Nestled between Scandinavia and the Slavic lands, Catholicism and Orthodoxy, Prussia and Russia, between fascism, capitalism and communism, the Baltic states – Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia – have had a front-row seat to the territorial and ideological battles of European history.
As conflict between Russia and the EU heats up again, British journalist Oliver Moody argues that the region has never been so relevant yet also so understudied. The Berlin correspondent for The Times of London published Baltic: The Future of Europe in March, and gave us five book recommendations for a crash course in understanding both the politics and people of the region.
Robert K. Massie – Peter the Great: His Life and World
The best place to start on the Baltic world is with the historical figure who did more than anyone else to shape it. Tsar Peter I, one of Vladimir Putin’s rhetorical lodestars, single-handedly turned Russia into a major European power at the dawn of the 18th century by founding St Petersburg, breaking the Swedish empire and conquering the Baltic provinces, as they were back then. Massie’s classic biography is a whopper but written with so much flair that you barely notice its prodigious scope.
- Peter the Great: His Life and World by Robert K. Massie is available from Bloomsbury Publishing, details.
Czesław Miłosz – Beginning with My Streets: Essays and Recollections
The Nobel prize-winning Polish poet, born in 1911, grew up in a world that is almost unimaginably distant from the present: a dazzlingly multi-ethnic and multilingual Vilnius full of Jewish rabbinical scholars, Belarussian merchants, Russian soldiers and polonised Lithuanians.
That world was torn apart in Miłosz’s youth but lived on in his poetry of exile. It comes back from the dead in this entrancing volume of essays, released in Polish in 1985, which also includes a chillingly far-sighted exchange of letters with the Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova on the future of Europe.
- Beginning with My Streets: Essays and Recollections by Czesław Miłosz is available from ernster, details.
Aliide Naylor – The Shadow in the East: Vladimir Putin and the New Baltic Front
Naylor, a British-Estonian journalist and Russia expert, has spent years traversing the Baltic states, covering everything from the local pagan revival to high geopolitics. The result is a charismatic, carefully balanced and deeply knowledgeable portrait of the three countries and how they have wrested control of their own destinies from Moscow. Unusually for the genre, she pays as close attention to Baltic culture and the lives of ordinary residents as he does to security questions.
- The Shadow in the East: Vladimir Putin and the New Baltic Front by Aliide Naylor is available from Bloomsbury Publishing, details.
Aldis Purs – Baltic Facades: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania Since 1945
Less a conventional history of the Baltic states than a series of meditations on their identities, this is one of the most insightful and probing introductions to the subject in recent years. Purs, a Latvian historian based in Seattle, teases out the fiercely distinctive features of three countries that are so often casually lumped together. He is admirably frank about their failures and does not shy away from the darker historical episodes that are frequently glossed over, including local collaboration in the Holocaust.
- Baltic Facades: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania Since 1945 by Aldis Purs is available from Reaktion, details.
Johannes Bobrowski – Shadow Lands: Selected Poems
One of postwar Germany’s greatest lyrical poets, Bobrowski was born only six years after and a few miles apart from Miłosz, but his life could scarcely have followed a more different trajectory. Repulsed by his experience in the Wehrmacht, he spent four years in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp and then moved to the DDR, where he wrote exquisitely delicate elegies to the lost landscapes of the southern Baltic and their armies of the dead. The violence of the 20th century appears in his work only as flickers of unease – a trickle of blood in a river, an axe blade falling from the sky – but it suffuses everything he wrote.
- Shadow Lands: Selected Poems by Johannes Bobrowski (trans. by Ruth & Matthew Mead) is available from Carcanet Press, details.
- Baltic: The Future of Europe by Oliver Moody is available from Griffin Books, details.
