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Popular Culture Review
What follows is a sampling of the various kinds of evil that appear in the
novel. In 1930, Professor Rossi sees a vampire servant, complete with neck
wounds, in a library in Istanbul. Twenty-plus years later, Rossi explains the
dangerous dragon book legacy to his American graduate student Paul, adding
that “human history is full of evil deeds” (35). Moreover, once Rossi, and Paul,
and later on Paul’s daughter (the unnamed narrator) learn that Dracula lives on,
they cannot stop themselves from pursuing Dracula.
In 1930 at Oxford University, Professor Rossi’s friend and older colleague
Hedges is brutally attacked by a vampire as a warning to the younger Rossi not
to pursue Dracula research. A characteristic juxtaposition occurs when, only a
few pages later, we read about how, in 1972, the young female narrator is in an
Amsterdam library reading about the atrocities committed by Vlad the Impaler
in 1456 when he was appointed Lord in Wallachia. This is Kostova’s method of
connecting evils throughout the novel.
Instances of evil and menace abound in The Historian. In 1972, Paul and his
daughter are being watched as they travel throughout Europe and as Paul
gradually tells her the Professor Rossi story. A particularly bloody death awaits
Johan Binnerts, the Amsterdam librarian who helps Paul’s daughter learn more
about vampires. Several times in the novel, whenever a character speaks aloud
the name of Dracula, a vampire appears and threatens the person who dares to
speak the magic “word” (111).
A person who receives three vampire bites is doomed to become one of the
undead. Professor Rossi will eventually receive three bites; his daughter Helen
will receive two bites and thus escape undead status. Helen and Paul eventually
marry, and their daughter is the unnamed narrator who, when sixteen, is
accosted on a train in France by Dracula himself. She escapes unbitten.
In 1930, Rossi is trying to track down Dracula’s tomb in Transylvania. He
meets evil along the way, as a stranger gives Rossi a drink called “amnesia” to
make him stop his search and forget his discoveries. But 20 years later, Rossi
resumes his research, and Dracula violently kidnaps Rossi from his office in an
American university.
At one point, we read about the “Little Plague” of 1477 that swept the
Carpathians in the year after the human Dracula’s first death. We are meant to
connect this disease to the evil vampirism of Dracula. We also read about how
the human head of Dracula was separated from his body after his death in 1476,
as a way to prevent Dracula from becoming undead. But his followers
eventually retrieved the head, and so Dracula lives on as an immortal.
Finally, Helen—we recall that she is Rossi’s daughter, later Paul’s wife, and
later the young narrator’s mother—tells Paul that the two of them must destroy
the preternatural Dracula to help prevent evil from spreading. For instance,
Dracula’s undead, vampiric evil is associated with Stalin who admired Ivan the
Terrible who admired Dracula. “Can you imagine a world in which Stalin could
live for five hundred years? . . . Or perhaps forever?” wonders Helen.