Countess Dracula

by Tony Thorne

  Of the films based on Countess Báthory’s career only Peter Sasdy’s made the explicit link with ‘Dracula’, borrowing the name for purely commercial reasons which had nothing to do with the plot. Nevertheless, the idea that the Irishman Bram Stoker’s fictional Count Dracula was indeed based to a large extent on the personality of Elisabeth has been promoted by Raymond McNally, the American author who, sometimes writing with the Romanian Radu Florescu, has contributed a whole series of books and articles to recent vampire literature. After producing a biography of the historical Dracula, Vlad Tepes ‘the Impaler’, McNally briefly visited Austria and the then Czechoslovakia and wrote Dracula Was a Woman, subtitled In Search of the Blood Countess of Transylvania, (1983) which provided a brief summary of the career of Countess Báthory together with a long vampire-related bibliography and filmography.

  McNally points out that there are several elements in Stoker’s novel (first published in 1897) which cannot be directly inspired by Vlad: Stoker’s vampire is one of the Székely people of Transylvania, ethnically Magyar not Wallachian; he is a count rather than a prince, and – perhaps most importantly – he enhances his youthfulness by drinking human blood, a detail not found in any of the other sources known to have been consulted by Stoker. The difficulty in confirming any such connection is that Bram Stoker kept copious notes during the long gestation period that his novel went through, and although it is known that he met the Hungarian Ármin Vambéry, an expert on his country’s history, there was no mention at all of Countess Báthory in those notes. It is certain, however, that Stoker was familiar with Baring-Gould’s Book of Were-wolves, quoted above, but had he been considering writing about a vampire femme fatale with strongly sapphic tendencies, Stoker need have looked no further back than 1871, to Carmilla, the heroine of the novella of the same name published by J. Sheridan le Fanu, another Victorian author of Irish blood.9

  From folklore and anthropological studies le Fanu took the notion of an unquiet soul who returns to earth in human or animal form to drain the life gradually from its mortal victims. In his tale, set in the Styrian region of Austria, an undead countess, Carmilla Karnstein, befriends the heroine Laura, who, after half-remembered nocturnal visits from her strange acquaintance, finds herself wasting away. Le Fanu nowhere acknowledged the Báthory legends as the source of his work, and he need not have known of them firsthand to have introduced the device of a female aristocrat as villain; the concept had been rehearsed in Tieck’s Swanhilda, Hoffmann’s Aurelia and Poe’s Berenice among others. But the setting of the story in the lands of the Habsburg Empire may be significant, for it was there that the legends of the historical Countess Báthory had become embedded in folklore.

  Thus it does seem likely that Elisabeth had infiltrated the literary consciousness of horror writers in English but was not acknowledged. Why was she herself not celebrated in Victorian fiction? European neighbours have found it difficult to appreciate the extent of a puritanism in Victorian society (even allowing for its seamier underworld) which lingered well into the 1960s. Any more than a hint of lesbianism, for example, let alone unnatural love coupled with female sadism, was a taboo until recently; and many people have found blood-drinking distasteful and blood-bathing even more so. One hundred years ago for a writer like Stoker, the idea of choosing as a heroine a blood-obsessed lesbian mass-murderess would have been a short cut to literary obscurity.

  The first and last appearance of any Báthory in English literature was the invention of the fictional ‘Bethlen Báthory’ – an amalgam of Elisabeth Báthory’s nephew Prince Gábor and his successor, Gábor Bethlen, by Coleridge for his play Zápolya (his least successful work), which in its risibly confused version of Hungarian history – the historical tyrant King John Zápolya10 is transformed into Báthory’s mother – is characteristic of the cavalier way in which Hungary’s history has been toyed with by outsiders when they have bothered to consider it at all.11

  To locate and make sense of Elisabeth Báthory is not going to be an easy task. Looking for her demands an imaginative displacement in space and time, to a part of Europe which, almost a century after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and half a decade on from the end of communism, is still largely unknown or misunderstood, and to a time which forms a precarious bridge between our own post-Enlightenment reality – difficult enough to negotiate if we look back more than a generation or two – and the almost unknowable mediaeval world which went before.

  During the long years of the Turkish wars Hungary was a place where only a handful of mercenaries and adventurers from the rest of Europe cared or dared to go. Captain John Smith, the husband of Pocahontas, fought there against the infidel, as did several of the Devonian ‘gentlemen of the West’ in Walter Ralegh’s circle.12 News of Magyar heroism and rumours of Byzantine excesses committed inside the ramparts of mysterious Transylvania filtered back to London and Paris by way of Constantinople, and when the Turks withdrew at the end of the seventeenth century there was an intense curiosity, especially in neighbouring Austria and Italy, about what really lay in these once forbidden territories on the ill-defined eastern fringes of the Christian world.

  Vampire fiction has invariably been refracted to us through a Germanic lens – its dramas have been set among dank forests, brooding, cold fortresses, but Elisabeth Báthory’s history was played out not to the sound of groaning pipe-organs and beer-songs, but in a region where cimbalom and cithare music hangs in the warm air. The Scot William Lithgow records several times his wonder at the late-summer landscape of Hungary in 1616: ‘. . . Hungary . . . may be termed the granary of Ceres, the garden of Bacchus, the pasturage of Pan, and the richest beauty of Sylvan; for I found the wheat here growing higher than my head, the vines overlooking the trees, the grass justling with my knees, and the high sprung woods threatening the clouds.’13 Other later travellers from Britain and France indulged their prejudices and frequently complained about the bad conditions of the roads in Hungary, the ferocious aspect of the people, and the discomfort suffered in the inns and taverns which they were forced to patronise.14

  It has always been the language of Hungary, sharing five or six words with Finnish but otherwise unrelated to any other European tongue, which has both symbolised and enshrined the separateness of its people.15 Some of Hungary’s neighbours had a deeply ambivalent appreciation of the cadences of the Magyar language. The ardent Romanian nationalist mystic Emil Cioran wrote:

  Although I have known only its curses, I like the Magyars’ language infinitely, I cannot have enough of its silence, it enchants me and horrifies me, I surrender to its charm and its terror, to all its words concocted from nectar and cyanide, which so properly match what one’s death agony demands. We should all sigh out our existence with a Hungarian word; otherwise it is not worth dying.16

  From the earliest days, visitors from the west returned with proverbial tales from the great store of anecdotes that already existed to illustrate the exotic customs and uninhibited ways of the Magyars. At the end of the sixteenth century the Frenchman Fumée told the tale of ‘a certaine tayler of Varadin’ who surprised his young wife in bed with one of his closest friends. The enraged cuckold, egged on by the townspeople, dragged his wife to the town square, where according to local custom he should execute her himself with a sabre. So piteous were the doomed girl’s pleas to be allowed to live that the jilted husband thought again, then decided to forgive her. The onlookers had also been won over by his wife’s display and applauded his merciful action. It so happened, Fumée went on, that not long after these events, the wife found her husband in the act of copulating with ‘a common wench’. The proceedings were repeated: the man was taken to the market square, the wife made ready to strike off his head, and the husband pleaded movingly for mercy. The watching crowd was poised to praise the woman for her forbearance, but she brushed aside the tailor’s promises and coolly beheaded him. Just a piece of colourful folklore, but the coming together of bravura and cruelty, the sense
of a grim delight in mischief (although English has no word for it and has to borrow Schadenfreude from German, Hungarian expresses the notion by its own káröröm), will be encountered again and again in the search for Countess Báthory and the spirit of her time.

  It is unfashionable now to talk of a ‘national character’, nevertheless, the modern traveller to east-central Europe, if she or he stays long enough, will experience the peculiar mixture of giddiness and introspection (‘one eye weeping while the other smiles’) which characterises the Magyars, and the wistful warm-heartedness behind the stoic countenances of the Slovaks. And it was Slovakia, although the region was then without a name and its people without a voice, that was the setting for Elisabeth Báthory’s eventual downfall.

  In the Czechoslovakia that came into being in 1918 and later, from 1993, in the new Slovak state, Countess Báthory has had relatively little importance as a historical reality; few scholars have paid her serious attention, although her castle in Čachtice and the village below it have often featured in folktales and songs. An older generation of Slovaks were aware of the atrocities alleged against Bátorička (‘Little Báthory’) through short stories and articles dating from the turn of the century.

  She is known today mainly from character sketches in periodicals and the semi-fictional romance Čachtická Pani (Lady of Čachtice), a melodrama by the journalist Jožo Nižňanský which was first serialised in the Czechoslovak newspaper A–Z in the 1930s.17 This work, which was later published as a 600-page novel, is the one certified bestseller among the middle-European dramatisations of the Báthory affair, a title still unknown outside the Slovak and Czech republics, where it has been in print since 1932 and has sold nearly three million copies. Nižňanský carefully studied the texts relating to the historical Countess Báthory and juxtaposed in his pages real characters with fictional creations to stage a struggle between good and evil reminiscent of the adventure novels of Walter Scott.

  The late-twentieth-century versions of Nižňanský’s romance of the 1930s are two novels in English pitched squarely at the vampire and fantasy market, published, one in Britain and one in the United States, in 1994 and 1995 respectively. The Blood Countess by the Romanian-American author Andrei Codrescu intersperses buggery, sadism and masturbation with evocations of sixteenth-century pageantry and manifestations of Elisabeth’s baleful power in the present day, as when a Hungarian professor of history called Lilly Hangress (based on one of the Countess’s real biographers, Dr Katalin Péter) is suddenly possessed by Elisabeth Báthory’s restless spirit and orates in her voice: ‘Mass slaughters of peasants, the cyclical devastations of the Black Death, the unending battles, made my world an unsteady island on a sea of blood. There was literally and metaphorically no place for me to step without stepping in blood . . . Given this red liquid medium in which I spent my life, it would have been surprising if I didn’t bathe in blood.’18

  As for the British novel, Blood Ritual by Frances Gordon, the blurb introduces its heroine and sets the tone: ‘She was dazzlingly beautiful, prodigiously cruel and possessed of a consuming vanity which led her to worship strange and dark gods. Her blood descendants still live on deep within the Carpathian mountains and are determined Elisabeth’s line should not die . . .’19

  Both novels used the opening up of eastern Europe and the political turmoil there as a backdrop for the sort of neo-gothic fantasy that the American vampire authoress Anne Rice had pioneered (Gordon’s book actually advertised itself as being ‘in the great tradition of Anne Rice’). But neither conveys any sense of place; both play idly with the notion of a supernatural malignancy crossing from past to present. Otherwise they rely on easy thrills and contrived tensions.

  Outside these works and the neat, finite references in anthologies and encyclopaedias of horror – ‘armed with her special flesh-tearing silver pincers, a manual of tortures her husband had used when fighting the Turks and a taste for flagellation learned from her aunt, she set out to indulge herself and while away the lonely hours . . .’20 – Countess Dracula’s is a name to conjure with, but not much more. After all, the repressions and tensions which made the vampire a potent symbol for the nineteenth-century consciousness no longer obtain. But vampires are surprisingly still with us, thriving in our popular culture: the Victorian gothic has become the amoral soap opera of Anne Rice. In fact, we can all be vampires now; we crave longevity, immortality, and it is offered in the form of cosmetic surgery and cryogenics. In the wealthier suburbs of Los Angeles and Sydney mummification is back in vogue. We can enjoy vicariously the catharsis of bloodletting that for our ancestors was viscerally real, watching our videos as the helpless doll-victims – college co-eds now rather than chambermaids or seamstresses – are racked, mutilated and bled, just as she is said to have watched.

  The opportunity to explore the myth and reality of ‘Countess Dracula’ for the first time is an irresistible one for a writer. The persona of the Blood Countess is almost too rich in significance. She is two Jungian archetypes – the wicked stepmother and the fatal seductress – in one. She embodies so many modish end-of-century themes – she is an alleged murderess (in the 1950s and 1960s murderers were the outsiders, the supreme existentialists; now they are serial killers, the ultimate consumers), a vampire, a woman wielding power in a man’s world, and she is also from far away in time and place, so the Báthory biographer can fantasise that he is an early anthropologist, opening up new territory – in this case the forgotten eastern half of the European continent and the communities of 400 years ago.

  It is not true, as the American authors McNally and Codrescu have written at different times, that the Hungarian authorities or the country’s academic establishment have conspired to hush up the case of Countess Elisabeth Báthory. What is true is that she has been marginalised in her country’s history and that, not surprisingly, Hungarians have not celebrated the memory of what may be their most monstrous forebear. Her picture does not hang in the National Gallery in Budapest next to the heroes of the Turkish wars and the struggle for independence, but is stored underground in darkness.

  How did an heiress from an ancient and noble line come to stand accused by history of presiding over cannibal feasts, the application of systematic and imaginative torture and the extermination of maidens in their hundreds, all in the cause of cosmetic rejuvenation, stalking the labyrinths of the European imagination, her hands dripping with blood, part Morgan le Fay, part Lady Macbeth, part Morticia Addams?

  Chapter One

  An Incident at Midwinter

  Beate Ungheria! se non si lascia

  Piu malmenare.

  (Blessed Hungary! If she no longer allows herself to be mistreated.)

  Dante, La Divina Commedia, Il Paradiso

  The landscapes of Greater Hungary ~ Čachtice today ~ an incident at midwinter ~ George Dózsa’s peasant crusade ~ perpetual servitude ~ the Battle of Mohács and the Turkish occupation ~ nationality and identity ~ Transylvania ~ the Fifteen-Year War against the Turks ~ noble courts and their inhabitants ~ Rudolf II, the imperial recluse ~ along the Váh valley to Bytča ~ a mysterious correspondence

  Borders in this part of the world have always been impermanent things; mountains and rivers have been the points of reference by which the inhabitants negotiated their worlds. The Danube, the greatest river west of the Volga, flows due east on its way to the Black Sea through the old Habsburg capital Vienna, now all triumphal arches and eagles, and curves gently southward a few miles further on to pass by Bratislava, whose foursquare, mournful castle guards the old walled and tiled city in its shadow. Today the other bank of the river, where the ferry used to embark, opposite the castle, is almost deserted, but the meadows that lie beyond have been covered by a giant complex of hundreds of panelled concrete tower-blocks; a showpiece megalopolis without a heart from the last years of socialist Slovakia. Barely a hundred kilometres downstream the green-brown river abruptly turns due south and passes between gorges, past miles of willow and poplar an
d shingle beaches to where the twin cities of Hungary’s capital stand, located, according to the latest satellite mapping, in the real geographical centre of the continent, so that the green hills of Buda, the ancient limit of the Roman Empire, lie in western Europe and the busy, noisy, dusty conurbation of Pest in the east.

  In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the highlands were yet more densely covered in forest and the flat lands dotted with thickets and copses. Cross-country travel was almost impossible where creeks and marshes lay, and hard going even on the uncertain roads and bridges which were subject to flash floods, subsidence, rock-falls and the attentions of armed beggars and rogue soldiers. When a great lady or her lord pictured their homeland in their minds, they must have formed a vision of something like a green sea – dark green in the forested north, lighter green on the southern plains – from which rose islands of sunlit yellow, the citadels in which they lived (the vár, the castle above; the manor-house, the kastély, below), and which made a series of stepping stones connecting the little centres of power and civilisation, outside which were only nameless, powerless beings toiling in the fields and vineyards, gathering wood or tending their animals.

  Here at the outset of the sixteenth century was a Greater Hungary, a kingdom more than twice the size of the present Hungarian state. Rising in the south, the Leitha formed its eastern border with the German-speaking Imperial provinces, while flowing into the Danube from the north were the rivers which dissected the old territory of Upper Hungary and delimited the administrative districts: the Váh, the Nitra and most importantly the Tisza (which for the court effectively separated the governable from the barely governable territories in those days). Mountains, too, were actual and symbolic barriers, the western Carpathians marking off Moravia, the Fatras and Tatras separating the prosperous west from the impoverished and troublesome eastern counties, and – a frontier at once natural, psychic and political – the high passes leading to the plateau of Transylvania.