![]() ![]() There are few “ burzhui niceties” at the novel’s start, when we find Marina in the outskirts of Russia, in Tikhvin, some 200 kilometers away from St. ![]() That violence has eroded civilization in Marina’s voice, Fitch tells us that everyone was “coarsening like abused beasts,” driven by the instinct for survival to think “only of food, and sex, and sleep, of warmth and safety”: “No more morality, none of those burzhui niceties.” Those who have read Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry, or Aleksandr Blok’s long poem The Twelve, which both open up a terrifying window onto the brutality unleashed by the Russian Revolution, will be prepared for the novel’s frightening setting. The second volume of Fitch’s great investigation of one of modern history’s greatest cataclysms through the eyes of a young woman finds the pregnant Marina Makarova in the midst of the vicious violence of the Russian Civil War. ![]() We are plunged back into a world of furious beauty, sprawling, majestic landscapes, and erotically charged and traumatic encounters, with life and love hanging in the balance. CHIMES OF A LOST CATHEDRAL, Janet Fitch’s brilliant sequel to The Revolution of Marina M., picks up right where the previous volume leaves off and continues at the same pace. ![]()
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