99 characters
assign("a",1:10); b<<-paste(a,collapse=";"); unlist(lapply(strsplit(b,";")[[1]],function(c)c[[1]]))
Not sure if lapply on strsplit is a negative example but it sure should be.
Returns as a character:
[1] "1" "2" "3" "4" "5" "6" "7" "8" "9" "10"