Excerpt from Elizabeth Miller, Dracula: Sense & Nonsense. Southend-on-Sea, UK: Desert Island Books, 2006. Pp. 161-166.

 

 

“MY FRIEND ARMINIUS”

 

 

“He [Arminius Vambery] provided Stoker with details concerning Vlad Tepes, who became the model for Count Dracula.” (Matthew Bunson, The Vampire Encyclopedia  261)

 

Prove it! There is not one shred of evidence that Arminius Vambery (1832-1913) gave Stoker any information on Vlad.  On the other hand, we do know the sources for the information supposedly supplied by the Hungarian professor.

 

.    The conviction that Stoker gleaned information from the Hungarian originated before the discovery of Stoker’s Notes. Ludlam appears to have started the trend in 1962: “Bram sought the help of Arminius Vambery in Budapest” and that “Vambery 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’” (113).

          McNally and Florescu cemented the connection in 1972: “Stoker learned of ‘Dracula’ from this Hungarian friend” (Search 13);[1] and “The two men [Stoker and Vambery] dined together, and during the course of their conversation, Bram was impressed by the professor’s stories about Dracula ‘the impaler.’ After Vambery returned to Budapest, Bram wrote to him, requesting more details about the notorious 15th century prince and the land he lived in” (178).[2] The only fact in these statements from In Search of Dracula is that Stoker and Vambery dined together.[3] The co-authors concede in the next paragraph that “Unfortunately, no correspondence between Vambery and Stoker can be found today” (178). In fact, no such correspondence has ever been found.

 

Table talk

 

In Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (1906), Stoker gives a brief account of two meetings with Vambery (1:371-2).[4] But 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?[5] As Stoker’s account of this dinner was written several years after the publication of Dracula, one would expect him to have mentioned Vambery’s role (assuming he had one). Stoker notes that the Hungarian was “full of experiences [about a trip to Central Asia] fascinating to hear” (1:371). 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 came upon the name “Dracula” in Wilkinson’s book. 

          As for the second encounter, Stoker says even less: “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 heard” (1:372).  The only comment about the subject matter of the talk was that Vambery “spoke loudly against Russian aggression” 1:372). Nothing about Dracula; nothing about those “tales of the terrible Dracula” that are supposed to have “inspired Stoker to equate his vampire-protagonist with the long-dead tyrant” (Klier 56). At any rate, by this time, Stoker’s novel was well underway, and he was already using the name “Dracula” for his vampire.

 

The case of the missing correspondence

 

The “correspondence” mentioned by McNally and Florescu pops up elsewhere. Olga Hoyt, for example, states categorically that Stoker wrote Vambery and that the Hungarian replied with information about Vlad (145). As for evidence, biographers Alder and Dalby inform us that “Vambery’s correspondence to Stoker cannot now be traced” (466, emphasis mine). The premise that such correspondence once existed but has been lost is groundless.

 

A veritable mishmash

 

Lack of evidence appears to be no obstacle to those who insist on Vambery’s role. In addition to providing all that “information” about Vlad in conversation and correspondence, we are told that he went further, providing Stoker with valuable leads for his research.

          One example of this is the following:

 

Vambery himself was certainly familiar with Engel’s History of Moldavia and Wallachia, in which there was specific inclusion of the Dracula pamphlet in the National Museum in Budapest which portrayed Dracula as a berserker, a bloodthirsty monster. Vambery was not only familiar with the consistent image of Dracula as arch villain and clever ruler in Hungarian folklore and history, but also knew that Hungarian vampire stories often associated the word ‘Dracul’ with acts of vampirism. In fact, in 1886 the publication of an article identifying the word ‘Dracul’ with vampire stories may have lent impetus to Vambery’s influence on Stoker. Vambery was undoubtedly also conversant with aspects of Romanian folklore in which the vampire beliefs were highlighted, as embodied in an important work in German published at Hermannstadt in 1866.  (Florescu and McNally, Biography 151)

 

     With good reason, in 1989 the two historians toned down these suppositions, following their examination of Stoker’s Notes and the realization that they contained not a single reference to Vambery. They concede that “though this Hungarian scholar wrote dozens of tomes about Matthias Corvinus ... the Hunyadis, Sultan Mehmed II, and other principal characters of our plot, apparently he wrote not a word on Dracula” (Prince 232). But they still cling to the notion that Vambery was likely a source:

 

Certainly Vambery was in a good position to answer Stoker's many queries about the real Dracula, with whom he, as an eastern European historian, was obviously familiar from the works of Engel and Munster to which we have earlier referred. Vambery would have been able to confirm Wilkinson’s negative image of the authentic prince, for whom no Hungarian historian ever had much interest or respect, a very good reason for Vambery’s slighting of Dracula in his own writings.”  (232)

 

Maybe he “would have been able to” – but did he?

 

Fiction as proof of fact

 

Supporters of the Stoker-Vambery link also turn to the novel for evidence, claiming that what Vambery told Stoker is revealed through what Arminius tells Van Helsing. The Dutch professor, the argument goes, is Stoker’s alter-ego, and the insertion of Arminius is the author’s tribute to Vambery, or, as McNally and Florescu speculate, “Stoker’s way of acknowledging his debt” and showing “what information and conclusions the professor had passed on to Stoker” (Search 1972, 179). They expand as follows:

 

[W]e learn through Van Helsing’s conversation that Vambery was the source for the link between Dracula and “the Evil One,” the devil.  And, finally, the conversation indicates that Vambery had made the association between the brave, heroic Dracula known through one tradition and the horrifying tyrant known through another. (180)

 

But surely the mere inclusion of the name “Arminius” 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, who better to use than Arminius [Vambery] whom Stoker had briefly met?

          But assuming that what Arminius tells Van Helsing is an echo of what Vambery 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. (337-8)

 

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 is taken 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 had originally attached to his Count. Not a scrap remains to have come from Vambery.

          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” (23:413).[6] While he goes on to comment on his “mighty brain, a learning beyond compare” (not traits one associates with Vlad) and “a heart that knew no fear and no remorse,” Arminius says nothing about his reputation as “the Impaler,” his most notorious legacy.

          Once again we are confronted with fiction offered as fact. Vambery’s biographers Alder and Dalby in The Dervish of Windsor Castle (1979), recount Van Helsing’s musings and conclude that “This description, in a nutshell, conveys what information and conclusions Vambery passed on to Bram Stoker” (466). That anyone would use fictional comments by a fictional character as historical fact is beyond comprehension.

 

Are the times a-changin’?

 

Thankfully, not all scholars are insisting on a Vambery connection. Bierman counteracted in 1977 that “What Professor Arminius says in Chapter 18 of Dracula ... cannot be taken to represent what Professor Arminius Vambery actually told Bram Stoker” (51-2). In 1985, Leatherdale condemned the “unwarranted presumption that fact mirrored fiction” (89). Joining the ranks recently have been Haining and Tremayne who contend that the connection between the two has been overstated because of this tendency of transposing fiction into fact (133).[7]

 

          Stoker makes no reference to Vambery in his working papers. No evidence exists that Vambery gave Stoker any information about Vlad. I rest my case.

 


[1]This sentence is omitted from the revised 1994 edition.

[2]Revised in 1994: “The two men dined together, and during the course of their conversation Stoker became impressed by the professor’s stories about his homeland” (150).

[3]A dinner that has even been combined with the apocryphal “dressed crab” tale: “After talking with ... Vambery and after dining on too much dressed crab, Stoker attests that he fell asleep and had a dream about a vampire....” (Florescu and McNally, Biography 157).

[4]Though Stoker makes no mention of it, he had met Vambery earlier in 1889 at a social event (Alder and Dalby, 462).

[5]Or even on the fact that earlier that same day Stoker had passed his legal examinations and been called to the bar?

[6]This passage was removed from the 1901 edition, which Stoker likely had a hand in revising; this would suggest its relative unimportance in the grand scheme of things.

[7]Unfortunately, they mar their argument by stating that Vambery was a professor at the University of Budapest, “the city founded by the historical Dracula” (125)!