By Janet Fitch

From: The Los Angeles Times

My new novel debuts on the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, which is also the historical moment of the book. It didn’t take me quite 100 years to write “The Revolution of Marina M.,” but 11 years was long enough.

Unlike my last books, “White Oleander” and “Paint It Black,” set in the ’90s and the ’80s in Los Angeles, I didn’t live through the Russian Revolution. I couldn’t call its subjects and ask, “How did your telephone work in 1917? Could you walk from car to car on a train, or did you have to exit the car and walk back? How easy was it to join the Bolshevik party?”

I did my best. I read hundreds of books—histories, biographies, memoirs. I’m grateful to the libraries at USC, where as an adjunct professor I could borrow books for a semester at a time. As a novelist, my imagination springs from the concrete details, and the writing is only as vivid as my mastery of the time and the place. Russia is foreign enough, but the past too is a country, and it cannot be visited in the flesh.

I once spoke with an eminent historian whose books on the revolution sit at my right hand. Surely, he could clear up some unsolved mysteries — after all, he’d spent his career writing about this period. But he confessed that the kind of detail I was searching for was exactly what the historian clears away to get at the information he considers valuable. Then I understood that a novelist’s meat is a historian’s clutter.