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Ferenc Kulin (1943–) is a literary historian, critic, and politician, and was the chief editor of the journal “World in Move.” He received his MA degree in Hungarian and Russian language and literature from Loránd Eötvös University (ELTE) Budapest in 1968. From 1970 to 2007, he worked as an educator of the Literary History Department of ELTE. From 1999 he was appointed as chair, and then from 2005 to 2008 as dean of the Gáspár Károli Reformed Church University (KGRE), Budapest.

From 1970 to 1990, he worked as an editor of literary periodicals: Irodalomtörténet, Jelenlét, Mozgó Világ, and Magyar Napló. He joined the editorial staff of “World in Move” (Mozgó Világ) in 1974 as a columnist and deputy chief editor, and from 1981 to 1983 he became the chief editor, until he was replaced in mid-September. In 1989–1990, he was the chief editor of Magyar Napló (Hungarian Diary).

Zvonimir Kulundžić (Osijek, 16 January 1911 - Zagreb, 27 December 1994) was a writer/publicist, bibliographer, journalist and historian. He graduated from the Classics Gymnasium in Osijek, and as a young man he began to write dramas. At the beginning of the 1930s, his talents in writing earned the respect of certain famous writers, who described it as “uncompromising in revealing negative relationships in society". However, as he did not want to accept compromises and change his writing, he was unable to get his work published or performed in the theatres of monarchist Yugoslavia. He turned to journalism in 1933, and after that he worked for numerous journals and magazines. In Osijek in 1936, he launched his magazine Hrvatski narodni glas (Croatian People's Voice), but it was shut down after only four issues. Soon he moved to Belgrade, where he worked as a proof-reader at the State Printing House. After the beginning of the war in Yugoslavia in 1941, he remained in Belgrade until he joined the Partisans in 1944.

After the war, he returned to Belgrade, where he was assigned to the Central Committee of the Confederation of Trade Unions of Yugoslavia, with the task of establishing a publishing department, which soon became the publishing company Rad. There he worked an editor-in-chief until the end of 1947, when he moved to Zagreb to work in another publishing company (Nakladni zavod Hrvatske).

In the 1950s, he dedicated himself to bibliology (the academic study of books), and in 1951 he published Knjiga o knjizi (A Book About the Book) (Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 1951), which achieved immense success and became a textbook for universities and vocational schools (for librarians, graphic artists, etc.). In 1958, he left the institution and became an independent writer and publisher who earned a living from his writing. He was successful to an extent because many of his books sold out very quickly, even those published on his own (samizdats). He researched the history of development of books on Croatian soil. Though philologists regularly neglected him as a relevant author, his hypothesis about Kosinj as the first printing centre in the South Slavic area in the late 15^th century (Kosinj: kolijevka štamparstva slavenskoga juga [Kosinj: The Cradle of the South Slavic Typography], Zagreb: self-published, 1960) gained respect over the years. He wrote studies on prominent Croatian writers (Mihovil Pavlek-Miškina, Slavko Kolar, Miroslav Krleža) and politicians (Antun and Stjepan Radić) as well as on political life and corruption in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (Politika i korupcija u kraljevskoj Jugoslaviji [Politics and Corruption in Royal Yugoslavia], Zagreb: Stvarnost, 1968).

He was an uncompromising polemicist. He shook the literary scene with the book Razgovor neugodni naroda književnoga (An Unpleasant Discussion of Literary People) (Zagreb: self-published, 1952) as well as the book Tragedija hrvatske historiografije (The Tragedy of Croatian Historiography) (Zagreb: self-published, 1970) which led to one of the most controversial debates in Croatian historiography. The book criticised institutional historiography which, in his opinion, was published in accordance with the authorities. He thought that Croatian historians were methodologically conservative and that they avoided elaborating certain important themes from Croatian national history or even falsified it. The manuscript of the book Tajne i kompleksi Miroslava Krleže: koje su ključ za razumijevanje pretežnog dijela njegova opusa (The Secrets and Complexes of Miroslav Krleža, Which are the Key to Understanding the Overwhelming Majority of His Works) (Ljubljana: Emonica, 1988) was confiscated because in it Kulundžić dealt with controversies and discussions between Slavko Kolar and Miroslav Krleža, who was the former principal literary authority in Yugoslavia and a friend of Josip Broz Tito.

Kulundžić's writing was full of dark satire and social accusations. He dealt with numerous topics from Croatian literature and history, and in doing so, he put forth many theses and conclusions that were quite different and often contrary to those advocated by institutional literature and historiography. That is why he often participated in open conflicts with institutional literature and historiography. Due to his non-conformist character, his disagreements with the existing situation, and above all his refusal to ingratiate himself to those in power, poet Boro Pavlović called him “Quercus croaticus incorruptibilis et indelebilis” (Croatian oak, incorruptible and indestructible).

In the foreword to the first book of his collected works, Sabrana djela (Zagreb: self-published, 1977), Kulundžic said that tried not to allow himself to think of a career that would force him to be cautious and to do just what the others wanted him to do. The mainstream was always something strange and far away from him, so he could behave quite comfortably in his actions because he felt that he had nothing to lose, that nobody could bring him down from a position he did not have. He said that he was the horse on the outside for his entire life.

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.