A Baltic travelogue unearths a forgotten past

The Glass Wall. By Max Egremont. Picador; 320 pages; £25. To be published in America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in September; $30

THE BALTIC states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania once seemed to have disappeared as utterly as Atlantis. The collapse of the Soviet Union put them back on the map. As Max Egremont writes in his elegiac account of ties between the past and present, “the 1990s brought a chance at last to discover a world that you thought had been closed for ever. History and memory took on a new bright dimension, as if a window had been suddenly wiped clean.”

In fact locals remember the Soviet past all too clearly. But the author’s voyage of discovery in these supposedly unknown lands sails over such quibbles. The book is confidently written, featuring reportage interwoven with his own and other writers’ literary and genealogical insights.

“Max Egremont” is a deceptively simple pen-name. In his other life the author is John Max Henry Scawen Wyndham, the 7th Baron Leconfield and the 2nd Baron Egremont; he lives in Petworth House, one of the stateliest homes in Britain. This may explain, but does not excuse, his overemphasis on the region’s long-departed aristocracy, the Baltic German barons who for two centuries ran Estonia and Latvia as provinces of the Russian...