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