‘Neo-Gothic Clairvoyance and Palingenetic Myth in Late Soviet Czechoslovakia and Post-Soviet Israel: Pavel Kohout’s The Premonitions of St Clara (1980) and Its Film Adaptations’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pavel Kohout’s bestselling novel The Premonitions of St Clara (Nápady svaté Kláry), whose first German edition was published in\nHamburg in 1980, and first Czech edition in Toronto in 1981, describes a commotion caused by a psychic teenage girl called Clara\nin an unnamed Communist-run small provincial Czech town in the mid-1960s. My article traces how the novel and its adaptations\n– a 1980 German-language film by Vojtěch Jasný and a 1996 Israeli full-length feature by Ari Folman and Ori Sivan – transform a\nhost of cultural topoi across a transnational setting, for different reasons and to varying effects. Such topoi include, among others,\nthe clairvoyant child; the lustful male villain; and the unbeliever to whom the existence of the supernatural is eventually proven.\nAlthough Kohout’s book and its derivatives do not involve vampires, doppelgängers, pedicides and haunted castles, in my opinion,\nthey nevertheless qualify as (neo-)Gothic, because of the book’s and the films’ Gothic-like focus on remote settings (such as the\nCzech or Israeli backwaters) and on the mysterious, the violent and the macabre (as some of the female teenager’s prophesiescome-true entail a flood and an earthquake).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".