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Matulaitis (1866-1956) graduated from Moscow University in 1891, and opened a medical practice in Lithuania. While at the university, he began to write articles for the underground Lithuanian newspaper Varpas (The Bell). In 1896, he joined the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party. He was exiled by the Imperial Russian government for his political activities. From 1917 he was a member of the Lithuanian Communist Party. Matulaitis was persecuted in the Republic of Lithuania, and in 1925 he emigrated to the Soviet Union. (He was deported to Kazakhstan in 1937.) While he was still a student, he started to research Lithuanian history. He returned to Soviet Lithuania in 1945, and until 1950 he was a senior researcher at the Lithuanian Institute of History.

In 1950, at a session of the Academy of Sciences, Matulaitis openly criticised the work of the Academy and the Institute of History for ignoring Lithuanian history. Later, he wrote several letters to the Presidium of the Academy explaining his reasons. His case illustrates the situation of scholars and historians in the late Stalinist period. The historian was obliged to work under heavy ideological pressure. Some scholars conformed to the political and ideological realities, while others, a minority, did not, and even openly protested. After the speech mentioned above, he was accused of bourgeois nationalism, and dismissed from his job.

Rusko Matulić was born in Split (then in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, now Croatia) in 1933 to a family from the island of Brač. After the fall of Italy in 1943, the Partisans killed his father Roko Matulić in Brač, who was associated with the Chetnik movement and intellectuals, writers and Yugoslav nationalists such as Ivo Andrić and Niko Bartulović. As a boy, he travelled with his mother to El Shatt, Egypt, where resided with other refugees from Dalmatia from February 1944 to November 1948. Later, he passed through Italy, England, Chile and the USA, where remained until the end of his life. He graduated with a degree in electrical engineering and later worked as an engineer for Consolidated Edison in New York (Lađević, 2015).

Among Yugoslav émigrés, he mostly communicated with the Democratic Alternative organization and the circle of intellectuals around Naša reč, an émigré publication from London. The shared political stance of both Matulić and that London circle was the decommunization and democratization of Tito's Yugoslavia, wherein they doggedly opposed its disintegration and transformation of the Yugoslav federal republics into independent sovereign states. Although Mihajlo Mihajlov was the central figure, Matulić was de facto the editor of the bi-monthly CADDY bulletin, which was published in the US from the first half of 1980 to late 1992. It reported on the fate of dissidents, human rights violations and freedom of thought in Yugoslavia since Tito’s death in 1980. Because of all this, Matulic was labelled as a representative of the “hostile emigration” that attacked the foundations of socialist Yugoslavia. His collection emerged simply as a result of his editorial work on the CADDY bulletin, as well as his management of that same organization, in which he received numerous testimonies on the difficulties dissidents faced in Yugoslavia. Additionally, there is an immense body of correspondence in Matulić's collection, not only with dissidents and political émigré, but also with numerous other members of the American political and journalistic establishment.

Matulić published a memoir, February 1944 El Shatt Egypt Nov 1948, in which he argued that refugees from Yugoslavia in Egypt were not only pro-Partisan-oriented, as claimed by Tito’s propaganda, but that there were also those who were anti-communist. He also collected bibliographic units about Yugoslavia in the West and about the character and work of his close associate Mihajlo Mihajlov, on the basis of which he published three bibliographic works: Bibliography of Sources on Yugoslavia (Palo Alto: Ragusan Press 1981), Bibliography of Sources on the Region of Former Yugoslavia (Boulder: East European Monographs), issued in three volumes (1998, 2007, 2014) and Contribution for the Bibliography of Mihajlo Mihajlov in 2014 (Lađević, 2015). Among other articles and essays, his article “Repression of Dissent in Yugoslavia (1956-1984)” published in the collection Human Rights in Yugoslavia (New York: Irvington Publishers 1986) is particularly important to the history of the cultural opposition. He also wrote articles about his primary profession in the field of electrical engineering (Rusko Marulic papers, box 2). He died in 2015 in New York.

Predrag Matvejević (Mostar, 7 October 1932 – Zagreb, 2 February 2017) was a Croatian writer, literary theorist and essayist. He is one of the most translated Croatian authors in the world. He began his study of French language and literature in Sarajevo, and completed it in Zagreb. In 1967, he obtained his Ph.D. in comparative literature and aesthetics at the Sorbonne in Paris. In period 1959-1991, he taught French literature at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, when he emigrated, initially living for several years in Paris, and then in Rome. As full or visiting professor, he taught at several foreign universities (New York University, 1982, Ecole des langues orientales, 1991, Nouvelle Sorbonne, 1991-1994, La Sapienza, 1994-2007, Collège de France 1997, Université catholique de Louvain, 2000). He received several honorary doctorates (Perpignan, Genova, Trieste, Corsica, Mostar). He was president of the Croatian PEN Centre (1980-1989), and the honorary lifelong vice president of PEN International in London. In 2011, he received a Kiklop Lifetime Achievement Award , and in 2013 Gariwo honoured him with the Duško Kondor Award for Civil Courage. 

Dóra Maurer (1937) is a Hungarian fine artist and film director and an artist of the Hungarian neo-avantgarde. Between 1956 and 1961, she studied at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts. In 1967, she received a scholarship to Vienna, which was important in making her an international artist: since then, Maurer has lived and worked in both cities. In 1972–1973, she took part in the events of the non-conformist art studio at Balatonboglár. Between 1975 and 1977 she taught creative practices in visual study classes together with Miklós Erdély at the factory of Ganz-MÁVAG. In 1981–1983 she led photographic and film study classes as part of the InDiGó Group at the Museum of Fine Arts. Since 1990, she has been a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts. In 2017, she was elected president of the Széchenyi Literature and Art Academy.