Revolution of Marina M. (Fitch)

The Revolution of Marina M. 
Janet Fitch, 2017
Little, Brown
816 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316022064


Summary
From the mega-bestselling author of White Oleander, a sweeping historical saga of the Russian Revolution, as seen through the eyes of one young woman.

St. Petersburg, New Year's Eve, 1916.
Marina Makarova is a young woman of privilege who aches to break free of the constraints of her genteel life, a life about to be violently upended by the vast forces of history.

Swept up on these tides, Marina will join the marches for workers' rights, fall in love with a radical young poet, and betray everything she holds dear, before being betrayed in turn.

As her country goes through almost unimaginable upheaval, Marina's own coming-of-age unfolds, marked by deep passion and devastating loss, and the private heroism of an ordinary woman living through extraordinary times.

This is the epic, mesmerizing story of one indomitable woman's journey through some of the most dramatic events of the last century. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—November 9, 1956
• Where—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Reed College
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles

Janet Fitch is an American author most famously known her 1999 novel White Oleander, which was chosen as an Oprah's Book Club pick the year it came out. The novel was adapted to film in 2002. Other novels followed: Paint it Black in 2006 and The Revolution of Marina M. in 2017.

Janet Fitch was born in Los Angeles, a third-generation native, and grew up in a family of voracious readers. She is a graduate of Reed College, located in Portland, Oregon. As an undergraduate, she had decided to become a historian, attracted to its powerful narratives, the scope of events, the colossal personalities, and the potency and breadth of its themes.

But when she won a student exchange to Keele University in England, where her passion for Russian history led her, she awoke in the middle of the night on her twenty-first birthday with the revelation she wanted to write fiction.

Currently, Fitch is a faculty member in the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California, where she teaches fiction.

Two of her favorite authors are Fyodor Dostoevsky and Edgar Allan Poe. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/14/2017.)

Book Reviews
[A] vast, ambitious historical tale.… Marina, the reader [eventually] concludes, is not a true revolutionary; she is tossed like flotsam by great events; the the novel would benefit if she were more a participant.… [S]omewhere in the middle of its 800 pages, this novel loses any semblance of [the author's] 19th century forbear's sense of narrative control. That said, the feral descriptions of sex provide some of the novel's most amusing, if decidedly unDostoyevskian, moments.
Simon Sebag Montefiore - New York Times Book Review


[A] question that haunts the story…what is this book about?… Many books, especially those requiring 800 pages of time from their readers, would be undone by the absence of a clear purpose. And yet, astonishingly, The Revolution of Marina M. is hard to put down. Like Marina, it is maddening and flawed. It makes a good many bad decisions. And yet it is charming and lively and, ultimately, worth the time.
Trine Tsouderos - Chicago Tribune


Marina M is a budding 16-year-old poet on the eve of the 1917 October revolution, when the Bolsheviks take power. Fitch creates a virtual magic lantern show of the following three years of turmoil, immersing Marina in each scene. She begins a love affair with Kolya, a mercurial officer secretly involved in the lucrative black market. She moves in with Genya, a poet in a futurist commune. She plays dangerous games with her childhood friend Varvara, who becomes a Cheka commissar. Her father is involved with a counter-revolutionary plot; her mother inspires a spiritualist cult that withdraws into the countryside to escape the Red Terror and cholera epidemic. Marina is by turns adventurous, foolish, romantic, self-destructive and courageous in this extraordinary coming-of-age tale.
Jane Ciabbatari - BBC Culture


[A]n epic bildungsroman.… The resilient Marina has much in common with the modern heroines of the author’s previous books and is a protagonist worth following. However, even though the book is well researched, the overlong narrative peters out.
Publishers Weekly


Fitch captures the epic grandeur of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy…. Yet she also infuses her protagonists with transgressive sexual energy…. Verdict: Readers…will thrill to this narrative of women in love during the cataclysm of war. —Barbara Conaty, Falls Church, VA
Library Journal


Fitch's novel…provides an excellent sense of history's unpredictability and shows how the desperate pursuit of survival leads to morally compromising decisions.… [C]inematic storytelling and Marina's vibrant personality are standout elements in this dramatic novel. —Sarah Johnson
Booklist

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for The Revolution of Marina M. … then take off on your own:

1. Describe Marina. Early on in the novel, she leads a life of privilege, yet she is dissatisfied. Why? What does she want? (Okay, sex...but what else?)  Do you admire her? In what ways does Marina change over the course of the novel?

2. Follow-up to Question 1: Near the beginning of the novel, Marina says,

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.

Do you think she is correct: that the idea of future or fate (which one is she actually referring to … or is it both?) is exciting to the young? As you read through the novel, at what point did fate stop being romantic for Marina? When did the the dogs start to "sink their teeth into [her] calf"? By the end of the novel, has Marina changed? In her outlook? Or in her essential character traits? What, if anything, has she learned?

3. What is the political state of Russia early on in the book? Marina describes history as "the sound of a floor underneath a rotten regime, termite-ridden and ready to fall." She is obviously referring to the government of the Czar. In what way is the regime "rotten" and "ready to fall"?

4. Why are the reforms offered up by Premier Prince Lvov — the promise of freedom of speech and assembly, the right to strike, and elections by ballot — insufficient for the radicals? What causes the provisional government to fail?

5. Talk about the effect that Leon Trotsky has as he addresses the crowd at the Cirque Moderne. Is he a typical demagogue out for power and self-aggrandizement? Or does he offer genuine path of reform for the Russian people?

6. What do you think of Marina's best friend Varvara and their relationship? In the fervor of revolution, was Varvara right or wrong in persuading Marina to spy on her father? And what about her father's outing of his daughter?

7. Describe the conditions of life for the population in the months following the October 17 overthrow? How grim is it?

8. Baron Arkady von Princip. Care to talk about him? What was your experience reading about the S&M he subjects Marina to?

9. Returning to the quotation in Question 2 — about how youthful romanticism can turn into a vicious animal — what do you see as the thematic concern of The Revolution of Marina M.? Is it how young people come of age in the midst of life's trials? Is it what happens to bonds of love and loyalty during social and political upheaval? Is a cautionary tale about how revolutions can turn more repressive than the regimes they replace? Or perhaps it's simply offered as a bird's eye view into one of the great events of the 20th century, one that shaped Western politics for decades to come. Or is it something else?

10. What have you learned about the October 17 Revolution that you did not know before reading Janet Fitch's novel? What surprised you most? What did you find most disturbing, maybe horrifying? Where did you find your sympathies falling: with the victors or the vanquished?

11. The novel is 800 pages long. Too long for you? Do you feel the author made some unnecessary detours in order to ramp up the plot line? Or do Marina's many adventures — as a sex slave, as part of a spiritual cult, living with the astronomers — enhance the story for you, giving it life and color?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution.)

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