The Border in My Mind

Andriy Lyubka

Artwork by Alice Yu Deng

I was born in Riga, but not “abroad.” At least, that’s what my mother thought. From a formal point of view, she was correct: in the times of the Soviet Union, there were no borders between Ukraine and Latvia, so a Zakarpattian born on the shore of the Baltic Sea was still considered to have been born “at home,” not abroad.

This contradiction became the greatest mystery of my childhood. I grew up in Vynohradiv, a town near two borders—the Hungarian and the Romanian. It turned out that a border existed just twenty minutes from my home, but one did not exist 1,200 kilometers away. My child’s mind refused to accept this, because logically, a border—and therefore abroad—should be something distant. Yet, in my life, it was the opposite.

From an early age, I listened with bated breath to stories about Hungary and Romania. These countries were nearby, yet to a child they seemed full of wonders, exotic, because they were abroad! My imagination painted jungles, prairies, and crocodiles I had read about in Jules Verne. On the other hand, adult conversations about these countries in the 1990s were mundane and entirely devoid of romance: markets, prices, the possibility of buying and selling something. Poverty imposed its own rules: adults traveled to the nearest foreign towns, and sometimes even to Kraków or Yugoslavia, but they never really saw the cities or abroad only the markets near the train stations or the large trading fairs that had grown on the city stadiums. They traveled, seeing nothing, and therefore did not travel at all.

And yet, since adults traveled abroad to earn money, abroad in my imagination appeared rich and luxurious. From there they brought us incredible, colorful things: dyed soft drinks, chewing gum with stickers, exotic fruits that were impossible to find in Vynohradiv. There was the West—modern, developed, innovative. Again, a child’s imagination, unaccustomed to abstract concepts, painted a naïve but fundamentally correct picture: we lived as if in the previous century, while just a few kilometers away, beyond the border, the next century had already arrived. After all, a border separates not only countries and people, it also divides eras, past and future.

Yet enchantment and disappointment always go hand in hand, so it was no surprise that over time I was forced into bitter disillusionment. My fairy-tale notions were swept away down the Tisza River, the longest and most branched tributary of the Danube. Near Vynohradiv, the Tisza becomes the border between Ukraine and Hungary. And once, in my later childhood, I had the chance to look across the river at Hungary and the West.

What a disappointment it was! Hungary had seemed to me something magical, another world, a country from dreams and films. And suddenly, it turned out that the other bank was no different at all. The same trees, grass, sky, and river water lapping the pebbled shore—everything was identical. Yet between these similarities ran a border.

Later, I learned to make use of that border. The thing was, the Tisza was home to Danube salmon—a fish whose catch was prohibited under Ukrainian law. In Hungary, however, it was allowed. So I simply cast my spinning rod farther, past the center of the river, which was defined by the state border. In this way, I was able to catch Danube salmon without violating Ukrainian law. More than that, I even performed a patriotic act—bringing foreign wealth into my own country.

Be that as it may, the border remained closed to me until adulthood. I lived near it, saw the other bank, but for various reasons—not worth mentioning here—I could not reach it. The only thing left to me was to dream.

And my dream grew and strengthened over the years; my impatience increased, and with each passing day, the moment approached when I would finally cross into the magical and unexplored abroad. Yet, strangely, although I seemed fused with the border, the closer I got to its longed-for crossing, the more I began to fear it. The border instilled fear in me, awakened feelings of inferiority. I was afraid that I would not be allowed to pass to the other side.

*

I crossed Ukraine’s western border for the first time on November 5, 2008. I remember the exact date because I took a photo of the passport stamp and saved it. It was—honestly—a huge event for me.

Together with my friend and senior colleague Mykhailo Roshko, I was traveling to Germany to perform at a literary evening in Darmstadt. So, in a way, my first trip abroad happened thanks to poetry: I was carried along, so to speak, by literature. In my passport, a German visa gleamed proudly—valid for exactly eight days, with the right to a single entry. I was ecstatic.

We crossed the Ukrainian Chop border without any problems, and when we drove over the Tisza River—which was the border itself—I nervously lit a cigarette. In my mind, I conjured countless reasons why I might be denied entry. They wouldn’t believe I was a writer because I was too young. For that reason, I had specifically brought along two of my poetry collections, one of which even had my photo on it. They wouldn’t let me through because I had no money. True, I didn’t, but the invitation from the German side stated that they would kindly cover all my expenses and even pay a fee for my performance. In addition, my colleague lent me several hundred in hard currency, just in case I needed to show it to the Hungarian border guards.

Still, none of this seemed reliable to me. Subconsciously, I could not believe they would let me pass. A student living in a dorm and working nowhere? No way! It seemed that only wealthy and reputable people had the right to cross borders. Mykhailo tried to calm me as best he could, while I nervously smoked and prepared to put on a mask of confident cheerfulness in front of the EU border guard. In the end, I was so anxious that I cannot even recall the exact moment when they returned our passports and the barrier rose in front of the car. It seems they hadn’t asked me anything at all. Or maybe they had, but somehow I’d squirmed my way through the questioning. I recall this episode not because it is dear to my memory, but purely for illustrative purposes—as representative of an entire generation of young people who grew up in post-Soviet countries. My peers in EU countries have no fear of borders; they often do not consider a border anything serious. And in this perception lies the mental border between us.

In short, the barrier went up—and Mykhailo drove his Mitsubishi forward. During those eight days, we managed to perform in Darmstadt and visit many countries and cities. We planned our route so that on the way there we would travel the northern arc of an ellipse, and return along the southern. Thus, our journey took us through Hungary, Austria, Germany, Luxembourg, France, Italy, Slovenia, and back to Hungary. Not bad for the first trip of my life.

We visited Budapest, Vienna, Munich, Darmstadt, Luxembourg, Paris, Venice, Ljubljana, and a bunch of smaller towns. But I must admit, none of them impressed me as much as the first kilometers of road after the Hungarian border. From the passenger seat, I took about a hundred photos: every village and town we passed amazed me. Every church seemed like an ancient and exquisite monument. Budapest took my breath away. But with each kilometer, the intensity of impressions dulled, the colors became less vivid—I simply got used to being abroad, and the magic dissipated. That’s why I have fewer photos of Venice than of the first hour driving through the gray, monotonous Hungarian countryside.

After crossing the first—Hungarian—border, we saw no more borders. Signs with country names lined the roads, abandoned checkpoint structures gaped like the skeletons of extinct dinosaurs, but there were no actual dividing lines. For someone who grew up near a border they longed to cross, this was a wonder. A wonder that grew into a dream: that one day we, too, would live in this blessed world without borders. Let’s attribute my exhilaration to the shock of that first real journey.

During those incredible eight days, it felt as though we had traveled the entire world, but we had to return. My visa allowed me to stay in the EU only until the end of November 12. That afternoon, we wandered around Ljubljana, and by evening, a thick fog had settled on the road in Hungary. We had to slow down, and we reached the border in the very last moments before midnight. A few minutes later, my German visa would have lost its magical power—and our car would have faced the fate of the coach from a famous fairy tale. Or at least, the “bear seal”—as they call the stamp prohibiting entry into the European Union—would have been stamped on me for sure. But we made it in time.

*

I had dreamed of traveling abroad for so long and waited for it so eagerly that, after my first trip, I couldn’t stop. Since then, I have traveled a lot and for long periods: I’ve been to around forty countries and spent more than four years abroad in total. It seems this restlessness, similar to dromomania—the compulsive desire to wander, which plagued Hryhoriy Skovoroda, with whom I share a birthday—was fueled by a subconscious desire to conquer my fear of borders.

It was difficult. I crossed borders hundreds of times, but I was always anxious, expecting that this time they would turn me back. My documents, visas, money, and the purpose of my trips were all in order, yet the fear seemed to have burrowed deep inside me.

Interestingly, I belong to the last generation born in the Soviet Empire, yet the Iron Curtain still managed to become an important part of my mentality. I feared the border because I came from that part of the world where the border is more important than the individual.

Similarly, during my first trips to other countries, I was afraid to speak to police officers; it seemed unheard of that a uniformed person could be asked for help or directions. Soviet consciousness warned: a person in uniform could beat you and cause harm, because power and law are always on their side—such people must be avoided. So, during my first walks through European capitals, I constantly felt that the police were watching me, and I expected that they would stop me, check my documents, and deport me back to Ukraine.

I only managed to overcome this fear because of a certain problem. After the Euromaidan, I returned to live in Uzhhorod and bought a car registered in Slovakia. Due to the lobbying of Ukrainian oligarchs, used cars in Ukraine cost almost three times as much as cars in neighboring Slovakia. And since Uzhhorod is located right on the border with that country (one street of the city ends at a barrier), a car with Slovak license plates from the town of Michalovce seemed like a logical, convenient, and economical choice. After all, I didn’t have much money at the time, so I could either buy a Slovak car or walk everywhere.

The problem was that the law considered my car “transit.” I didn’t have to register it if I left Ukraine every five days. In practice, it looked like this: I didn’t even enter the EU—I just handed my passport to the Ukrainian customs officer, who stamped that I had exited Ukraine. Then I drove a hundred meters, turned around in the neutral zone, and reentered Ukraine.

I had to cross the border so frequently—every fifth day!—that eventually I got used to it, as if it were a routine. Local customs officers and smugglers, who are often hard to distinguish, began to recognize me. In this way, thanks to the Ukrainian oligarchs, who tried to force citizens to buy only domestic cars through high excise taxes and customs duties, I killed two birds with one stone: I gradually overcame my fear of borders, and one day, while standing in line at a customs window, I came up with an idea for a novel about smuggling.

I realized I had stopped fearing the border for the first time at the checkpoint between Macedonia and Greece, when a descendant of the Hellenes refused to let me bring through a jar of homemade ajvar (something like a spicy pepper spread) that I had bought at the market in Skopje the day before. The officer demanded I throw it away, because it was nonstandardized, of unknown origin, and produced under unknown conditions—unfit for import into the EU. I was so outraged that I yelled at the border guard in every language I knew, threatened to eat the ajvar right in front of him, and cursed all the rules and regulations in the world.

Eventually, stunned by my reaction, the officer gave in, and I entered Greece with the jar of ajvar. At the first turn after customs, I realized: I was no longer afraid of borders.

But the fear sometimes returned—like a phantom pain, sudden and intense. This happened one summer at the border between Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina near Dubrovnik. The officer, inspecting my car, found a folding knife in the door pocket. I used it to cut sweet melons and watermelons when I stopped in the shade and laid out a summer snack on the hood. The officer, however, cited laws and claimed that a knife within the driver’s reach is considered a weapon. He said it could lead to criminal liability and prison. Yet, he also said, it was clear I was a simple and decent young man, certainly not a criminal, but he didn’t even know how to help me in this hopeless situation . . . 

At first, I was scared, but from his dramatic monologues, I guessed what the officer meant. We haggled a bit—and finally I entered Bosnia, leaving ten euros to warm his pocket. He even returned the knife to me.

*

“Bravo!” a German policeman said to us somewhere in Bavaria, interrupting that first trip abroad of mine. We smiled at him gratefully, but he repeated it, this time enunciating the word more sternly: “Bravo!” We smiled again and nodded. The policeman seemed to be losing patience, so the third time he almost shouted: “Bravo! Driver’s license, Bravo!”

When the rear window of an ordinary car that had overtaken us on the autobahn suddenly lit up with the word “POLIZEI,” we couldn’t believe our eyes. We thought they were some kind of scammers. But then, in addition to the neon sign, the flashing lights came on, and we had to pull off the autobahn behind the police car.

A tall, slender man in uniform approached us. He introduced himself and asked where we were going. He behaved pointedly politely, but there was an unpleasant undertone in his voice. As if we had done something wrong and he was about to scold us for it.

We said we were going to Darmstadt for a literary evening, that we were writers, and to prove it we showed him a small booklet from the organizers where our names were listed in the program. The policeman skeptically turned this proof of our worldwide fame over in his hands, then said, “Bravo!” We positively beamed.

But in the end he did take the driver’s license and ordered us to open the trunk. Meanwhile, his colleague joined him—a stout, slightly older man wearing glasses. He put on rubber gloves and began rummaging through our luggage. It was humiliating, because he did it very thoroughly: he went through not only the contents of the suitcase but also the bag with dirty laundry, emptied every pocket of the packed clothes, and even tapped the spare tire. They were checking us as if we were criminals transporting weapons and drugs. The Ukrainian license plates on the car turned out to be sufficient grounds for stopping and searching us. From these barbarians from the East, one could expect only the worst—or so the guardians of German order must have thought.

It’s unpleasant to be victims of stereotypes, but we, too, are not without sin. On the way to Munich we amused ourselves discussing how fanatically Bavarians value their Ordnung, from which it logically followed that this region had been the backbone of Hitler’s Nazism. The policemen’s ostentatious distrust, the rubber gloves they used to touch our belongings—all this confirmed our idea that true Aryans lived here, considering everyone else an inferior race.

In addition, our Mitsubishi had one flaw: from time to time a bit of oil would drip from the engine. Not much—just a few drops every couple of hours. But even so, we were afraid to drive into Munich with such a car: if Bavarian pedestrians noticed a dark stain on the asphalt from the motor oil, they would immediately call the police or an environmental protection service, which would catch us, fine us, and confiscate the car. At least, that was how we imagined it.

So we parked on the outskirts of Munich, and I quickly slid a piece of cardboard under the oil pan, which was supposed to catch all possible drips and thus leave no trace behind us. We went into the city by public transport. And at every subsequent German stop, I repeated my little cardboard trick. Thus the stereotype of Eastern barbarians met the stereotype about Germans being so proper that they report all “improper” people to the police. Both of these stereotypes were rooted in ignorance.

*

This ignorance is caused not only by geography—that is, not only by a lack of information due to spatial distance. Perhaps that was once the case, but nowadays it is hardly so. Blissful unawareness reigns everywhere today, regardless of kilometers and meridians.

To avoid looking far for examples, I’ll mention my native Zakarpattia. It seems that in every speech, local officials emphasize the traditional multiculturalism of our region, which has long since become a byword. At first glance, this is true: people of different nationalities, languages, cultures, and religions have lived in the region since time immemorial. Four borders—with Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland—contribute to this.

However, coexistence and multiculturalism are by no means always the same thing. I grew up on the border, but one did not need to cross it to see Hungarians and Romanians: they lived among us and were constantly nearby. In the neighboring house lived a Hungarian family; I remember the stout Boriška-nénі, her frail husband, their daughter Piroška, and the grandchildren who came for the holidays. But was this neighborhood multicultural? Unfortunately, no.

The Hungarians lived in a world of their own (one is tempted to say, a self-built ghetto): they had their own church, their own newspapers, radio, and TV channels. There was no deeper interaction between us beyond “May we borrow some salt?” We knew that our neighbors celebrated Christmas in December and would greet them when we met on the street. Yet they still seemed as if they were on another planet. We knew no more about Hungary and Hungarian culture than an average resident of Kharkiv: Budapest, Sándor Petőfi, the csárdás, and Tokaj wine. From childhood, I picked up a few dozen Hungarian words—enough to get by at the market—but most of them were swear words. And that was it.

The situation with Romania and the Romanians was even worse. Under Ceaușescu, the country was completely closed, and after the fall of communism it turned out to be so poor that you couldn’t make even a small business deal there. People from Zakarpattia traveled to Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia, but avoided Romania. There were some disparaging jokes about mountains, carts, and Roma—this was the entire set of information we had about Romanians. And even those jokes were few. In the end, even now, when Romania has become an EU member and is developing rapidly, there is still no rail or bus connection between Vynohradiv and Satu Mare—a major Romanian city just an hour and a half away. As if between us there were not just a border, but a chasm.

So it turns out that we shout about our multiculturalism at every corner, but in reality we don’t have it. Stop a passerby in Uzhhorod, Vynohradiv, or Rakhiv and ask them to name the most famous contemporary Hungarian or Romanian writer, their most popular pop bands, notable artists, or film directors. In response, you will be met with eloquent silence.

If Zakarpattia is really so multicultural and tolerant, then where did more than 100,000 local Jews disappear to? Why did almost no one defend them? Who lives in their houses now? The wartime mayor of Chernivtsi, Traian Popovici, saved nearly 20,000 Jews, while the mayor of Uzhhorod, László Megői, personally oversaw the deportation of local Jews to concentration camps—and in 1944 he ceremoniously welcomed Eichmann to Uzhhorod. Do you feel the difference?

Boastfulness has always been a characteristic trait of people from Zakarpattia, but in the matter of multiculturalism it has crossed all bounds. Unlike residents of other regions, we have every opportunity to acquaint ourselves with the cultures of our neighbors—if only we had the desire. But that desire is lacking, and so I dare say that in the case of Zakarpattia it is not multiculturalism we are dealing with, but underculture. For culture does not appear on its own. Culture is interest, curiosity, effort; multiculturalism is even more effort and the knowledge that effort brings.

And where there is no knowledge, its place is taken by projections of our fears, stereotypes, and disdain. And the Romanians become nothing but Roma on a cart, while the Magyars become Asian nomads—unfathomable, and therefore threatening, barbarians. 

translated from the Ukrainian by Yulia Lyubka and Kate Tsurkan

The full piece is here: https://www.asymptotejournal.com/special-feature/the-border-in-my-mind-andriy-lyubka/

Andriy Lyubka (Андрій Любка) is an award-winning novelist, poet, essayist, and translator. After four years of fundraising to purchase 415 cars for Ukraine’s military, he enlisted and became a service member in 2026. His debut novel, Карбід (Carbide; Kalvariya, 2015) was published in English in 2021 (Jantar), and his wartime volunteering essay collection, War from the Rear (Війна з тильного боку; Academic Studies Press), in 2025.

Yulia Lyubka is an award-winning translator from English into Ukrainian and Ukrainian into English. Her translations of Peter Pomerantsev’s How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler (Public Affairs, 2024) and Therese Anne Fowler’s Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (St Martin’s Press, 2013) were well-reviewed in Ukraine.

Kate Tsurkan is an award-winning translator and writer. She is a reporter at The Kyiv Independent where she writes mostly about culture-related topics. Her co-translation of Khrystia Vengryniuk’s novel The Hamlet Called America (Хутір Америка) is forthcoming from Sandorf Passage in 2026.

Andriy Lyubka is widely recognized as a novelist, poet, essayist, and translator whose work moves fluidly between the personal and the political. His essays are particularly notable for the way they transform everyday experiences—crossing a checkpoint, meeting a neighbor, being stopped by police—into reflections on history, identity, and the invisible boundaries people carry within themselves. His collection У пошуках варварів: подорож до країв, де починаються й не закінчуються Балкани (In Search of Barbarians: A Journey to the Lands Where the Balkans Begin and Never End; Meridian Czernowitz, 2022) explores how borders endure not only on maps but in the imagination, shaping fear, prejudice, and belonging.

This excerpt, “The Border in My Mind,” exemplifies Lyubka’s distinctive essayistic voice: ironic, self-scrutinizing, and alert to the ways stereotypes are mirrored across the East and the West. Beginning with a fascination with “abroad” developed during his childhood in Vynohradiv, and moving through encounters in Germany, Hungary, and beyond, Lyubka reveals that the most consequential borders are often mental ones—formed by post-Soviet inheritance, provincial isolation, and the stories nations tell about themselves and their neighbors.

We are drawn to this collection because it speaks with unusual clarity to a broader contemporary condition: even in an age of open frontiers and instant information, ignorance remains fertile ground for suspicion. Lyubka’s essays insist that multicultural coexistence is not the same as mutual understanding, and that knowledge—hard-won through curiosity and effort—is the only antidote to the “barbarians” we imagine on the other side.