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. Afterward he goes back off to war, but in feverish Petrograd, revolution seethes. 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. 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. Women in this milieu endured prison sentences and Siberian exile but also enjoyed love affairs with male revolutionaries (some of whom they married). 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. 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. 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. 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, red-haired and curvaceous.
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 coming-of-age of a quintessential revolutionary heroine dovetails with the events of October 1917. “I was in love with the Future, in love with the idea of Fate.
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