20 - Hubert Butler and nationalism

Summary

One of the most poignant, yet unsettling, of Hubert Butler's essays is his short evocation of the social ambiance of Riga Strand in 1930 which stands at the head of his second Lilliput collection, The Children of Drancy (1988). A text of the Great War's aftermath, it reminds one of the atmospherics of the opening section of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, published eight years earlier, with a cosmopolitan caste of Eastern Europeans cast up on a shore where history had so recently been at its terrible full tide. Eliot's poem had been moodily attentive to the déraciné voices of those left behind as the waters of empire subsided, following the cataclysm of 1914–18. Butler, in ‘Riga Strand in 1930’, brings more of a realist's eye to social anomalies to be observed in the young and fragile Latvian republic that had carved out a temporary space and peace for itself after the deluge. For, Butler remarks (intrigued by a social mix lost on departing Russian officers and merchants frustrated by ‘the petty officialdom of a young nation, proud of its new independence and snatching at all opportunities of asserting it’):

All the same Riga Strand must have a fascination for more leisured visitors, who have time to be interested in the past and the future of the small republics which rose from the ruins of the Russian Empire. It is the holiday ground not only for the Letts but for all the newly liberated peoples of the Baltic. There one may meet Estonians and Finns, Lithuanians and Poles, bathing side by side with Germans, Russians and Swedes, who were once their masters.