The establishment of communist regimes in Eastern Europe involves a radical transformation in terms of publication and in the writer profession, due to nationalization, centralization, ideological control, and due to the establishment of preventive and repressive censorship. Does the area of intellectual exchange between East and West survive this? How do works produced under conditions of strict printing control manage to move beyond the borders and to be translated? How do you avoid a collection of political, economic, legal, material and linguistic constraints? This study tries to formulate an answer to these questions by means of a historical and sociological analysis of literary transfers from Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania and the USSR to France from 1947 to 1989. By reconstructing the political issues of cultural transfer, this book shows that literature, at the time of the Cold War, was first and foremost a weapon.