Reflections on Central European Literary Figures in Paris

The article discusses two Central European literary figures, Zbigniew Herbert and Miklós Szentkuthy, through the perspective of an Italian writer living in Paris over thirty years ago. The author references Danilo Kiš and Milan Kundera as personal influences during that period. Kiš worked as a Serbo-Croatian lecturer at French universities including Strasbourg, Bordeaux, and Lille while maintaining connections to Yugoslavia until his death in 1989. Kundera moved voluntarily to France in 1975, teaching at the University of Rennes and later at EHESS in Paris, after facing censorship in Czechoslovakia following the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague.