‘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’

Abstract

Pavel Kohout’s bestselling novel The Premonitions of St Clara (Nápady svaté Kláry), whose first German edition was published in Hamburg in 1980, and first Czech edition in Toronto in 1981, describes a commotion caused by a psychic teenage girl called Clara in an unnamed Communist-run small provincial Czech town in the mid-1960s. My article traces how the novel and its adaptations – a 1980 German-language film by Vojtěch Jasný and a 1996 Israeli full-length feature by Ari Folman and Ori Sivan – transform a host of cultural topoi across a transnational setting, for different reasons and to varying effects. Such topoi include, among others, the clairvoyant child; the lustful male villain; and the unbeliever to whom the existence of the supernatural is eventually proven. Although Kohout’s book and its derivatives do not involve vampires, doppelgängers, pedicides and haunted castles, in my opinion, they nevertheless qualify as (neo-)Gothic, because of the book’s and the films’ Gothic-like focus on remote settings (such as the Czech 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).