Historical Study A-1972: Dragon Books and Dracula

In a prefatory “Note to the Reader,” the unnamed protagonist—ostensibly the author of Elizabeth Kostova’s debut novel “The Historian”—indulges in a moment of metanarration.

After noting that she embarked on a quest to piece together the mysterious past of her diplomat father Paul and his Ph.D. advisor Bartholomew Rossi, our historian eerily asserts: “we all found ourselves on one of the darkest pathways into history. It is the story of who survived that search and who did not, and why. As a historian, I have learned that, in fact, not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it. And it is not only reaching back that endangers us; sometimes history itself reaches inexorably forward for us with its shadowy claw.”

Lest we dismiss this story as, to borrow a line from one of its characters, “only literature,” our historian reminds us that it is a history; Kostova not-so-subtly tries to inject an aura of verisimilitude into the novel.

Opening the story proper, our historian sets the scene in Amsterdam, 1972. Sheltered, studious, and alienated from the “tough-talking, chain-smoking sophisticates” in the brat cohort of diplomats’ children, the protagonist spends long hours with the 19th century tomes in her father’s library during his frequent absences. She becomes captivated by a “much older volume” that breaks the collection’s uniformity: an enigmatic medieval text marked by a woodcut of a dragon and concealing a collection of yellowing letters.

The letters, written by Rossi while he was a young scholar at Oxford in the 1930s, contain a fantastical claim: Vlad the Impaler, a despotic 15th century prince who inspired Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel “Dracula,” really was a vampire—and really was undead.

Although the young Rossi had dismissed Stoker’s “Dracula” as mere fiction—“useless as a source of information about the real Dracula”—our historian mulls over the very question of literary truth. Since Rossi believed Vlad the Impaler was actually a vampire, could “a novel...have the power to make something so strange happen in actuality”?

Our historian’s life comes to imitate literature. Neatly broken into three volumes, her narrative rivals the structured verbosity of the Victorian novel, and its notorious long-windedness.

Kostova successfully fills out these pages through a multi-layered framing device: as Paul and his daughter flit about Western Europe and the Eastern Bloc—brokering peace agreements and possibly being stalked by an undead librarian—our intrepid historian interweaves correspondence and flashbacks to fill us in on Paul and Rossi’s back stories.

Rossi had received a dragon book identical to one our historian later finds in Paul’s library. When a colleague and close friend dies from a suspicious neck wound, Rossi defects for Cambridge, Mass. Kostova, a Yale graduate, has her characters using all sorts of amusing circumlocutions—the “excellent university,” the university of the “distinguished American scholar”—to describe our fine institution, Rossi’s chosen haven.

Of course, by the time Rossi is advising Paul’s dissertation in the 1950s, even Harvard Yard—the haunt of graduate students identifiable by their “barely veiled fatigue” and guileless undergraduates “attending some kind of study group, comparing notes sotto voce”—has become unsafe for Rossi.

So when Rossi disappears without a trace, Paul and a fellow graduate student travel through Turkey, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania. Along the way, they collaborate with an expansive cast of scholars in an effort to locate Dracula’s tomb, to which they are convinced that Rossi has been taken.

As our historian’s prefatory note suggests, her story’s competing subplots move inexorably toward a climatic showdown in a crypt. It is no great surprise that when the lord of the undead finally appears, he is the “shadowy claw” of history:

“‘As I knew I could not attain a heavenly paradise’—again that dispassionate tone—‘I became an historian in order to preserve my own history forever.’”

Although the undead prince is undoubtedly the villian of this novel, our response to Dracula is ambiguous. We revile his inveterately cruel deeds, but might we also sympathize with his commitment to History? This is the mark of literary complexity, and it belies our historian’s tendency of essentializing historicism.

The Historian
By Elizabeth Kostova
Back Bay Books
Out Now