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Milan Kundera is widely known especially for his novels written in Czech, only much later he began to write his fiction in French. Rather paradoxically, it was only when he had become a French citizen that Kundera started to write systematically about the Central European novel as a specific phenomenon with highly original features, e. g. polythematic structure, lack of great epic stories, a tendency to essayism, and an ironical approach to the author?s homeland. His novels are very often based on playful or grote...

Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997) is along with Jaroslav Hašek and Milan Kundera one of the greatest Czech writers of the 20th century; his works are translated into 27 foreign languages. In the period from 1989 to 1992, Hrabal wrote a series of fictional letters addressed to Dubenka (April Gifford), a visiting American student who became the muse of his later years. These half-imaginary letters were never sent to her, though their relationship was very close and even intimate. Therefore, it is necessary to ask a questio...