BALTIC SOULS

A closely observed study of a region often overlooked, but of critical importance in world history.

Everywhere he goes in the Baltic, the Dutch novelist and essayist Brokken encounters authority, past and present. Arriving in Latvian waters aboard a battered coastal freighter, he’s confronted by suspicious border guards, one of whom asks, “What’s so special about the Baltic?” When he answers, “Mariners say it’s the most beautiful of all the seas,” they discover that Brokken is a writer and deem him to be “crazy, not dangerous.” In Latvia he finds a brilliant cultural legacy, personified, for one, by the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, who credited the Bolshevik Revolution with making him an artist and took up arms against his own father, an anti-Bolshevik engineer who designed some of Riga’s most noteworthy buildings. Riga’s prodigiously accomplished artistic community claims diaspora members in Paul Simon and Bob Dylan, as well as Mikhail Baryshnikov, whose father was a Soviet soldier who, even after Stalin’s death, “continued to hold Stalinist views, which made him doubly hated.” Much of that community was Jewish, destroyed by the Nazis and homegrown anti-Semites during World War II. Similar atrocities occurred in the other present-day republics: Vilnius, Lithuania, once had the largest synagogue in the world, but “ninety-nine of the city’s one hundred shuls were burned to the ground, bombed, smashed to rubble, or…simply demolished.” Small wonder that those who fled Vilnius, including the writer Romain Gary, took care never to mention it. Much of the Baltic’s past is painful, but the future looks hopeful, so long as the republics can remain free of an ever-threatening Russia. Indeed, Brokken writes, even young people in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad are optimistic, hoping that it “would become the Hong Kong of the north…but with greater scope for independence.”

A learned, literate travelogue about a cultural cornucopia.