In Chapter 18 of Dracula,
Van Helsing says this of the Count: “He must, indeed, have
been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk, over the
great river on the very frontier of Turkey-land” (291). Very
little attention was paid to the possible connection between the
fictional Count and his historical namesake until 1972 when Radu
Florescu and Raymond T. McNally’s In Search of
Dracula revealed to the world the story of the real Dracula
– Vlad Tepes. This was closely followed by
McNally’s fortuitous discovery that the Rosenbach Museum in
Philadelphia had acquired Stoker’s working papers for Dracula,
which prove conclusively that he did know about the existence of the
“Voivode Dracula.” Dracula studies have not been
the same since. Using the initial findings of Florescu and McNally
(some of which the two historians have since revised), many enthusiasts
have championed tenuous connections between Count Dracula and Vlad, to
the point where it has become increasingly difficult to separate fact
from hypothesis.
It has become commonplace to
assume that Stoker was inspired by accounts of the Impaler’s
atrocities and deliberately modeled his Dracula on the life and
character of Vlad. This has resulted in some fanciful and at times
ludicrous statements: that “Dracula was
the reshaping of four centuries of folk legends that had accreted
around the historical Walachian warlord Prince Vlad Tepes”
(Dziemianowicz 11); that much of the story of Count Dracula
“was drawn … from the ghastly doings of the
Hungarian Prince Vlad who was a remote ancestor of Attila the
Hun” (Mascetti 274); that the historical Dracula’s
abandonment of his Orthodox faith resulted in his becoming subject to
punishment by Orthodox priests who “publicly laid the curse
of vampirism” on him (Hillyer 17); that the city of Bucharest
was “first mentioned in a document dated 1459 and signed Vlad
Tepes (Count Dracula)”; and that the “first
reported vampires were real historical figures … Elizabeth
of Bathory and Vlad the Impaler” (Brownworth and Redding ix).
It is time to put such claims to rest.
Investigations into possible
connections between the Count and the Voivode began before the
publication of In Search of Dracula. In 1958,
Bacil Kirtley stated that “Unquestionably the historical past
that Van Helsing¼ assigns the fictional vampire Dracula is
that of Vlad Tsepesh, Voivod of Wallachia” (14). In 1962,
Stoker’s first biographer, Harry Ludlam, asserted that Stoker
had “discovered that the Voivode Drakula or Dracula
… had earned for himself the title of ‘the
Impaler,’ and that the story of his ferocity and hair-raising
cruelty in defiance of the Turks was related at length in two
fifteenth-century manuscripts, one of which spoke of him as
‘wampyr’” (113). In 1966, Grigore Nandris
connected the vampire Dracula with the historical figure, even claiming
that available portraits of Vlad were “adapted by Bram Stoker
to suit his literary purposes” (375). Building on these
obscure references to a possible connection, Florescu and McNally
embarked on a quest of their own, the results of which were published
in In Search of Dracula (1972, rev. 1994). While
their historical research was thorough and well documented, the two
authors speculated that the author of Dracula
knew quite a bit about the historical figure, and that his sources
included Arminius Vambéry (a Hungarian professor whom he met
on at least two occasions) and various readings found at the British
Museum. But is this the case? Exactly what is the
connection between the Count and the Voivode? For the answer, we must
go to two sources, the reliability of which cannot be questioned:
Stoker’s Notes at the Rosenbach Museum, and the novel itself.
We know from Stoker’s
Notes that by March 1890, he had decided to write a vampire novel; in
fact, he had already selected a name for his vampire … Count
Wampyr. We are also certain that Stoker found the name
“Dracula” (most likely for the first time) in a
book that he borrowed from the Whitby Public Library in the summer of
1890, An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and
Moldavia (1820) by William Wilkinson. Stoker not only
recorded the call number of the book but copied almost verbatim key
passages. This is what Wilkinson wrote:
Wallachia continued to pay it
[tribute] until the year 1444; when Ladislas King of Hungary, preparing
to make war against the Turks, engaged the Voivode Dracula to form an
alliance with him. The Hungarian troops marched through the
principality and were joined by four thousand Wallachians under the
command of Dracula’s son. (17)
And later,
Their Voivode, also named
Dracula, did not remain satisfied with mere prudent measures of
defence: with an army he crossed the Danube and attacked the few
Turkish troops that were stationed in his neighbourhood; but this
attempt, like those of his predecessors, was only attended with
momentary success. Mahomet, having turned his arms against him, drove
him back to Wallachia, whither he pursued and defeated him. The Voivode
escaped into Hungary, and the Sultan caused his brother Bladus to be
named in his place. (19)
The name
“Dracula” appears just three times, two of which
more accurately refer to the father (Vlad Dracul). What attracted
Stoker was a footnote attached to the third occurrence:
“Dracula in the Wallachian language means Devil. The
Wallachians were, at that time, as they are at present, used to give
this as a surname to any person who rendered himself conspicuous either
by courage, cruel actions, or cunning” (19). That Stoker
considered this important is evident in that he copied into his own
notes “DRACULA in Wallachian language means DEVIL.”
The three references to “Dracula” in
Wilkinson’s text, along with the footnote, are the only
occurrences of the name in all of the sources that we know that Stoker
consulted.
Stoker’s debt to
Wilkinson is generally acknowledged, but a number of points are often
overlooked: Wilkinson refers only to “Dracula” and
“Voïvode,” never
“Vlad,” never “Vlad Tepes” or
“the Impaler”; furthermore there are no specific
references to his atrocities. It is no mere co-incidence that the
same paucity of information applies to the text of Dracula.
Yet the popular theory is that Stoker knew much more than what he read
in Wilkinson; that his major sources were the Hungarian professor
Arminius Vambéry, and readings in the British Museum.
In Personal
Reminiscences of Henry Irving (1906), Stoker gives a brief
account of two meetings with Vambéry (238). There is nothing
to indicate that the topic of Dracula ever came up. Stoker does tell
us, however, that Henry Irving was present at the first meeting, a meal
that followed a performance of the play “The Dead
Heart.” Is it not more likely that the dinner conversation
focused on the play, and (considering Irving’s overpowering
personality) on his performance? As the account of this dinner was
written several years after the publication of Dracula,
one would expect Stoker to have mentioned
Vambéry’s role (assuming he had one). Stoker notes
that the Hungarian was “full of experiences [about a trip to
Central Asia] fascinating to hear” (238). Surely a discussion
about the atrocities of Vlad the Impaler would have been as
fascinating, had it occurred? Also significant is that this meeting
took place in April 1890, before Stoker went to
Whitby and read Wilkinson’s book. As for the second
encounter, Stoker provides even less information. “We saw him
again two years later,” records Stoker, “when he
was being given a Degree at the Tercentenary of Dublin University.
… He soared above all the speakers, making one of the finest
speeches I have ever head [sic]” (Reminiscences
238). The only comment about the subject matter of the talk was that
Vambéry “spoke loudly against Russian
aggression” (238). Nothing about Dracula. But by this time,
Stoker’s novel was well underway, and he was already using
the name “Dracula” for his vampire.
The conviction that Stoker
gleaned information from the Hungarian seems to be the residue of
theories about Stoker’s sources before the discovery of his
Notes. As early as 1962, Ludlam was making the claim that
“Bram sought the help of Arminius Vambéry in
Budapest” and that “Vambéry was able to
report that ‘the Impaler’ who had won this name for
obvious reasons, was spoken of for centuries after as the cleverest and
the most cunning, as well as the bravest of the sons of the
‘land beyond the forest’” (100). Florescu
and McNally cemented the connection in 1972: “The two men
[Stoker and Vambéry] dined together, and during the course
of their conversation, Bram was impressed by the professor’s
stories about Dracula ‘the impaler’. After
Vambéry returned to Budapest, Bram wrote to him, requesting
more details about the notorious 15th century prince and the land he
lived in” (Search 115).
The only fact we have is that they dined together! Stoker makes no
reference to Vambéry in his working papers. No documented
evidence exists that Vambéry gave Stoker any
information about Vlad, or for that matter, about vampires. Yet we keep
encountering statements to the contrary.
Supporters of the
Stoker-Vambéry link also go to the novel for textual
evidence, claiming that what Vambéry told Stoker is revealed
through what Arminius, Van Helsing’s friend, tells Van
Helsing. Van Helsing, the argument goes, is Stoker’s
alter-ego, and the insertion of Arminius is the author’s
tribute to Vambéry, or, as Florescu and McNally speculate,
“Stoker’s way of acknowledging his debt”
and showing “what information and conclusions the professor
had passed on to Stoker” (Search, 1972,
116). But surely the mere inclusion of the name proves no such thing.
After all, Dracula contains many names drawn from
its author’s friends and acquaintances. The name
“Harker,” for example, most likely came from one of
the workers at the Lyceum, while “Swales” was taken
from a tombstone that Stoker noted in Whitby. Since the authority on
Dracula in the novel would need to be foreign, someone acquainted with
the Dutch professor Van Helsing, whose name was better to use than
Arminius [Vambéry] whom he had briefly met (Finn 42-3)?
But let us assume that what
Arminius tells Van Helsing is an echo of what Vambéry told
Stoker. What exactly does he say?
I have asked my friend Arminius,
of Buda-Pesth University, to make his record; and, from all the means
that are, he tell me of what he has been. He must, indeed, have been
that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk, over the great
river on the very frontier of Turkey-land. If it be so, then was he no
common man; for in that time, and for centuries after, he was spoken of
as the cleverest and the most cunning, as well as the bravest of the
sons of the ‘land beyond the forest’ …
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. In the records are such
words as ‘stregoica’ – witch,
‘ordog,’ and ‘pokol’
– Satan and hell; and in one manuscript this very Dracula is
spoken of as ‘wampyr,’ which we all understand too
well. (291)
All of the vital information in
this can be traced to Stoker’s own notes and sources:
Wilkinson, as we have seen, writes about Dracula and the Turks, as well
as the Voivode’s courage and cunning; ‘the land
beyond the forest’ was the heading of a chapter in Charles
Boner’s book on Transylvania (one of Stoker’s known
sources) as well as the title for a book by Emily Gerard, whose article
“Transylvanian Superstitions” we know that Stoker
read; the information about the Scholomance comes almost verbatim from
Gerard’s article; the terms ‘stregoica,’
‘ordog’ and ‘pokol’ are listed
in Stoker’s notes as having come from Magyarland
(1881); and ‘wampyr’ was the name that Stoker
originally intended to give his Count. Nothing remains to have come
from Vambéry.
Arminius makes a second
appearance in the text as Van Helsing reports on Dracula to the band of
vampire hunters: “As I learned from the researches of my
friend Arminius of Buda-Pesth, he was in life a most wonderful
man” (360). While he goes on to comment on his
“mighty brain, a learning beyond compare, and a heart that
knew no fear and no remorse,” Arminius says nothing about his
reputation as “the Impaler,” certainly his most
memorable characteristic. While the inclusion of the name of Arminius
can be seen as Stoker’s tribute to Vambéry, there
is no evidence that the Hungarian provided Stoker with any
information about Dracula.
But what about the
“manuscript” in which “this very Dracula
is spoken of as ‘wampyr’”? Some scholars
have posited the theory that Stoker actually did see such a manuscript.
“During his extensive research at the British
Museum,” writes Donald Glut, “Stoker uncovered
writings pertaining to Vlad the Impaler” (55). Andrew
Mackenzie goes further, declaring that “if the historical
Dracula had not been presented as such a horrific figure Bram Stoker
would never have selected him from the archives of the British Museum
as the character who, transformed by his imagination, was to become a
symbol of terror” (55). No doubt Stoker did do some research
at the British Museum, but there is not a shred of evidence that he did
any of it on the historical Dracula. Now, he could
have. The material was certainly there. Christopher Frayling lists what
would have been available at the time: included is one of the German
printed pamphlets about Vlad Tepes published in Bamberg in 1491 with a
woodcut. Could this be the mysterious document to which Arminius
alludes? Frayling goes so far as to suggest that this is an
“authentic model for Dracula” and that
“Stoker must have seen the pamphlet or a reproduction of
it” (421). This is, of course, speculation.
Yet for many, it has become fact: Paul Dukes, for example, refers to
the “woodcut of Vlad the Impaler … found by Bram
Stoker in his researches in the British Museum in 1890” (45).
The caption accompanying the woodcut reads: “A wondrous and
frightening story about a great bloodthirsty berserker called Dracula
the voevod who inflicted such un-Christian tortures such as with stakes
and also dragged men to death along the ground” (Florescu and
McNally, Essential Dracula 59). Given the
reference to a “bloodthirsty berserker,” the
argument goes that Stoker must have seen this. But the
logic behind the argument – Stoker was at the British Museum,
the Bamberg pamphlet was at the British Museum, and therefore Stoker
saw the pamphlet – is fallacious. We must treat such
speculation (including that Stoker had read Munster’s Cosmographia
or Richard Knolle's Generall History of the Turks)
with caution.
One result of all of this is that
readers, accepting these hypotheses as fact, begin to look to the novel
for corroborating evidence. First there is the assumption that Stoker
drew his physical description of Count Dracula from either the woodcut
portrait in the Bamberg pamphlet or from a printed account of
Vlad’s physical appearance. For example, in his narration for
a recent television documentary, Christopher Frayling states that the
woodcut “certainly provided Stoker with the physical
description of Count Dracula.” It might also be tempting to
deduce that Stoker had access to the following description of Vlad,
provided by a fifteenth-century papal legate who had met the voivode:
“He was not very tall,
but very stocky and strong, with a cold and terrible appearance, a
strong aquiline nose, swollen nostrils, a thin and reddish face in
which the very long eyelashes framed large wide-open green eyes; the
bushy black eyebrows made them appear threatening.” (qtd. in
Florescu and McNally, Prince 85)
However, anyone familiar with
nineteenth-century Gothic literature knows that many of the features of
Vlad described in the legate’s account (such as the bushy
eyebrows and the aquiline nose) had become, by Stoker’s time,
common conventions in Gothic fiction. And as for Count
Dracula’s “eyebrows almost meeting over the
nose,” Stoker records in his notes that this came from
Baring-Gould’s The Book of Were-wolves.
Another popular piece of
speculation began as early as 1956: that in creating Renfield, Stoker
“seems to have adapted the legend” about
Vlad’s penchant for impaling mice while he was a prisoner in
Hungary (Kirtley 14). Also Nandris (1966) connects the tradition about
Vlad impaling birds saying it “is developed in Bram
Stoker’s Dracula” (391). This
reappears several years later in Farson’s biography of Stoker
and is extended to Renfield:
There is a story that he [Vlad]
bribed his guards into bringing him small birds which he would mutilate
and then impale on sticks in neat rows. If true, this was echoed by
Stoker in his powerful characterisation of the lunatic Renfield, who
caught flies to feed spiders to feed birds which he devoured himself.
(128)
Equally far-fetched is the claim
that Vlad’s fondness for impaling his victims was
Stoker’s inspiration for his method of destroying the vampire
– the use of the wooden stake! According to Glut,
“Vlad’s preference for impaling his victims (a
method of destroying vampires) … further inflamed
Stoker’s imagination” (56), while the travel guide Eastern
Europe on a Shoestring claims that Vlad “inspired
the tale of Count Dracula by his habit of impaling his enemies on
stakes” (651). This connecting of impalement to the staking
of vampires is misleading, and overlooks three facts: that Bram Stoker
had planned on writing a vampire novel before he ever came across the
name of “Dracula”; that there is no definitive
proof that Stoker knew anything about Vlad’s fondness for
impalement; and that the staking of vampires was a well-established
motif both in folklore and in earlier Gothic fiction long before Dracula.
Another consequence of the
insistence on connecting the two Draculas is the temptation to
criticize Stoker for inaccurate “history.” Why,
some ask, did he make Dracula a Transylvanian Count rather than a
Wallachian Voivode? Why was his castle situated in the Borgo Pass
instead of at Poenari? Why is Count Dracula a
“boyar,” a member of the nobility which Vlad
continuously struggled with? Why does Stoker make Dracula a
“Szekely,” descended from Attila the Hun, when the
real Dracula was a Wallachian of the Basarab family? There is a very
simple answer to these questions: Vlad Tepes is Vlad Tepes, while Count
Dracula is Count Dracula. Considering the preposterous conclusions that
the premises behind such questions have generated, a closer look seems
warranted.
Although Stoker’s
knowledge of the historical Dracula was scanty, he did know that he was
a voivode. His use of the title “count” was in
keeping with the Gothic convention of drawing villains from the ranks
of the aristocracy. A cursory glance shows a recurrence of villainous
Counts: Count Morano in The Mysteries of Udolpho
(Radcliffe), Count de Bruno in The Italian
(Radcliffe), Count Doni in Ernestus Berchtold
(Polidori), Count Cenci in The Cenci (Shelley),
Count Montonio in The Fatal Response (Maturin),
Lord Byron’s Count Manfred, and Wilkie Collins’
Count Fosco. Vampire Counts in pre-Dracula fiction include Count Azzo
von Klatka in “The Mysterious Stranger” and
Countess Karnstein in Le Fanu’s
“Carmilla.” The frequent occurrence of Counts in
Gothic fiction links the temporal power of aristocrats, especially
foreign aristocrats, with supernatural powers. As for references to the
Borgo Pass, the “boyars” and the Szeklers, these
are bits and pieces from sundry sources that Stoker mentions in his
notes.
How much did
Bram Stoker know about the historical Dracula? There is no doubt that
the material was available. But how meticulous a researcher was Stoker?
We know that he read and took notes from a number of books and articles
(for a complete list, see Leatherdale, Origins
237-9) and that some of this material found its way into his novel
almost verbatim. But his research seems to have been haphazard (though
at times fortuitous) rather than scholarly. What he used, he used
“as is,” errors and confusions included. That his
rendering of historical and geographical data is fragmented and at
times erroneous can be explained by the fact that Stoker seemed content
to combine bits and pieces of information from his sources without any
concern for accuracy. After all, Stoker was writing a Gothic novel, not
a historical treatise. And he was writing Dracula
in his spare time, of which I doubt he had much. He may very well have
found more material about the historical Dracula, had he had the time
to look for it. But in the absence of any proof to the contrary, I am
not convinced that he did. There is no conclusive evidence that he
gleaned any information on Vlad from Vambéry, from material
at the British Museum, or from anywhere else except that one book he
found in Whitby – by William Wilkinson.
I have other reasons for taking
this position. Let us assume for argument’s sake that he did
learn more from Vambéry, that he did
conduct research on the historical Dracula beyond Wilkinson. Why, then,
is Count Dracula in the novel never referred to as
“Vlad” or “the Impaler”? Why
are there no references to his atrocities, which would have been grist
for the horror writer’s mill? Why is Van Helsing reduced to
stating that “He [Dracula] was in life a most wonderful
man”? And why are there no references in Stoker’s
working notes to his having found any other material? There are only
two possible answers: either he knew more and chose not to use it, or
else he used what he knew.
Was Stoker so sophisticated a
novelist that he deliberately suppressed material for artistic
purposes? One need only consider how greedily he gobbled up and
reproduced a significant amount of rather trivial information. Are we
to believe that he knew about Vlad’s bloodthirsty activities
but decided to discard such a history for his villainous Count in favor
of the meager pickings gleaned from Wilkinson? One could argue that
absence can be as important as presence: that Stoker deliberately
suppressed information in order to make his character more mysterious;
or that Dracula’s silence about his past is a consequence of
the fact that the text denies him a narrative voice. Such
interpretations are intriguing, but one must bear in mind that there is
a difference between interpretation and fact.
As for the theories about the
connections between the Count and the Voivode, they are (with the
exception of the link to Wilkinson) based on circumstantial evidence,
some of which is quite flimsy. I do not dispute that in using the name
“Dracula” Stoker appropriated the sobriquet of the
fifteenth-century Wallachian voivode. Nor do I deny that he added bits
and pieces of obscure historical detail to flesh out a past for his
vampire. But I do vehemently challenge the widespread view that Stoker
was knowledgeable about the historical Dracula (beyond what he read in
Wilkinson) and that he based his Count on the life and character of
Vlad. While it is true that the resurgence of interest in Dracula
since the early 1970s is due in no small measure to the theories about
such connections, the theories themselves do not withstand the test of
close scrutiny.
Works Cited
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Its People and its Products. London: Longmans, 1865.
Brownworth, Victoria A. and
Judith M. Redding. “Introduction.” In Victoria A.
Brownworth, ed. Night Bites: Vampire Stories by Women.
Seattle: Seal, 1996.
Dukes, Paul. “Dracula:
Fact, Legend and Fiction.” History Today
32 (July 1982): 44-47.
Dziemianowicz, Stefan.
“Introduction.” In Robert Weinberg, Stefan R.
Dziemianowicz and Martin H. Greenberg, eds. Weird Vampire
Tales. New York: Gramercy, 1992.
Eastern Europe on a
Shoestring . Hawthorn, Australia: Lonely
Planet, 1995.
Farson, Daniel. The
Man Who Wrote Dracula: A Biography of Bram Stoker. New York:
St. Martin’s, 1975.
Finn, Anne-Marie.
“Sources of a Nightmare: The Genesis of Dracula.”
Unpublished diss. Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1995.
Florescu, Radu and Raymond T.
McNally. Dracula: Prince
of Many Faces
. Boston: Little Brown, 1989.
—,In Search
of Dracula. New York: Greenwich, 1972. Rev. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1994.
Florescu, Radu and Raymond T.
McNally, eds. The Essential Dracula. New York:
Mayflower, 1979.
Frayling, Christopher.
“Nightmare: Birth of Victorian Horror.” Television
documentary. BBC/A&E, 1997.
—,Vampyres:
Lord Byron to Count Dracula. London: Faber and
Faber, 1991.
Gerard, Emily.
“Transylvanian Superstitions.” The
Nineteenth Century (July 1885): 128-44.
Glut, Donald. The
Dracula Book. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press,
1975.
Haining, Peter, ed. The
Vampire Omnibus. London: Artus, 1995.
Hillyer, Vincent. Vampires.
Los Banos, CA: Loose Change, 1988.
Kirtley, Bacil. “Dracula
the Monastic Chronicles and Slavic Folklore.” Dracula:
The Vampire and the Critics. Ed. Margaret L. Carter. Ann
Arbor: UMI, 1988. 11-17.
Leatherdale, Clive. The
Origins of Dracula. Westcliff-on-Sea:
Desert Island Books, 1995
Ludlam, Harry. A
Biography of Bram Stoker, Creator of Dracula. 1962. London:
New English Library, 1977.
Mackenzie, Andrew. Dracula
Country. London: Arthur Barker, 1977.
Mascetti, Manuela Dunn. Vampire:
The Complete Guide to the World of the Undead. New York:
Viking, 1992.
Melton, J. Gordon. The
Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead. Detroit:
Visible Ink, 1994.
Nandris, Grigore. “The
Historical Dracula: The Theme of his Legend in the Western and Eastern
Literatures of Europe.” Comparative Literature
Studies 3.4 (1966): 367-96.
Oinas, Felix. “East
European Vampires & Dracula.” Journal of
Popular Culture 16.1 (1982): 108-16.
Page, Carol. Bloodlust:
Conversations with Real Vampires. New York: Harper Collins,
1991.
Skal, David J. Hollywood
Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula From Novel to Stage to Screen.
New York: W. W. Norton, 1990.
Stoker, Bram. “Bram
Stoker’s Original Foundation Notes and Data for his Dracula.”
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—,Dracula:
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—,Personal
Reminiscences of Henry Irving. 1906. London: William
Heinemann, 1907.
Varma, Devendra. “The
Genesis of Dracula: A Re-Visit.” In
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Notes
. For an expanded
version of this paper, see Chapter 1 of my book Reflections
on Dracula (White Rock, BC: Transylvania Press, 1997).
. Thankfully, not
everyone has jumped on the Vlad-wagon. Daniel Farson avows that
“Stoker seized on the name of Dracula, together with a vague
impression of the background, and that was all” (130); David
Skal cautions that Stoker was inspired “only to an
extent” by accounts of Vlad (22); and J. Gordon Melton
suggests that Vlad was a figure upon which Stoker “partially
built the title character” (665).
. It should be
noted, however, that Emily Gerard’s “Transylvanian
Superstitions” (1885), which we know that Stoker read,
contains three references to the possessive
“Drackuluj” meaning
“devil’s” (131) which may very well have
reinforced for Stoker his choice of the name.
. While
Wilkinson’s footnote mentions “cruel
actions,” there is no indication that the reference is
specifically to Vlad; furthermore, this is given as one of three
alternatives.
. In the 1994
revised edition of In Search of Dracula, the
claim is less definitive: “The two men dined together, and
during the course of their conversation Stoker became impressed by the
professor’s stories about his homeland” (150).
Florescu and McNally also admit (in both editions) that no
correspondence between Stoker and Vambéry has been found.
. See, for
example, Farson 124, Oinas 115, Varma 47. Perhaps the most extreme case
of creating fact from fancy is the following contribution from Peter
Haining:
On an evening in April 1890,
among his [Stoker’s] guests was a small, balding
middle-European named Arminius Vambery … There he sat
between Sir Henry and Bram Stoker and for the rest of the night filled
their heads with stories of the superstitions which abounded in his
native land. Stories of witches, werewolves and the un-dead
… It was the thought of those un-dead beings that
specifically excited his [Stoker’s] interest … He
also wrote to Vambery in Budapest about his idea and found the little
Professor more than willing to elaborate on the story he had told over
dinner. (Omnibus 2)
. It is
significant that this passage was removed from the 1901 abridged
edition of Dracula, suggesting that Stoker (or
his editor) considered it dispensable.
. He may have
taken his lead from Florescu and McNally who suggested in 1972 that
Stoker saw this pamphlet which was his “cue for transforming
Dracula into a vampire” (Search 116).
. It is much more
likely, however, that Stoker noticed the word
“berserker” in Baring-Gould’s The
Book of Were-Wolves (1865), which is on his own list of
sources for Dracula.
. For example,
according to Carol Page, Sean Manchester claims that Stoker based his
Dracula on Hunyadi, “since he was a count, and Vlad
wasn’t, he was in the right geographic location, and Vlad
wasn’t, and so on” (104).
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