Baltic Souls: Remarkable Life Stories from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania

A monumental journey through Baltic history and culture, in which we encounter well-known personalities and forgotten ones, and a disconcerting picture of Europe in the twentieth century.

From 1999 to 2010, Jan Brokken explored life stories in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The result was his masterly Baltic Souls, available here for the first time in English. Brokken uncovered the stories of famous artists and writers such as Mark Rothko, Sergei Eisenstein, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Lipchitz, who were all born in the regions bordering the Baltic Sea before leaving to build their work abroad, spreading a bit of the Baltic soul across Europe and America.

Less well known were the stories of people such as the Rozes and their family bookstore in Riga, or the von Wrangels, the ultimate descendants of the Baltic barons. Or the story of the titanic struggle that violist Gidon Kremer fought with his father in Riga, who was burdened by the death of thirty-five family members in concentration camps. Or the story of Loreta Asanavičiūte, who was run over by a Russian tank in 1991.

It is this melancholy imbued with fatalism, this vitality forged by the upheavals of history, this appetite for reading, music, and art, that enriches the portraits painted by Jan Brokken.

Conducted in the style of a travel diary where chance encounters and biographical sketches mingle, Baltic Souls makes us feel the cruelty and violence of an era, but also the tenderness and solidarity of an entire people, united across borders.

Jan Brokken is a writer of fiction, travel, and literary nonfiction. He gained international fame with The Rainbird, The Blind Passengers, My Little Madness, In the House of the Poet, The Reprisal, The Cossack Garden, and Baltic Souls, and his books have been translated into twenty languages. Brokken has won numerous prizes for his work, including the Golden Quill 2023 (a prize for his significant contribution to Dutch writing and culture) and the Bruce Chatwin Lifetime Achievement Award 2023 for his entire oeuvre. Four of his books have been made into movies; two are in production.

David Doherty is based in Amsterdam, where he has been working as a Dutch-to-English translator for over twenty years. His literary work includes novels by award-winning authors Marente de Moor, Peter Terrin, and Alfred Birney. Summer Brother, his translation of Jaap Robben's novel Zomervacht, won the 2021 Vondel Translation Prize and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize.