Dracula, Prince of Many Faces

by Radu R Florescu

  In 1863 Bolintineanu wrote in the same nationalistic vein a historical novel based on Dracula's life.

  However, the greatest of all Romanian poets of the late nineteenth century (one of the few whose works have been translated into English) was undoubtedly Mihai Eminescu (1850–1889), whose life was tragically cut short at the age of thirty-nine. Eminescu represented an isolated voice crying in the wilderness, protesting the amorality of politics, the perfidy of politicians, the faithlessness of diplomats, the crass materialism and iconoclasm of the literary men who took in vain the name of heroes of the past. Like Hamlet, he felt that times were out of joint. In despair, in a great historic ballad called The Third Letter, he appealed to the giants of old to rise from the dust under which they had been laid to rest in order to regenerate Romanian society and political life. They alone, he said, understood the true meaning of patriotism and had shown genuine love of the fatherland. The poem opens by recalling the manly virtues and military valor of Wallachia's early medieval princes, notably Prince Mircea the Old, Dracula's grandfather, who, when summoned to surrender his country to the great Sultan Bayezid, then at the height of his power, defied him at the Battle of Rovine (1394) with the following proud words:

  “Oh,

  But the man you see here stand

  Is no common mortal; he is Prince

  of the Romanian land.”

  Eminescu immortalized Vlad with an often quoted stanza. He recalls the great Dracula from the grave to save the Romanian nation and asks him to do away with the Philistines in the land:

  You must come, O dread Impaler, confound them to your care.

  Split them in two partitions, here the fools, the rascals there;

  Shove them into two enclosures from the broad daylight enisle 'em,

  Then set fire to the prison and the lunatic asylum.

  Only during recent decades in Romania has Dracula made a full comeback even among Socialist historians. Heretofore, Romania's historians had dismissed Dracula in only a sentence or two along the lines of “cruel but heroic and just.”

  The occasion chosen for this belated awakening of a scholarly interest was the celebration of the five hundredth anniversary of Vlad's death, “Dracula Year,” proclaimed in 1976. Panegyrics, commemorative eulogies, discussion panels, lead articles in the press and in scholarly journals (the popular History Magazine dedicated its entire issue of November 1976 to Dracula), radio and television commentaries, and films were devoted to the subject. Even Romania's president Ceauescu invoked the memory of Vlad. A special commemorative stamp was issued. Dracula became a national hero par excellence, one who defended the nation's independence against overwhelming odds—a kind of George Washington of the Romanian people, who had been maligned by his political enemies in the west, from his own period to our times, when he had finally degenerated into a vampire. In the view of some Romanian authors, the progressive vampirization of Dracula by western novelists and movie producers had all been a “Hungarian plot,” originally inspired by King Matthias, continued by Vambery, Stoker's Hungarian informant, and given its most masterful stroke by Bela Lugosi, a Hungarian who adapted his name from the town where he was born, Lugoj, in the Banat region of Transylvania (his real name was Béla Ferenc Blasko).

  One last factor in the extraordinary Vlad/Dracula dichotomy is Romania's reaction to Stoker's best-selling novel, which has been printed in virtually every European language and many Asian ones. To date, the book has not been translated into Romanian—nor have Lugosi-style vampire films been shown in Bucharest. Even the National Tourist Office, in its legitimate attempt to earn hard currency by encouraging the so-called Dracula Tours, has decided to divide Romania into two segments—the southern and western tiers, Wallachia and southern Transylvania, are “Vlad country,” associated with genuine historic sites connected with the Romanian prince: the castle on the Arge, the monastery of Snagov, the palace of Tîrgovite, et cetera. Beautiful sound-and-light spectacles have been held at such locations at night. Ruins like these are as sacred to the Romanians as the Washington Monument or Plymouth Rock to Americans and the tours are aimed at the serious-minded history buffs. For the vampire hunters—and this includes many Dracula societies that have flourished in the west—the government has created an artificial Disneyland-style vampire scenario centered in Stoker's Borgo Pass region in northeastern Transylvania, where the plot of the famous book was laid. Like Jonathan Harker, Dracula's solicitor's clerk in the novel, a visitor can book a room at the Golden Crown Hotel in Bistria, which has been rebuilt; there he can enjoy “paprikash chicken” and “Mediasch” wine, which is fermented not far away, and then proceed to the not-so-sinister Borgo Pass in quest of the ruins of an insignificant castle that once belonged to Dracula. This was the concession the Socialist government of Romania was willing to give to what they considered decadent western vampirologists, on the condition that they not fraternize too closely with the local population, many of whom still believe in the dreaded strigoi.

  CHAPTER 11

  Stoker's Count Dracula, the Vampire

  THERE can be no question that the best-selling novel Dracula, published by the Anglo-Irish writer Bram (Abraham) Stoker in 1897 (and published in no fewer than 85 editions between 1897 and 1971) was responsible, after a prolonged period of silence, for giving the Romanian prince a kind of fame he had never enjoyed in the fifteenth century, projecting him onto the world stage. Though historically this new image can be linked to the earlier traditions of the German stories associated with the historical Dracula—which, as noted, were bestsellers of a kind during the fifteenth century—it is Stoker's fictitious creation, the ultimate metamorphosis of the many images of Dracula, that has most successfully anchored itself in the public mind and immortalized that name, largely through the mass media and forms of communication not widely available during the earlier period.

  Even though it is a work of fiction, some of the strength and many details of Stoker's creation are derived, as we suggest in our prologue, from what can be described only as a prolonged period of study and research—not least about Dracula the man—extending over some six years, from 1890 to 1896, before the final draft was completed in Scotland at Cruden Bay a year before publication. Evidence for these facts was gathered by the two co-authors, who were the first to discover Stoker's notes (some 75 pages in all) during a visit to the Philip H. and A. S. W. Rosenbach Library at Philadelphia. (Others, such as Professor Phyllis Roth of Skidmore College, Dr. Joseph S. Bierman, and Bernard Davies, president of the English Dracula Society, have since researched these same documents.) Pending possible new finds in the possession of the Stoker family (Stoker's granddaughter, Anne Dobbs [née Stoker] is now the honorary president of the Bram Stoker Society founded at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1980), the existence of an original manuscript remains a subject of speculation. In its absence, the notes available at the Rosenbach Library provide invaluable insights into some of Stoker's sources of information, the general conception of the novel, and the various stages of adaptation it underwent. In addition to extensive bibliographies on vampirism and the occult, there are copious notations on such diverse subjects as the appearance of Whitby Abbey and the cemetery (Stoker was particularly interested in sailors who died in nautical disasters), countless meteorological observations about tides, winds, et cetera, a few remarks about and sketches of the symptoms of insanity garnished from one of Stoker's brothers, Sir William Thornley Stoker, a former president of the Royal College of Surgeons, and a short bibliography dealing with eastern European history.

  To understand the significance of this detailed research, one must first place Dracula within the general context of the gothic novel and trace Stoker's indebtedness to that tradition, which dates back to Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764) and Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Unlike Mary Shelley, who kept extensive bibliographies of gothic works she consulted for Frankenstein, many of them loaning some element to her novel, Stoker makes no specific acknowledgm
ent in his notes to any of his English, Irish, or French gothic precursors.

  According to a story known to every English schoolboy, the famous foursome of Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Byron's doctor, John Polidori, were confined because of heavy rainstorms to Villa Diodati in the small village of Cologny outside Geneva. On the particularly stormy night of June 16, as a thunderbolt of lightning struck down a tree outside, Lord Byron began reading ghost stories in his stentorian and dramatic manner, while Polidori was discussing the latest inventions in the field of electricity. Under the impact of copious doses of the drug laudanum (opium), Lord Byron issued his famous challenge, daring all assembled to write a truly terrifying story that would frighten generations to come. Mary Shelley eventually wrote Frankenstein. With relevance to the vampire, Byron's young lover Polidori, taking his cue from a vampire plot that Byron had sketched out but never finished (derived from his various readings on vampirism in Arab countries and China and his experiences with folkloric superstitions in Albania), published the first vampire story in the English language, The Vampyre, in April 1819. The story, wrongly attributed to Byron (Goethe thought it was the best thing that Byron had ever written), led to a vampire craze in English and French theaters during the 1820s. Operettas and stage plays were quite popular. The German composer Heinrich Marschner wrote Der Vampyr (The Vampire), a successful opera that may have influenced Richard Wagner.

  Vampire serial novels became the rage in English popular literature during the 1840s. The most famous was Varney the Vampire or, The Feast of Blood, written by Thomas Peckett Prest in 1847. Varney is a reluctant vampire aristocrat who sucks the blood from young Flora Bannerworth, captures her lover, and inadvertently brings havoc wherever he goes. The novel ends spectacularly when Varney throws himself into the hissing mouth of Mount Vesuvius.

  The vampire novel Carmilla, by the Irish author Joseph Sheridan LeFanu (1814–1873), published in 1871, was the most important literary inspiration for Stoker's Dracula. It is a story of a strange, almost lesbian, relationship between the young heroine Laura and the mysterious countess, Carmilla, who turns out to be a female vampire. When Carmilla's body is discovered in her crypt, the traditional wooden stake is driven through her heart to pin her to her coffin and she is beheaded. Her friend Laura remains haunted by the countess and imagines hearing the soft footfall of Carmilla coming to see her again. LeFanu's story made a deep impression on Stoker, who was then an unpaid Dublin theater critic.

  Two foreign works in particular could have drawn Stoker's attention to the vampire's folkloric connections with Romania and Transylvania. One was Alexander Dumas's Mille et un fantômes (A Thousand and One Ghosts), published in 1849 under the initial title Les Monts Carpathes (The Carpathian Mountains), which centered on the castle (located not very far from the site of that of Stoker's vampire count) of a Prince Brancovan. A member of that princely family had dealings with a vampire who refused to stay in his grave. Only five years before the publication of Dracula there appeared Jules Verne's Château des Carpathes (Castle of the Carpathians), published in Paris in 1892. It is the story of wicked ghosts who haunt the Jiu Valley of Transylvania. Like Stoker's Dracula, the novel has references to early princes in Romanian history, notably to Radu I, one of Dracula's precursors, and to his palace at Arge.

  Another important influence on Stoker that cannot be ignored is his friendship with Sir Richard Burton, the prominent orientalist. Burton had translated into English the Thousand Nights and One Night, which included a tale about a vampire originating in Hindu sources. It is fascinating to note that in his Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, about the famous Shakespearean actor for whom Stoker worked most of his life, Stoker wrote how impressed he was not only by Burton's accounts but also by his physical appearance—especially his “canine teeth.” Sir James George Frazer's Golden Bough, which mentions the “walking dead,” and Stoker's friendship with fellow vampire specialists, such as members of the “Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn,” though secret by their very constitution, are obviously relevant in gauging his fascination with the occult.

  There are innumerable other works on the gothic and/or vampire traditions that Stoker might have read, though we have no proof of such readings from gleanings in his notes that are at the Rosenbach Library. The notes are precious, because we can follow the progression of Stoker's research in a more or less precise fashion by observing the letterheads of the various hotel stationeries or other papers on which he took them down, such as the Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia (where he stayed with Sir Henry Irving while on his tour of the United States) or the Lyceum Theatre in London, which Stoker managed for Irving. Quite apart from precise citations from books, Stoker seems to have jotted ideas as they came during his travels or in his idle moments away from managing the theater or going on tours. Most of his period of study and perhaps the preliminary outlines for the book were completed during his summer holidays at Whitby in Yorkshire, where he went to escape the London heat in 1890, 1892, and finally in 1896, upon his return from America. He then began writing the final draft, which was completed, as we said, at Cruden Bay in Scotland. (From our experience, at least until a few years ago, the landlady of the house that Stoker rented in Port Erroll, that quaint Scottish town, was still willing to relate anecdotes about the eccentric Englishman's daily program and behavior.) The length of time it took to write the novel provides additional proof of the gradual adaptations it underwent and the seriousness with which the author digested the many facts he had accumulated in the course of his research.

  Stoker's primary interest was the vampire and the occult, and the list of books he consulted on that theme, available in his notes at the Rosenbach Library, is extensive. It includes titles such as Sabine Baring-Gould's Curious Myths of the Middle Ages and The Book of Were-Wolves; this author is perhaps best known for having penned the words to that rousing hymn “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”

  Stoker's interest in vampirism and the supernatural was by no means restricted to the traditions of Transylvania. Indeed, the readings attest to the worldwide origins of vampire superstitions, spanning not only continents but centuries as well. Dr. Van Helsing makes this point clear in his halting English: “Let me tell you, he [the vampire] is known everywhere that men have been. In old Greece, in old Rome; he flourish in Germany all over, in France, in India, even in the Chersonese; and in China, so far from us in all ways.…”

  Progressively, however, Stoker began to focus on the superstitions of eastern Europe in general and Transylvania in particular. This narrowing tendency can be traced from copious notes from his reading of yet other books, mostly travelogues and pseudoscientific books dealing with folklore. Most extensive of all were those from Emily Gerard de Laszowska (a Scottish lady who had married a Polish-born Austrian officer), who wrote an article entitled “Transylvanian Superstitions” for the Nineteenth Century Magazine (of July 23, 1885, published simultaneously in London and New York)—a periodical to which Stoker also contributed articles. Her work was later expanded into a widely read two-volume travelogue entitled The Land beyond the Forest.

  With few exceptions, most of Stoker's information on Transylvanian vampirism and other superstitions were transcribed literally from Emily Gerard's article. Comparing several crucial passages from that book with the novel's content on the parallel subject will make our point quite clear. Describing many forms of evil spirits thought to exist among the Romanians of Transylvania, Gerard writes: “More decidedly evil, however, is the vampire nosferatu, in whom every Romanian peasant believes as firmly as he does in heaven or hell. The very person killed by a nosferatu becomes likewise a vampire after death, and will suck the blood of other innocent people till the spirit has been exorcised … by opening the grave of the person suspected and driving a stake through the corpse.… In very obstinate cases it is further recommended to cut off the head and replace it in the coffin with the mouth filled with garlic, or to extract the heart and burn it, strewing the a
shes over the grave” (p. 142). In the novel, Van Helsing, when referring to Lucy's vampirization, makes the same point, warning her fiancé in his poor English: “Last night when you open your arms to her, you would in time, when you had died, have become nosferatu, as they call it in Eastern Europe, and would all time make more of these Un-Deads that so have fill us in horror.” (In strict Romanian folkloric terms, nosferatu refers to the devil [necuratul] rather than the vampire, whom the peasants refer to as strigoi or [feminine] strigoaic.)

  Stoker also picked out of Gerard's book the materials on the fearsome devil's school in the mountains, which some of the Draculas attended, according to the novel. In Gerard's essay one reads, “They learned the secrets in the Scholomance, amongst the mountains over Lake Hermanstadt, where the devil claims the tenth scholar as his due.” Gerard continued, “… I may as well mention the Scholomance, or school supposed to exist somewhere in the heart of the mountains, and where all the secrets of nature, the language of animals, and all imaginable magic spells and charms are taught by the devil in person. Only ten scholars are admitted at a time, and when the course of learning has expired and nine of them are released to return to their homes, the tenth scholar is detained by the devil as payment, and mounted upon an Ismeju [the correct Romanian spelling is Zmeu, another word for dragon] he becomes henceforward the devil's aide-de-camp.… A small lake, immeasurably deep, lying high up among the mountains to the south of Hermanstadt, is supposed to be the cauldron where is brewed the thunder, and in fair weather the dragon sleeps beneath the water” (p. 136). Again, Stoker has Van Helsing state in the novel: “The Draculas were, says Arminius, a great and noble race, though now and again were scions who were held by their coevals to have had dealings with the Evil One. They learned his secrets in the Scholomance, amongst the mountains over Lake Hermanstadt, where the devil claims the tenth scholar as his due.” This reference to the Scholomance is derived from the Romanian word olomonari, meaning “students of alchemy.” It is a corruption of the name Solomon, the wise judge in the Bible, whom legend turned into an alchemist. Such students were thought to study and control the forces of nature. Near Sibiu (Hermannstadt), in the mountains close to the town of Pltini, there is a spot named Pietrele lui Solomon (“Solomon's Rocks”). That is where wandering students traditionally took oaths to uphold their scholarly way of life.