This view of the “divine” origin of the prince's power was derived from Dracula's view that “anointment,” meaning the prince's being touched by the holy relics of some saint, was ordained by God, and thus the ruler was implicitly akin to the Divinity. Therefore God alone could judge his actions. Since Ivan III had every interest in strengthening the power of the central government against the Orthodox church, he was easily won over to this view of his own “divinity,” against the arguments of Sophia Paleologus, who supported the Orthodox church.
The victory of Dracula's viewpoint was symbolized by the splendid ceremony that took place at the Cathedral of the Assumption in Moscow, when the youth Dmitri, brought up in the traditions of his mother's Judaizing friends, was recognized as Ivan's sole legitimate heir — while Sophia Paleologus and her son Basil were sent away in disgrace into house arrest.
Kuritsyn and Elena, however, had not reckoned on the unusual resiliency and talent for intrigue of her clever rival, the ambitious Sophia. She staged a remarkable comeback, by cleverly insinuating that Elena and Kuritsyn were planning a coup against the aged grand duke, hoping to poison him in order to hasten the rule of the young grandson. Ivan III, who was ill, and suspicious of his daughter-in-law, abruptly changed his mind. He had Elena and Dmitri arrested barely four years after his grandson had been crowned, while Sophia's son Basil, reemerging from his confinement, became heir.
Elena was probably murdered in jail in 1504. Her unfortunate son Dmitri lingered for another five years and died in circumstances that have never been satisfactorily explained. Equally mysterious was the end of Kuritsyn and his brother Ivan the Wolf and their Judaizing followers, who suddenly disappeared from the political scene in 1501. They were condemned by the powerful Orthodox hierarchy in a special synod convoked in 1503.
Though the power of the Russian church survived intact until the more radical reforms of Peter the Great, Dracula's political philosophy, inherent in Kuritsyn's narrative, continued to hold sway among a number of successive tsars. Particularly strong was its impact upon the deranged mentality of Ivan IV (1533–1589), nicknamed “the Terrible,” the grandson of Ivan III. The Dracula narrative was probably read to the young heir to the throne during the impressionable years of childhood. His biographers inform us that one of his chief pleasures was torturing animals, particularly plucking the feathers of birds, eccentricities that match those committed by Dracula, mentioned in Kuritsyn's story. Especially after the poisoning of his beloved wife, Anastasia Romanova, in 1558, Ivan IV prosecuted the old Russian boyars whom he knew to be disloyal to his person with cruelty inspired by pages from the Dracula manuscript. Like Dracula, he chose new elements to serve him, pliable and loyal to his person. Even his infamous streltsy guard, responsible for his most dastardly crimes, were closely modeled on Dracula's hired armai. He taught disrespectful ambassadors the lessons of protocol by nailing their hats onto their heads — the precise method used by the Wallachian prince. Dracula's standards for diplomatic protocol found their way into the Chronicle of Kazan, drafted upon the tsar's orders. Ivan made frequent use of impalement in killing boyars and other political enemies — a method of imposing death rarely used in Russia before his time and obviously inspired by Dracula. Ivan showed Dracula's intolerance for idle priests and monks who did not live up to the moral standards of the church; he subjected them to punishments that included impalement. Contemporaries observed that he, like Dracula, enjoyed seeing men twist in pain before they died in a variety of grotesque postures.
Though the Dracula narrative continued to serve as an internal court document for some time, it lost its appeal over the course of the centuries. It became irrelevant with Russia's progressive emergence on the European stage as a major power in the era of Peter the Great. In the long run, the Russian Dracula narrative acquired the legendary and even mythical aura of the German tales. In the eighteenth century, Kuritsyn's account began to be disseminated in various popular, literary, and even religious writings.
The Romanian Tradition: Dracula the Hero
Contrary to the gruesome Dracula depicted in the German and Turkish writings and, in contrast to the “cruel but just” characterization of the prince exploited by successive Russian rulers, a much kinder picture of the Wallachian ruler has emerged in Romania. Over the course of time, his heroic traits prevailed. This process has reached the point where some western readers accustomed to the vampirization of Dracula and Romanians who have witnessed his gradual deification believed for a while that they were dealing with two different personalities. This wide gulf was accentuated by the use of different names: “Dracula” in the west and “Vlad the Impaler” in Romania. Most confused by this double identity are tourists visiting the various sites associated with Dracula's name. To the inquisitive visitor asking for additional information concerning Dracula, the response of the national tourist-office guide is invariably “Oh, you mean Vlad the Impaler!”
The sources for the Romanian story must be sought in oral folklore, since Romanian did not exist as a written language until the sixteenth century—only Church Slavonic, the language of the liturgy, was in use at Dracula's court. The original authors of the Romanian Dracula narratives, mostly peasants, came from those regions of Transylvania and Wallachia associated with places where Dracula had sojourned, where he fought, and where he prayed. As noted, the majority of the population in Transylvania spoke the Romanian language. Living among the German Saxons, they were familiar with their anecdotes and included many of them in their own sagas. In regions of mixed ethnic origins, such as Bulgaria and Serbia, similar accounts of Dracula's exploits have recently been collected by folklorists.
The manner in which these Dracula ballads began was in essence no different from the beginning of oral traditions of any people: bards, minstrels, poets, drawn from the peasant class, would convert these stories to verse and compose songs, often accompanied by the music of rough wooden musical instruments like the bagpipe or Pan pipes, on festive occasions such as Easter or on the feast days of certain saints. There was a tendency to give the ballad a local flavor, connecting it with a familiar place or landmark. Dates of succession of princes and precise locations are rarely mentioned in the collective memory of the people. As tales are repeated from generation to generation, embellishments are naturally introduced with the passing of time. However, from the viewpoint of our research, these oral traditions of the Romanian people have provided an invaluable source to close the many gaps in our study of Dracula where documents were missing.
Although folklore has to be used with caution by the historian, it can become a legitimate tool. There are perhaps more reasons to trust collective folk wisdom, because people can be more discriminating in what they chose to remember, than the memoirs of statesmen, diplomats, and kings, who often chose to deceive posterity to enhance their reputation. What is worth stressing in connection with the rich folkloric tradition Dracula has generated is the fact that, although several Romanian princes had more distinguished careers and ruled for more extensive periods of time, Dracula, whose total reign lasted barely six years, is remembered most reverently by the people.
“The Dracula Castle Epic” first appeared in an old historical chronicle known by the name of its presumed author, Cantacuzino. Since written sources on Dracula were scanty, the earliest chronicler inserted a popular narrative concerning the construction of Dracula's castle, using the language of the Romanian people in the Slavonic script still current at that time in the seventeenth century. Cantacuzino related the story of the punishment of the citizens of Tîrgovite for burying Dracula's brother Mircea alive. “After the death of Prince Mircea, Prince Vlad, whose name was ‘the Impaler,’ came to rule. The latter built the monastery of Snagov and the castle of Poenari. He inflicted a severe punishment on the citizens of Tîrgovite, because they committed a great injustice to one of his brothers. For these reasons he sent his retainers, who, striking on Easter Day, apprehended the husbands and their wives, their sons and daught
ers in their gaudy clothes, and took them to the castle of Poenari, where they toiled until their clothes fell off their backs.” This detail is revealed in no historical document of the period. The first traveler to the region who recorded in the Romanian language the story of the construction of the famous castle was the head of the church at the time, Metropolitan Neofit. In the course of a journey he undertook to the source of the Arge River in 1747, he discovered Dracula's abandoned fortress. He left us yet another account, gathered from the tales of local peasants, of its construction by boyar slave labor.
One of the earliest nineteenth century collectors of peasant stories who focused on the Dracula legend was Petre Ispirescu. He had little training or background for this formidable job, being an artisan in a Bucharest print shop, with little knowledge of the subject of folklore. Instead of trying to understand the local peasant dialect of the castle region, he used the slang of his native Bucharest suburb to compile a faulty transcription.
A far more accurate account of Dracula peasant stories was compiled by C. Rdulescu-Codin, who was a native of the Muscel district, in which Dracula's famous castle is located. As a village teacher, he knew the local dialect well. In recent years the Institute of Folklore in Bucharest has made a most commendable effort in organizing research surrounding the castle area, subjecting it to rigorous scientific evaluation. Most notable in this respect was the work done by a group of professional researchers, led by Mihai Pop, at the time director of the Folklore Institute, an internationally recognized authority on the subject, who has worked closely with the two co-authors. By far the best work so far published on the Dracula castle epic is owed to Georgeta Ene, who wrote a dissertation on the subject under the direction of Mihai Pop. She refers to the siege, the suicide of Dracula's wife, and Dracula's escape across the mountains, which are not otherwise documented.
Serious folkloric work at the other sites connected with Dracula's name, such as Snagov, Tismana, Bucharest, Sibiu, Bistria, the Danubian battlefields, Tîrgsor, Media, even small villages like Ghergheni, and the many Transylvanian townships, has not as yet begun in earnest. A comprehensive survey in villages near Snagov such as was conducted at the castle site might yield important new discoveries to help resolve the problem of his death and entombment. Such a work is all the more essential, since with the current industrialization of Romania, the exodus of young people to the city, and the dying out of old people, it is increasingly difficult to find genuine “storytellers.” The problem has been compounded by the Romanian regime's recent decision to destroy village communities in order to make additional land available for agricultural production. This devastation of the rich cultural legacy of village life in the name of modernization is nothing less than a sacrilege.
The image of Dracula that has emerged from this vast compilation of Romanian folklore is in marked contrast to the two views we have described so far, those of the German and Russian narratives, in spite of the coincidence of many themes. The contrast is greater with reference to the German stories, in which Dracula is depicted as killing and torturing people without rational cause. Closer to the man revealed in Kuritsyn's original report, the “Romanian Dracula” is indeed a law-upholding statesman who is implacable in punishing thieves, liars, idlers, or people who otherwise cheated the state. He was a rational despot attempting to centralize his government by killing unpatriotic anarchical boyars. Dracula's crimes are further justified on a variety of counts. From a peasant point of view, because of his antiboyar stance he acquires the characteristics of a social leveler, a Robin Hood type of character, who plunders the rich in order to help the poor. In justifying his harsh punishment of unfaithful wives, there is a strong moral flavor to the stories (not fully in tune with the psyche of the Romanian people, who, like the French, are fond of “wine, women, and song”). Even the burning of the sick and the poor is condoned by the peasants on the grounds that Dracula was getting rid of undesirables and useless mouths to feed in times of war. Above all, his anti-German and anti-Turkish exploits gave a boost to the patriotic ego, in the dawn of the era of nationalism. All in all, the Romanian peasant narratives harnessed a law-and-justice theme to aid in the incarnation of a national hero. The tales were thus a powerful source for the Romantic historians of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who sought heroic and just precursors to pave the way for the establishment of an independent Romanian state. The task of transcribing the spoken language of the peasants, which was rough, ungrammatical, and limited in vocabulary, into a written language was difficult in the extreme.
Through a remarkable coincidence, the first fictional work in this new Romanian language, written by Ion Budai-Deleanu (1760–1820), was a poem that centered on Dracula. Deleanu gave his work the deceptive title of iganiada (Gypsy Epic). In the poem Dracula leads an army of gypsy slaves in a campaign against the Turks. The manuscript, dormant for almost a century, was finally published in its original form only in 1875.
Born not very far away from Hunyadi's castle at Hunedoara, Budai-Deleanu was educated at the College of Santa Barbara in Vienna, which was then experiencing the full bloom of the Enlightenment of the
eighteenth century; and he completed his doctorate at the University of Erlau in Germany. He then settled at Lvov in Poland, where he finished his remarkable work. He consulted long-forgotten archives, among them narratives about Dracula in German, Slavonic, Latin, and Greek, as well as his native Romanian folklore. Like Homer in his Iliad, Budai-Deleanu sought in Romania's past a hero to be immortalized above all other heroes and found him in the person of Dracula. He refused to use the nickname Dracula, which in his view had been exposed to excessive abuse by his German detractors; Deleanu instead opted for “The Impaler,” initially coined by the Turks but adopted by Romanian chroniclers since. In Deleanu's presentation, the Impaler Prince, far from being a villain, appeared as one of Romania's first great national heroes, fighting the Turks, the boyars, and legions of Satan, with a motley army of gypsies and angels, in essence representing the forces of good.
Narrated in a powerful orchestration of words perhaps unequaled until the nineteenth century, this poem, which contained satire, other forms of humor, sarcasm, and also political philosophy, was critical of despotism and absolute monarchy. It was also Voltairean in its distrust of men and revolutionary in its attacks on the boyars and the establishment. In this respect, Dracula was being used for purposes entirely contrary to those of the Slavonic narrative, which aimed at the justification of absolute monarchy.
The whole plot of the German stories and of Bram Stoker's famous novel is turned topsy-turvy in Deleanu's work, since the vampires and other evil spirits are Dracula's enemies. Deleanu, in fact, introduced, in written form, the Romanian equivalent for the word vampires: the strigoi, derived from the Latin word strix, meaning a hag or goblin. Vampire, adopted in English and in other western languages, is a word used by the Slavic peoples. In the poem Deleanu had these vampires (strigoi) “fly in the direction of Retezat toward a certain mountain that lies between Wallachia and the Banat,” a moonscaped ridge 100 miles distant from the authentic location of Castle Dracula. Deleanu also introduced the female vampire to his readers, creatures “who fly at nightfall when beautiful ladies take their walks, breaking people's bones.” Such evil spirits, of which the vampire is but one species, were of course familiar to Deleanu from his knowledge of the superstitions of the Romanian people of Transylvania. (In the course of time, such beliefs became the subject of scholarly investigations by a succession of English and other foreign travelers to Transylvania. Perhaps the most famous among them was the Scottish lady Emily Gerard, whose works were consulted by Bram Stoker in the composition of Dracula.)
When the current of nationalism that had started in Transylvania crossed the mountains into the principality of Wallachia, it was natural that the heroic figure of Dracula should in turn be exploited by Romanian nationalists to give precedence and paternity to the movement for independence. Most of the Romantic his
torians (G. Lazr, N. Blcescu, I. Eliade Rdulescu, Aaron Florian, A. Treboniu Laurian) responsible for organizing the revolution of 1848 (which aimed at securing total freedom from Turkish and Russian domination) took part in romanticizing Dracula's deeds and explaining away his crimes.
Beyond having nationalist motives, the men of the generation of 1848 were interested in presenting Dracula's career in literary rather than historical form. Since it was dangerous to teach Romanian history in the schools at a time when the country was under combined reactionary Russian and Turkish control, plays, poems, and novels with nationalistic themes were an effective, permissible way of reaching a wider audience. For instance, the public was bound to recognize the obvious message contained in Dracula's spectacular anti-Turkish campaign in 1462. Under cover of writing literature, one could successfully overcome the severe Russian censorship.
The Dracula heroic theme is best exemplified by the poets of the period. One of the most prominent figures of the generation of 1848, Dimitrie Bolintineanu (1819–1872), sounded the trumpet call, praising Dracula's military valor. In highly stylized but beautifully versified rhymes, and with a sense for the musical sounds of the Romanian language, Bolintineanu recalled the highlights of Dracula's career in his “Battles of the Romanians.” The episode of the nailing of the turbans to the heads of the Turkish envoys is dismissed in the following manner:
The assembly of soldiers
Shout with people:
“Long live the Impaler!”
The terrified boyars jump through the window
While Dracula drives spikes into the Turkish envoy's heads.
Dracula, Prince of Many Faces Page 30