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Milan Kundera is a Czech-born French writer and playwright. He graduated from the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague in 1952, where he worked as a teacher. His plays, novels, articles and public talks greatly influenced contemporary public life. His speech at the 4th Congress of the Union of Czechoslovak Writers in 1967, where he stressed the need for freedom of artistic expression, found great resonance. Because of his continued criticism of the communist regime, he could not officially publish his work after 1970. Five years later, he went into exile and settled in France. In 1979 he was stripped of his Czechoslovak citizenship. In France, he worked at the universities in Rennes and then in Paris. At the same time, he continued to write and his books were published in exile by Sixty-Eight Publishers in Toronto. Gradually, French also became the language of his novels and essays, and he has not published any work in Czech since 1993. He still lives in France and rarely visits the Czech Republic.

Kundera’s literary work began with poetry. However, from the late 1950s, he began writing novels and plays. From the 1960s, his plays were enthusiastically received by Czechoslovak society, for example, the play “The Owners of the Keys” (Majitelé klíčů, 1962) and “The Blunder” (Ptákovina, 1969). His books “Laughable Loves” (Směšné lásky, 1963) and “The Joke” (Žert, 1967) were also very popular. “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” (Kniha smíchu a zapomnění, 1979), “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” (Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí, 1984), and “Immortality” (Nesmrtelnost, 1990) were written in exile, though still in Czech. Later, however, his books were written in French, for example the novel “Ignorance” (L’Ignorance, 2000). Several films and radio plays have been based on Kundera’s writings.

Milan Kundera has been awarded many Czechoslovak/Czech and foreign prizes, including the Prix Médicis (1973), the American Common Wealth Award (1981), the Prix Europa Literature (1981), the Austrian State Prize for Literature (1988), and the Independent Foreign Fiction Award (1991). In 1990 Kundera became a Knight of the Legion of Honour.

Ivo Kunštýř was born on 24 January 1932, his father was a veterinarian. He graduated from a French grammar school in Prague and started studying at veterinary medical school afterwards. Due to political reasons, he had to study at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Košice, however, he finished his studies in Brno in 1956. Until 1968 he worked at the Veterinary Research Centre in Prague. After the invasion of the Soviet armies in August 1968, he emigrated to Vienna and later to West Germany. From 1970, he worked as a veterinarian for experimental animals at Hannover Medical School’s Central Laboratory for Experimental Animals; he acquired his teaching certification there in 1975. He worked as a professor at the Faculty of Medicine. He was granted West Germany citizenship in 1978 and stripped of his Czechoslovak in the same year. He actively participated in Czechoslovak exile activities. In 1986, he was a founding member of the Czechoslovak Documentation Centre of Independent Literature, which was founded in West Germany and led by the historian Vilém Prečan.

Ivo Kunštýř participated at many scientific conferences and symposiums focusing on laboratory animals. He published in scientific journals, but also wrote short works of fiction under his pen name of Jaroslav Pulda. He retired in 1997 and died in Hannover on 1 August 2013.

Architect, philosopher. The foundations for his spiritual ideas were laid first at the Catholic college and later as part of his involvement with the Scout and the Populist movements. Eventually, he fell under the lifelong spiritual influence of Lajos Szabó.

He graduated with a degree in architecture in 1949, but the architecture politics of the time forced him into inner emigration, so he worked as a concrete technologist at the Construction Quality Control Institute. Later, he became the scientific deputy director and later the director of the institute. He later worked for the institute as a scientific adviser.

He received a Doctor of Science degree in 1974. He was the chair of the Committee on Architecture of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Section of Engineering Sciences and vice president of CIB (Conseil International du Batiment). In 1991, he became an adjunct professor at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics.

In his underground spiritual life, he vigilantly sought original wholeness and held himself to the Biblicist method of Lajos Szabó, following the path of “seek first the kingdom of God” (Matthew 6:33). The essence of this is to locate the original source, the genesis, the fullest experience in a logocentric way, with the help of speculative thinking, searching for the right gradation of cognition.

Living behind the rampart of the existence of a research engineer, his basic proposition became the future of tradition. He defined this tradition as Phaidon of Plato, the Bhagavad-gíta, the Tao Te King, and the Gospel of John. He saw the pledge, the spiritual bridge, the future of this tradition in the basically monotheist-trinitarian biblical thoughts of Lajos Szabó.

Following the ideological loosening of the Kádár regime, in the middle of the 1980s he began to encourage the public reception of Lajos Szabó, and after the realization that in the case of some questions related to the philosophy of history the approach of Szabó and István Bibó overlap, he started to urge that they be read together in order to resolve the crisis of Hungarian spiritual life after 1990.