The book by the famous poet and philologist Tomas Venclova, "Borderland", includes selected journalistic articles and essays written over the past forty years. Among the topics that Tomas Venclova reflects on are the fate of unofficial culture and the moral choice of a creative person in a totalitarian state; the experience of internal and external emigration; the future of Lithuania as part of the European Union and a neighbor of Putin's Russia; Polish-Lithuanian political and interethnic relations. The book is supplemented by memories of Yuri Lotman, Efim Etkind, Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Milosz.

"Yuri Lotman, whom I consider my teacher, said that the elementary and most important link in any narrative, what we call an event, is always associated with overcoming some kind of border or threshold. And human life is also a kind of narrative. It is not only a question of geographical borders, of course, but also of social and similar ones, and of borders in time, and finally of the border between life and death. The global experience is one continuous borderland: life on this borderland forces one to constantly cross borders, to tirelessly fight isolation. This will not necessarily make the world monotonous: borders will remain in order to preserve individual beauty, but they will never, I hope, be insurmountable. We know that border situations can be fruitful, but they can also give rise to disputes, and even irreconcilable hatred, and the desire to strengthen old walls or build new ones. Alas, there are many examples of this: perhaps more in our part of the global world, in Central Europe, than anywhere else. But this can be resisted" (Tomas Venclova).