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Frontiers: From the Arctic to the Aegean
256 pages, Hardcover
First published October 3, 1985
5 people want to read
About the author
Adam Nicolson
63 books225 followersAdam Nicolson writes a celebrated column for The Sunday Telegraph. His books include Sissinghurst, God’s Secretaries, When God Spoke English, Wetland, Life in the Somerset Levels, Perch Hill, Restoration, and the acclaimed Gentry. He is winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and the British Topography Prize and lives on a farm in Sussex.
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March 12, 2023SUMMARY - I occasionally lost track with Nicolson's metaphor-heavy prose, which in places was as ill-defined as a USSR map. Overall, though, a hazily-unfiltered view of a 28 year-old's encounter with the iron curtain.
________
By bus, sleeper train, and in latterly after his wife gives birth in the interval, a part II motorbike journey, Nicolson skirts the iron curtain of mid-1980s Europe. In the east he finds a political frontier; in the west (Berlin) a passé backdrop to intellectual partying. Generally the actual line is just out of view, but throughout, it looms, unforgettable.
Nicolson is the grandson of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. His father was an equally-prolific author of non-fiction, and both penned titles on Sinsinghurst. It is my delving into past Somerset Maugham Award winners that brought this one to light, and as themes for travelogue go, this socio-political glimpse into the continent of my childhood is right up my street.
I wanted to access the differences between west and east, with all the sensory as well as intellectual contrasts. The desire was only partly met. Nicolson's prose often gets hazy with metaphor. Facts punctuate, with dates broadcast-sewn at intervals (the potted history of Lithuanian nationhood on page 92 particularly stands out) but the Nicolson's direct personal experiences oddly seem much more distant. Taking Lithuania as an example, we are told 'events become complicated, do not expect to understand them'. However, the factual history Nicolson then relayed was a whole lot clearer than his walks in the 'fat spurt' of Vilnius, with its furniture-cum-milk-bar churches, and taxi driver chats. The last finished the section, telling us about a man who 'got spliced... and was not a taxist never mind'. What does that even mean?
Generally it's possible to broadly keep the thread. There are lucid moments of scene-setting, especially towards the end where pastoral scenes irradiate a sense of summer travel through eastern bloc farmland. There is reportage that captures moments of condensed conversation, often of longing for different places, or reconciliation with the reality of stasis. There is also scholarship underpinning the description, such as the factoids on the lexical origin of places (e.gs, Murmansk and Tallinn). To know the links to the Normans and Danes, as with the border-drawing antics of Stalin, Churchill et al., is to more deeply meditate on the idea of 'frontier'.
The term 'frontier' is explained as being distinct from 'border', as it conveys a harder-edged politically-maintained creation. The preface was among the most interesting parts to me, as its description of a geographical 'crush zone' dictated in part by geography prefigures the deterministic arguments of the recent best-seller, 'Prisoners of Geography '. (It's worth noting that Nicolson was himself a geographer.). The rest of the book raises points where politics and people have moderated or broken these rules. Poland doesn't get treated, but Lithuania, Hungary and frontier towns in Greece tell the same story of countries on the shoreline. Army boots march back and forth like water in the tidal zone.
It's a classic Grand Tour, mixing UC Regency toff dilettantism with Kerouac stylings (not that the author makes an ego trip out of his knowingly modest Honda 125cc). It's also a young man's book. For all the erudition on history, it is sometimes obvious that this was a twenty-eight year-old writing. He writes well about an Auschwitz-survivor (who doffs the cap, and still keeps his old striped suit), but I winced when he said he'd pressed the once emaciated survivor for details. He makes other faux-pas when asking about national identity, but fair play to Nicolson for recording it.
I don't ultimately feel like I learned a lot about 1980s Eastern Europe, but to some extent that is maybe the point. A lot of Nicolson's experiences are about being shut out. He is rebuffed at borders by officialdom, but also spun double-bluff untruths by suspected undercover chaperones. Jokes may or may be told by interlocutors with impassive faces. Even when allowed into the innermost sanctums of people's homes, what he found was often food, contraband or pictures that tell an equivocal story of self-interest, mixed pasts, and uncertain futures.
It's a confusion compounded by Nicolson's indirect and image-muddied writing, but there is sense to be found. The factoids throughout the book are frequently interesting, and the snowdrifts of words take shape to outline distinct countries and cultures. Like the wonky indirectness of the iron curtain itself, Nicolson's book is built on solid foundations, and if meandering, nevertheless a strong enough testament to its time.
________
By bus, sleeper train, and in latterly after his wife gives birth in the interval, a part II motorbike journey, Nicolson skirts the iron curtain of mid-1980s Europe. In the east he finds a political frontier; in the west (Berlin) a passé backdrop to intellectual partying. Generally the actual line is just out of view, but throughout, it looms, unforgettable.
Nicolson is the grandson of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. His father was an equally-prolific author of non-fiction, and both penned titles on Sinsinghurst. It is my delving into past Somerset Maugham Award winners that brought this one to light, and as themes for travelogue go, this socio-political glimpse into the continent of my childhood is right up my street.
I wanted to access the differences between west and east, with all the sensory as well as intellectual contrasts. The desire was only partly met. Nicolson's prose often gets hazy with metaphor. Facts punctuate, with dates broadcast-sewn at intervals (the potted history of Lithuanian nationhood on page 92 particularly stands out) but the Nicolson's direct personal experiences oddly seem much more distant. Taking Lithuania as an example, we are told 'events become complicated, do not expect to understand them'. However, the factual history Nicolson then relayed was a whole lot clearer than his walks in the 'fat spurt' of Vilnius, with its furniture-cum-milk-bar churches, and taxi driver chats. The last finished the section, telling us about a man who 'got spliced... and was not a taxist never mind'. What does that even mean?
Generally it's possible to broadly keep the thread. There are lucid moments of scene-setting, especially towards the end where pastoral scenes irradiate a sense of summer travel through eastern bloc farmland. There is reportage that captures moments of condensed conversation, often of longing for different places, or reconciliation with the reality of stasis. There is also scholarship underpinning the description, such as the factoids on the lexical origin of places (e.gs, Murmansk and Tallinn). To know the links to the Normans and Danes, as with the border-drawing antics of Stalin, Churchill et al., is to more deeply meditate on the idea of 'frontier'.
The term 'frontier' is explained as being distinct from 'border', as it conveys a harder-edged politically-maintained creation. The preface was among the most interesting parts to me, as its description of a geographical 'crush zone' dictated in part by geography prefigures the deterministic arguments of the recent best-seller, 'Prisoners of Geography '. (It's worth noting that Nicolson was himself a geographer.). The rest of the book raises points where politics and people have moderated or broken these rules. Poland doesn't get treated, but Lithuania, Hungary and frontier towns in Greece tell the same story of countries on the shoreline. Army boots march back and forth like water in the tidal zone.
It's a classic Grand Tour, mixing UC Regency toff dilettantism with Kerouac stylings (not that the author makes an ego trip out of his knowingly modest Honda 125cc). It's also a young man's book. For all the erudition on history, it is sometimes obvious that this was a twenty-eight year-old writing. He writes well about an Auschwitz-survivor (who doffs the cap, and still keeps his old striped suit), but I winced when he said he'd pressed the once emaciated survivor for details. He makes other faux-pas when asking about national identity, but fair play to Nicolson for recording it.
I don't ultimately feel like I learned a lot about 1980s Eastern Europe, but to some extent that is maybe the point. A lot of Nicolson's experiences are about being shut out. He is rebuffed at borders by officialdom, but also spun double-bluff untruths by suspected undercover chaperones. Jokes may or may be told by interlocutors with impassive faces. Even when allowed into the innermost sanctums of people's homes, what he found was often food, contraband or pictures that tell an equivocal story of self-interest, mixed pasts, and uncertain futures.
It's a confusion compounded by Nicolson's indirect and image-muddied writing, but there is sense to be found. The factoids throughout the book are frequently interesting, and the snowdrifts of words take shape to outline distinct countries and cultures. Like the wonky indirectness of the iron curtain itself, Nicolson's book is built on solid foundations, and if meandering, nevertheless a strong enough testament to its time.
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