To the West of the Bug: diaries from the borderlands

This book is a unique anthropological report. It consists of the author's diaries and travel notes collected during the author's trip to Poland during 2015-2018. Each chapter of the book is a personal story from the daily life of people on different sides of the border: administrative, religious, ethnic, and others. These stories reveal that the reality of daily life in local communities on the periphery is much more complex than the official versions of national histories in neighboring states. Voices of ordinary and not ordinary people, hints, feelings, silence - all this forms a thin and vulnerable fabric of human everyday life, often invisible and incomprehensible.

The purpose of this book is to talk about these people and the challenges they face every day, and to teach us to be more tolerant and open to others, to conversations about a shared unbridged past, to a diversity of voices.