The Historian

The Historian relies on common tropes of the vampire myth to affirm the novel’s place within the larger tradition and to destabilize those familiar images: Dracula is also presented as a scholar and collector of books for a great library. In this way, The Historian contributes to the long history of vampire legends, which includes old stage productions and films, particularly the black-and-white film Dracula (1931) starring Bela Lugosi. Kostova also provides a list of related readings at the book’s close, situating The Historian within a canon of vampire literature. More recently, vampires are featured—and reimagined—throughout popular culture in such franchises as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight. The source to which this novel pays the most homage is Bram Stoker’s seminal text, Dracula, published at the end of the 19th century.

Stoker’s novel acts as a totem throughout the book, providing the quotations for the epigraphs to all three parts and acting as signposts to the development of Kostova’s story. The first epigraph makes appeals to truth and authenticity, claiming the events within Dracula are eyewitness accounts, thus reaffirming The Historian’s claims to authenticity and truth. The second epigraph references the nightmare that Jonathan Harker, the protagonist of Stoker’s novel, wakes to in the Carpathian Mountains. Like Harker, Paul records the nightmarish events that occur as he and Helen stalk their Dracula. The third epigraph is repeated, almost verbatim, within the novel itself, as Rossi grasps the direness of his situation: “Then I saw the largest sarcophagus of them all, a great tomb more lordly than all the rest, huge in the candlelight, nobly proportioned. Along the side ran one word, cut in Latin letters: DRACULA” (610). No matter how evil Dracula’s incarnation or intentions, the character remains grand. For Stoker, this air of nobility can be read as a critique of the European upper classes. For Kostova, Dracula’s grandeur reflects his ambitions. He is no longer the provincial prince railing against the more sophisticated Ottoman Empire; he has become the connoisseur of knowledge, particularly history.

The characters of both Dracula and The Historian arm themselves with crucifixes, garlic, and silver stakes in order to fight vampires, but they are partial recreations of Stoker’s original cast. For example, Rossi’s dogged pursuit of Dracula draws comparisons to Dr. Van Helsing’s determined monster hunting. Later, in one of his letters, Rossi refers directly to Stoker’s work, imagining himself as “Bram Stoker’s hero” as he and Georgescu climb toward Dracula’s castle (408). Helen, like Harker’s fiancée Mina Murray, is bitten, and the search for Dracula also becomes an attempt at salvation; the women upon which the vampire preys must be saved.

Finally, the narrator refers to her visit to the library in Philadelphia as a “pilgrimage,” where she studies historical documents alongside Bram Stoker’s notes (671). This reflects the author’s position on Stoker’s Dracula: It is the sacred text, the original source for the myth of the vampire. While Dracula appears to die in Stoker’s book, his legend decidedly does not.