CHIMES OF A LOST CATHEDRAL

The second installment of a young poet’s trials in war-torn
Russia, 1919-1921.

In another massive tome, Fitch (The Revolution of Marina M.,
2017, etc.) picks up where she left off—her heroine, Marina, once a bourgeois
princess in a refined intellectual family in Petrograd, is now 19, pregnant,
and desperately seeking work, shelter, and proletarian papers in the outlying
burg of Tikhvin. Not long after she gets herself situated, her lusty nature
gets her in trouble again—and then her long-lost poet husband (not the father
of the child, unfortunately) rolls into town on an agit-prop train. Rescued
from rural tedium, she’s off with the actors, sailors, and soldiers riding the
rails. Up on the roof of one of the cars, she glories in a “soar of spirits I
never expected to feel again.…Ah, the rush, the sweep of the horizon, this
enormous country headed into its future! I felt like I was riding time itself,
the sun on my face, the freshness of the fields, the great green expanse of
Russia in the blue bowl of her heavens.” This will be one of her only happy
moments in more than 700 pages of tumultuous plot, but no matter what grisly
doom and miserable fate befall her, Marina continues to think big, in swathes
of grand prose and plenty of quoted poetry. After she gives birth, she makes
her way back to Petrograd, a city starving, collapsing, and writhing in agony.
But on the plus side, she meets all the great writers of the period and is
embraced as a promising new talent. The writer and activist Maxim Gorky plays a
major role in the story; Blok, Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Gumilev, and
many others are also on the scene. This part of the book seems a bit special interest
for the general reader of historical fiction but will be a treat for fans of
Russian literature. Since the first volume began with a prologue set in 1932
and this one only gets us to 1921, one wonders if Marina’s story will end here.