a radical (but, for the reader, uninspired) poet named Genya, although Kolya remains the object of her true passion. Her best friend, the frizzyhaired aristocrat Varvara, becomes a Bolshevik activist whose speeches the book relates in full: "Far from improving the situation of the common people, the revolution in February has only increased your suffering," Varvara pontificates before a line of women on the street. "We, the Bolshevik Party, say down with the imperialists!" Varvara persuades Marina to inform the Bolsheviks of her father's political secrets. When he finds out she is sleeping with a poet and is a Communist spy, he disowns her. As Kerensky loses his prestige because of a series of military defeats and an attempted coup, Marina realizes the imminence of a Bolshevik takeover in a succession of familiar metaphors: "The world was cracking - I could hear it - like ice that had grown too thin to hold us." On the night of the October Revolution, she and Genya burst into the Winter Palace to find a "Blakean hell" of Red Guards' debauchery after they've just wrested power from the ministers of the provisional government. In the months after October 1917, Petrograd under the new Soviet Republic is increasingly threatened by not just famine, chaos and disease but also counterrevolution, factional betrayal and foreign intervention. Lenin (who will soon move the Russian capital to Moscow) deploys murder and terror to keep power. Amid all this public turmoil, Marina's personal life spins even more wildly out of control. She is kidnapped by the ruthless rapist and aristogangster Baron Arkady von Princip, who smells like "decaying pines." He lures her to an apartment for an excruciating 10page sadomasochistic marathon, during which Marina experiences a disturbing amalgam of pleasure, shame and fear. When Arkady subsequently tries to use her as a hostage in his criminal dealings, Marina's horrid father outs her as a Bolshevik spy. For all her progressive defiance, Marina is still treated by the more politically empowered men in her life as merely an object for degradation - the details of which are perhaps a little crass even for the most jaded reader. Marina, the reader concludes, is not a true revolutionary; she is tossed like flotsam by great events, and the novel would benefit were she more of a participant. Although Alexandra Kollontai's own free, dramatic love life shocked not just the bourgeoisie but also other revolutionaries, she still disapproved of precisely the kind of casual promiscuity in which Marina engages. In publicity materials, Fitch reveals her own lofty aspirations in her declared worship of Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment": "I opened it, and there was my world." Yet somewhere in the middle of its 800 pages, this novel loses any semblance of her 19th-century forebear's sense of narrative control. That said, the feral descriptions of sex provide some of the novel's most amusing, if decidedly un-Dostoyevskian, moments. Amid public turmoil, the protagonist's personal life spins wildly out of control. SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE'S most recent history book is "The Romanovs: 1613-1918." His latest novel, "Red Sky at Noon," will be published in January.