Border Conditions is the fruit of at least fifteen years of field research by Kevin Platt, an expert on Russian culture with a special interest in poetry. A great value of the book is that Platt relates firsthand knowledge of cultural conditions for Russian speakers in Latvia. He recounts dozens of personal conversations, anecdotes, and observations that are not repeatable by any other scholar researching the same topic. These vignettes reveal intriguing aspects of the state of Russian culture beyond the territorial borders of Russia. It is also notable that Platt speaks both Russian and Latvian, and he does an admirable job explaining the positions of both sides in the “memory wars” that have taken place since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 (although Latvians would probably not appreciate being referred to as an “enclave” within Latvia).

In Platt's account, a border zone is not merely the land on either side of a territorial border. It is an area in which people from different ethnic or linguistic groups hold varying notions of identity and belonging, caught between competing hegemonic narratives of history, empire, nation, and culture. Platt extends his analysis to the global level as well, and places Latvia within the wider overlapping contexts of the capitalist culture of liberal modernity, the general context of post-socialist and post-colonial existence, and the transnational “Russian world,” which itself has contested meanings. The effort by Russian-speakers to maintain a Russian culture within an independent Latvian nation-state also takes place against the backdrop of an aggressive Russian foreign policy, causing heightened concern among Latvians of renewed Russian imperialism. The conflict in Ukraine has also brought new Russian immigrants to Latvia who are fleeing Putin's regime, so the make-up of the Russian-speaking community in Latvia is itself in a state of flux.

Platt's focus is on projects of Russian cultural maintenance and renewal, including the restoration of a monument to Peter the Great, the role of Russian language libraries in Riga, and the work of Orbita, an award winning “multimedia art collective” that engages in “performative translation” projects. Some of these projects embrace the ambiguity of life in a border zone and pose “… a challenge to the ontological foundations of national borders as such” (195). If there is a distinctive Baltic-Russian identity, it is that Russians in Latvia often see themselves as more cultured than Russians in Russia.

To say that the book is theoretically rich would be an understatement. Platt's investigative method is that of “negative dialectics,” pioneered by Theodor Adorno. Other Frankfurt School/New Left/post-modernist thinkers who make an appearance include Etienne Balibar, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Frantz Fanon, and Michel Foucault. Platt writes from a critical tradition in which contributions by authors are referred to as “interventions.” The dense jargon of a practitioner of negative dialectics makes the method itself appear to be a form of performance art at times. Negative dialectics is an open-ended process in which each question leads to further questions. We never seem to arrive at a synthesis.

However, negative dialectics can impose its own limitations on analysis. For example, since this approach rejects the notion of “totality” in history and asserts that all attempts at creating an authoritative account of history are flawed, it maintains that all are equally flawed. All we can do is expose their flaws through endless critique. Totalizing claims must be rejected in toto. But can we not make judgments regarding which account is closer to the truth? Can we not determine whether things are getting better or worse? It is not Platt's purpose to offer such judgments. Indeed, he seems to value topics for their “critical potential.” As he concludes his text, “None of these projects can deliver us to a resting place for critique. Instead, the promise of a view from the border zone lies in the critical productivity of its excess of negativity” (253). And further, “Cultural or critical intervention … will be constrained in both time and space, a flash of insight that disappears or dissolves in the next moment or the next town over … never aspiring to solve all problems everywhere or stitch history together as one, but serving as an allegory for, or a site of translation into, other possible solutions in other times and places” (254).