Milan Kundera, a bridge between two Europes

Milan Kundera, one of the leading figures of the cultural revival in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, left his country after the crushing of the Prague Spring and the introduction of censorship and repression known as "normalisation". In France, the country he chose as a land of exile and of which he became a citizen, he enjoyed literary success with novels written in Czech and then in French.

With his famous essay A Kidnapped West : The Tragedy of Central Europe (Un Occident kidnappé ou la tragédie de l'Europe centrale) published in 1983 (and republished in 2022), which had a huge impact, he contributed to overcoming the ideological-political boundaries of the time and to reshaping the mental map of Europe before 1989. The writer in exile as a bridge between two worlds.

• Speaker : Jacques Rupnik
• Respondant : Iryna Dmytrichina

→ Écouter le replay de la conférence sur Canal-U

A series of 4 lectures on the intellectual trajectories of exile

Exile has never spared intellectuals. In the twentieth century and up to the present day, it has even been one of the usual conditions for the intellectual life. But if it obstacles thought and creation, it also sometimes leads them to blossom elsewhere, or even to be nourished by this situation made up of losses and constraints.

The series of lectures "Intellectuals in Exile: Humanism without Borders" seeks to make visible the complexity of these intellectual trajectories and their importance both for the renewal of thought and for democracy.

Each conference is organized around an exiled intellectual, most often hosted at the FMSH or the EHESS. Together with the specialists invited to present them, these intellectuals represent a wide range of backgrounds, whether it be their country of origin, their preferred discipline, or the period and conditions of their exile.

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