AUG - The Revolution of Marina M

August review for Book Riot's Read Harder 2018: The Revolution of Marina M by Janet Fitch, 2017. [BRICS country category - Russia]


{note--there will be general spoilers...}

The Revolution of Marina M is one of those books whose covers I saw a lot and stuck in my head until I finally picked it out. (Can we talk about the infuriating placement of library bar codes though? Since when is finding somewhere not blocking some cover content so hard??) A straight-backed, red-haired girl in profile, arms folded confidently and fingers splayed as she grips her own arm. This book tells the story of Marina, an upper-class Russian daughter of a government official who is mixed up (as is all of Russia, really) in the 1917 Russian Revolution and the downfall of the tsar. Fitch plots the revolution through the eyes of one sixteen-year-old girl, seeing purely what she sees of the revolution, how it affects her personal bubble, rather than the large-scale international repercussions.

Marina has occasion to be so many different women throughout her own personal revolution. She starts as the socialite and slips into the revolution by supplying her radical best friend with information about her father's dealings. She is a spy and a starving poet and a factory worker and a prisoner and a wife and a con woman and a follower and a revolutionary and an individual. She says often near the end, that she is "tired of Rooms." She goes on to tell how the rooms defined her relationships to the different people, different lovers, different parts of her life. Her childhood apartments and her relationship with her parents; the Poverty Artel where she moves in with her destitute poet lover and sleeps fully clothed and louse-ridden; the room where Kolya, her childhood crush, takes her when he returns and they stay for three nights of sex and food and abandon; the apartment where she is imprisoned by a mobster; the planetarium to which she escapes and spends a summer as a mute peasant girl; the prison where she is taken when picked up by the police; her best friend's room where she gives in and sleeps with a woman to repay her for saving her life; the old country house that she escapes to only to find it has been overrun by her mother's new-age cult friends. Each room is tied to a person: both a person who controls Marina and the person Marina is in that room, and on the last page of the novel, we end on Marina leaving, walking out into the air and a new start.

I think I could talk forever about my love for Marina's poetics. She uses phrases like "loping iambs and foot-dragging dactyls" to describe the works she immerses herself in. She talks of the difference of placing "word next to word" and creating meaning versus simply stringing sounds together, how old stories make her feel and how poets make the most excellent spies. Contrary to what one might think, Marina's revolution does not come with the publication of her work: in fact, that is where she starts, with her father arranging a small collection of her work, and she has to fight to keep it burning inside her as the revolution threatens to tear it out with her heart with every new tragedy. Not to mention her fire, her sexuality, her verve--I found that I met Marina as a friend, though our stories are worlds and years apart.

Janet Fitch wrote at the end of the book, "research was the oxygen in the water of this novel," and that thrilled me. I have long harbored a desire for writing historical fiction, as it takes a story like this to really cement history for me. I like to learn history through a person's eyes who has lived it, not by memorizing dates in a textbook. Never again will I forget that the Russian Revolution took place in 1917, and I am thrilled to learn that it is only one half of a two-part tale so I can learn more! Now that I'm not in school where I have to prove my knowledge in history essay exams (which give me terrible anxiety), I think I'd like to try my hand at writing a historical fiction project of my own. Marina has inspired me.