Christopher Moseley, ed.
From Baltic Shores. Short Stories
Chester Springs: Dufour Editions, 1995. Pp. 264. $24.00
Reviewed by Diana Spokiene

From Baltic Shores is a very elegant collection of short stories and should be of interest to English-speaking readers who are willing to go beyond the boundaries of their traditional geography, history, and culture. The volume contains twenty contemporary stories from the countries along the Baltic seashores, including the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Sweden, and Finland and those that have reclaimed their independence from the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, that is, the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Most of the writers whose works are chosen for this anthology are still relatively young and their works have heretofore not appeared in English translation. They include Suzanne Brøgger, Svend Åge Madsen, Dorrit Willumsen (Denmark); Einar Maasik, Mati Unt, Arvo Valton (Estonia); Orvokki Autio, Bo Carpelan, Rosa Liksom, Eeva Tikka (Finland); Alberts Bels, Valentins Jacobsons, Aija Volodze, Martins Zelmenis (Latvia); Juozas Aputis, Romualdas Granauskas, Romualdas Lankauskas (Lithuania); Göran Tunström, Per Gunnar Evander, Marie Hermanson (Sweden).

Reading these stories is to make one’s way through life in the “lands on the shores of the Baltic, both urban and rural” (16), to experience journeys of people who reconstitute their past and present, to enter both the landscape of history and memory and the changing landscape that is accommodating a new Western outlook. The story “The Fatherland Is in Danger,” written by Valentins Jacobsons, a Latvian writer who was deported to Siberia and who spent the years from 1941 to 1956 in detention, is based on personal memories of a life spent in Russia’s prison camps. The story depicts the deep moral degradation of the Soviet regime and shows “what Soviet power means” (168) to innocent people. “I Live as I Write and I Write as I Live,” written by the Danish author Suzanne Brøgger, portrays rural life as it is typical for Denmark and for the Scandinavian countries in general. It is the life of a “small people” who have managed to keep their distinctive cultural features—including their language—“while at the same time being open to world culture” (35).

In his brief introduction, the editor of this anthology, Christopher Moseley, who works for BBC World Service and who has, for many years, translated works from Swedish, Finnish, and Latvian, provides the reader with the historical, political, and literary contexts in which literature from Scandinavian and Baltic countries has to be placed. With the exception of Sweden, none of these countries has ever been a great power. Over the centuries, they have drawn on foreign political and cultural influences, mostly from Germany and Poland. Until the end of the First World War, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were ruled by czarist Russia, and except for a part of Finland they were once again occupied by the Soviet Union at the beginning of the Second World War. Therefore, the Baltic nations were often ignored or “dismissed by outsiders as merely a part, at best an adjunct, of Russia” (8). However, as Moseley points out, these “conservative, pious, reserved and hard-working farming nations” (9) succeed in preserving their folk traditions and their languages down to the days of their own national independence.

In the Scandinavian and Baltic countries fiction writing is a relatively recent phenomenon. The genre of short fiction established itself only around the turn of the twentieth century. Few of these early short stories have been translated into English and most remain “a closed book” to the wider English-speaking readership. From Baltic Shores is therefore all the more a welcome edition. The book promises to encourage Scandinavian and Baltic authors to publish their works outside their own borders and is bound to “whet the English-speaking reader’s appetite for more” (16).