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This article aims at giving an account of the reception, diffusion and literary elaboration of the 'Demetrius legend' in Italy during the 17th century. Its main focus is on the political and ideological background as well as the genre conventions which played a role in shaping the mythos of the Russian pretender. After considering the peculiarities of Maiolino Bisaccioni's historical novel, the article focuses on two tragedies by two minor Italian playwrights, Bianco Bianchi and Giuseppe Teodoli. Notwithstanding their different treatments of the subject, both authors were confronted with a difficult task: how to justify the fall of their hero (the legitimate heir to the Muscovite throne). They opted for a similar dramatic device: at the turning point of the tragedy Demetrius is erroneously considered an impostor, then dethroned and put to death as a tyrant. Finally, his legitimacy is reasserted and he is celebrated as a martyr of the faith or pitied for his unfortunate destiny. Both tragedies were drawn from the Jesuit account of the myth, spread from Poland, and are modeled on the rules of classical tragedy. Keywords Demetrius legend; Bisaccioni; Bianchi; Teodoli; Italian Baroque tragedy.

Writing the Time of Troubles traces recurring fictional representations of the man who briefly reigned as Tsar Dmitry, showing how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian playwrights and novelists reshaped and appropriated his equivocal career as a means of drawing attention to and negotiating the social anxieties of their own times.

El príncipe perseguido ofrece un interesante ejemplo de reescritura teatral. La comedia fue escrita por tres autores -Luis Belmonte Bermúdez, Agustín Moreto y Antonio Martínez de Meneses - antes del i6 de abril de 1645. Los tres dramaturgos se sirvieron de una relativamente temprana comedia de Lope de Vega, El gran duque de Moscovia y Emperador perseguido (Parte séptima, 1616). La comparación de los dos textos -la comedia colaborada y su fuente- permite conocer los modos de la escritura de consuno en el teatro del Siglo de Oro español. El análisis se concentra en el argumento (basado en la historia del falso Demetrio), que manifiesta un alto grado de compenetración a nivel macro- y microtextual entre los tres poetas. El estudio se centra en uno de los momentos más complejos en la historia de los espectáculos públicos en la España del Siglo de Oro (1644-1651).

Review.

The nightmare for Mr. [Dmitry Pruss] was based on things he had never written. A Russian scientist working at the National Institutes of Health on an ''exchange scholar'' visa in the early 1990's, Mr. Pruss would take part in online discussions with other expatriates of the former Soviet Union on Usenet, a worldwide network that held thousands of discussions on most every conceivable topic. (Usenet, which operates like a bulletin board on which people post messages and others read and respond to them over time, predates the World Wide Web, having been first developed in 1979 by Duke University researchers.) The groups that focused on Russian themes were known to be among the rougher neighborhoods of the online world, where participants would exchange angry messages in ''flame wars,'' as they are known; the scheming that ensued was tinged with a bitterness worthy of a Politburo purge. Mr. Pruss still does not know why his attacker chose him. What he does know is that one day in 1994, an allusion he made to the Holocaust from his government agency account was taken out of context and reposted in a vicious note sent to hundreds of newsgroups, especially those devoted to discussion of Jewish topics. The attack message against Mr. Pruss read in part: ''As a religious Jew I am OUTRAGED that my tax money is used to pay for Internet access for the notorious Jew-hating Russian punk.'' It included contact information for officials of the National Institutes of Health. Ultimately, Mr. Pruss said, his employers determined that he was not at fault, although they took away his online account and ordered him to submit to psychiatric counseling. They did, however, renew his work visa. N.I.H. officials refused to comment, except to confirm that Mr. Pruss had been employed as a molecular biologist on a temporary visa at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.