Ever since its inception in 1980, the Lublin-based quarterly Akcent has played a crucial role in the shaping of the artistic and intellectual life of the city and its region. While issues of local and regional significance have been an important part of the journal's content, its editors and authors from the beginning have stressed the necessity to look beyond the narrowly defined specificity of such issues and to broaden the contexts of their analysis. Akcent quickly became an influential institution, establishing a platform for debates about the risks and promises that would affect the social, cultural, and political life of the Lublin region, Poland, and East Central Europe in the process of transition from the epoch of the Soviet domination to the time of sovereign states and European integration. In the course of its history, Akcent has covered an impressive range of subjects, as attested by a recent anthology of selected essays originally published over the years of existence in the quarterly. Na pograniczu narodów i kultur: Polska – Europa – Ameryka, edited by Bogusław Wróblewski, the founding and heretofore chief editor of Akcent, and Łukasz Janicki, celebrates the journal's fortieth anniversary. Topics addressed in the essays collected in the anthology range from Polish Ukrainian folklore to Polish-Jewish literary relations, from issues of identity in the countries of East Central Europe to the legacy of migrations, and from symbolic imaginings of space to mechanisms of geopolitics. Na pograniczu narodów i kultur is the seventh volume in the series “Biblioteka Siedemsetlecia,” a joint initiative of the publishing house Czytelnik and Wschodnia Fundacja Kultury “Akcent,” launched on the occasion of the seven hundredth anniversary of Lublin's acquisition of municipal rights.In his introduction to the anthology, Wróblewski writes that, at an early stage of Akcent's development, the idea of the borderland emerged as a key concept around which the discussions of different national and transnational phenomena should revolve. As a reflection of the growing general awareness of the multicultural history of the Lublin region, a “borderland perspective” became an important element of the journal's mission. The borderland was redefined in such a way as to transcend its strictly geographical meaning, thus constituting a category that described trajectories of cultural exchange in a variety of contexts. Such an approach has proved particularly relevant in the era of globalization. The study of borderlands provides insights into the nature of social, political, and cultural processes the implications of which are not limited to specific historical or geographical circumstances. The complexity of the borderland—as an imaginary construct and a lived reality—is reflected in the three models of the functioning of cultural paradigms in borderland areas, as described by Wróblewski: confrontation, osmosis, and synergy. While always advocating dialogue between nations and cultures, Akcent's editors and authors have consistently avoided naïve idealism and sought to explore the ambivalent dimensions of various historical and cultural legacies.The composition of the anthology is not chronological but thematic, although Wróblewski decided not to divide it into parts, marking the passages between thematically related clusters of essays with sequences of poems. The poets featured in Na pograniczu narodów i kultur include, among others, Anna Frajlich, Wojciech Młynarski, Stanisław Barańczak, Bohdan Zadura, Waldemar Michalski, and Tadeusz Chabrowski. Wróblewski judiciously avoids the hierarchization of Akcent's contents. At the same time, a set of problems for the discussion of which the journal has provided a forum does become apparent. One such problem concerns Polish-Jewish cultural relations, addressed in five essays. For example, Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska discusses the portrayals of Poland and Polish characters in Isaac Bashevis Singer's fiction and the depictions of Biłgoraj in selected works by the Singer siblings: Isaac Bashevis, Israel Joshua, and Hinde Ester Kreitman. A vivid image of Biłgoraj is evoked in Israel Zamir's retelling of his father's—Bashevis Singer's—childhood memories. Romuald Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel begins his essay with a deeply moving personal testimony—he was born a Jew during the war and grew up in a Polish family to become a Catholic priest—to pass on to a series of ruminations about the intertwined histories of Poles and Polish Jews and the legacy of Polish antisemitism.A number of essays in Na pograniczu narodów i kultur explore aspects of identity construction in the nations of East Central Europe. Mykoła Riabczuk looks at the historical factors that account for contemporary Ukraine's delayed modernization and demonstrates that the two visions of Ukraine that crystallized in the course of its history—as a nation state and as an extension of the Eastern Slavic empire—still affect the ways the Ukrainians envisage themselves amidst the European nations. Władysław Makarski offers a historical overview of the Polish presence in Lithuania and analyzes the transformation of the Polish language used by the biggest diasporic communities there. He argues that the linguistic processes triggered by the Polonization of Lithuania complicate the picture of the Polish-Lithuanian relations as framed in terms of the colonizer/colonized binary. In an illuminating historical essay, Csaba G. Kiss shows that the processes of nation formation in East Central Europe began relatively late in comparison with Western Europe, which resulted in exclusive definitions of nations, based on the criteria of language and territory.Another thematic area that the editors of Akcent have prioritized is the life of the Polish diaspora in North America. This subject is addressed in the essays by Danuta Mostwin and by Stanislaus A. Blejwas. On the example of the Polish emigration to North America in different historical periods, Mostwin demonstrates that emigration signifies an experience of crisis that results either in a discovery of new creative potential on the part of the emigrant or a psychological withdrawal that can turn into a lasting syndrome. Blejwas describes the prejudiced mutual perceptions of different groups of Polish emigrants in the United States after the Second World War. It is worth mentioning here that Akcent has published special issues on Polish Americans (1997) and Polish Canadians (2002). The journal's archive remains an invaluable resource for scholars interested in the study of the Polish diaspora in North America.The reader of Na pograniczu narodów i kultur should appreciate the relevance of the essays despite the passage of time. Csaba G. Kiss's observations about the shaping of East Central European national identities in opposition to nineteenth-century imperial powers shed light on contemporary political manifestations of distrust toward the institutions of the European Union by some of the governments on the union's eastern flank. Dmytro Pavlychko's remarks about the marginalization of Ukraine in European geopolitics in his essay from 2001 explain, to an extent, the country's isolation after the Russian invasion of Crimea and the Donbas. Tomas Venclova warns us against the dangers of short-sighted patriotism that denies the complexity of history in adhering to the myths of heroic and/or suffering nations. Some of the essays in the anthology are gems of the genre, to mention Sergiusz Sterna-Wachowiak's poeticized evocation of the architectural space of the town of Wschowa or Stefan Symotiuk's philosophical discussion of the symbolism of the gateway. Na pograniczu narodów i kultur does much more than reappraise the achievement of an important journal; its content strongly resonates with various concerns of the present time and even of the predictable future.