Beginning with Starobinski's text "Nuit de Troie", this article deals with the question of exile with reference to those figures who cannot express themselves and are thus condemned to silence and oblivion. As they give no evidence about their life, their memory can be maintained only by a specific effort of sympathetic thinking.
Here remembrance constitutes a community in memory, as in the poem "Le cygne" by Charles Baudelaire. The article considers the myth of Persephone as a basic story of silent exile and then analyzes several transformations of the motif in literary works from Baudelaire and Poe to Czech and Central European writers, such as Teréza Nováková, Jan Čep and Robert Musil.