I have a motor but spare the gas when I can. I add it to a rockfish in my pail and row back to shore. I pull in a shining perch, shockingly alive. We say dusha, meaning not just the spiritual entity but also the person himself.Ī tug on the line. Though to say “soul” here is already wrong. The voice of the soul is not so easily translated. My English is good enough for the little stories I publish in pulp magazines, but for poetry one needs one’s native tongue. Why don’t you write in English, Marina? asks my friend Elizabeth. Those who love poetry, even my unreadable foreign brand, are a tender breed. No liquor on the premises just now-though it will come soon, down from San Francisco. In a few minutes, I will beach my boat on the pebbly shore and give him his due-we’ll share a bottle of homebrew, or perhaps he comes with a flask. I don’t complain, there are shutters to block out a storm, and an iron stove with a solid pipe. It’s only five dollars, the shack’s not built for winter. I have the money in a cigar box back in my cabin, most of it anyway. I watch the lanky form of my landlord’s son crossing the shingle, coat collar up, stopping by to collect rents. All one needs is a rented cabin, a decent stove, a small boat, a garden gone to seed for winter. If I knew him better I’d tell him the danger of trusting to solid things. The slow labor of the poet building himself a stone house at the cove’s south end makes for mild entertainment. No boys and girls play on the deserted beach now, only a few stoic fishermen huddle on upturned buckets. However, even though the book is well researched, the overlong narrative peters out.ROCKING ON THE RAZOR-MUSSELED bay, lulled by the sleepy toll of buoy bells, the music of rigging, the eloquent stanzas of the waves, I wait for news from the sea. The resilient Marina has much in common with the modern heroines of the author's previous books and is a protagonist worth following.

After a series of misadventures, including sexual enslavement, passing herself off as a boy, and running off with Kolya (now an enemy of the state), Marina finally finds sanctuary at her family's country estate, which has been taken over by a spiritualist cult.

With her friends, Jewish Mina and radical Varvara, she is swept up in the first wave of revolutionary fervor, for which her father kicks her out of the house.

She loses her virginity to a friend, Kolya Shurov, on leave from his regiment, and falls in love with an impoverished fellow poet, Gena Kuriakin. Through her eyes, readers see the deprivations caused by World War I, the ouster of the czar, and the rise of the Bolsheviks. In 1916 Petrograd, 16-year-old Marina Dmitrievna Makarova is an aspiring poet from a well-to-do background. In a break with her contemporary fiction, Fitch (White Oleander) has written an epic bildungsroman about a girl who lives through the Russian Revolution.

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