Abstract: The extent of the Russian Formalists' engagement with cinema has been obscured by their association with theories of the specificity of literature and a uniquely `poetic language' The problematic history of the film adaptation of Iurii Tynianov's story `Podporuchik Kizhe' provides a compelling basis upon which to approach his film work as writer and administrator, and to relate this to his theoretical writing This contextual examination of the genesis of the film provides in turn a basis upon which to return to the broad question of the specificity of various art forms, and to question the value of the vogue for approaching film from the perspective of adaptation

Abstract: Accounting for and acknowledging one’s national history in crimes committed against humanity is a process often thwarted by resistance from politically and socially influential institutions. Such was, until recently, the case in Austria, a country that had held on to an idea of itself as first victim of the Nazi regime. This notion was radically altered by events following the Waldheim Affair of 1986-1988. Former Austrian president and UN Secretary General, Kurt Waldheim, had repeatedly lied about his Nazi past and then – once revealed as a former member of the SA, – excused his involvement in the Nazi party as having only answered “the call to duty”. The subsequent process of acknowledging “Mitschuld”, i.e. complicity (7), in the Holocaust is painstakingly slow, subversive and ongoing as it colors political, cultural and social negotiations in Austria to this day.

Abstract: _La Stuartide_ is an incomplete epic in honour of the Stuart dynasty composed by the French Protestant poet and dramatist Jean de Schelandre. Published in Paris in 1611 and personally presented by the author to King James I of England (James VI of Scotland), it includes a heavily mythologized treatment of the same segment of Scottish history dramatized by Shakespeare in _Macbeth_. Comparison with a manuscript ‘Modelle’ of the project, which had previously been presented to the king, aids in identifying key points, notably in the heroic representation of Banquo, supposedly James's ancestor, where the poet appears to be reacting against the more equivocal version of the English playwright.

Abstract: Comparing the three full-length versions of Vladimir Nabokov's autobiography reveals shifts in the way he imagines his reader as he moves between languages. Nabokov's tussles with Edmund Wilson over Russian history and literature influence the devices he uses to share his experience of timelessness in Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. The creation of a ludic text which prompts a rethinking of patterns of perception offers a way of accommodating the author's ambivalent feelings towards the reader, who is desired as a friend as much as he is feared as an enemy.