Background of Study
Alexey Konstantinovitch Tolstoy, the nineteenth-century Russian writer who introduced the vampire into Russian literature, was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. Tolstoy was educated at home and, at the age of 16, entered government service at the Moscow Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. While in Moscow, he was able to study at Moscow University where he absorbed German idealistic philosophy. He received his diploma from the university in 1835.
At the beginning of his literary career, influenced by E. T. A. Hoffmann’s tales, Tolstoy wrote several fantastic/horror stories, the first of which was “Upyr” (“The Vampire”). “Upyr” was the story of a young couple, Runevsky and Dasha. The story opened in nineteenth-century Moscow with a group at a ball. Runevsky conversed with a pale young man, Rybarenko, on the subject of vampires. He predicted that if Dasha went to visit her grandmother she would die. Eventually, after a series of adventures and some visionary experiences, Runevsky learned the truth. The problem in Dasha’s family stemmed from previous generations, to an unfaithful wife who killed her husband. As he was dying, he pronounced a curse of madness and vampirism upon her and their heirs. She eventually went insane and committed suicide. Dasha’s grandmother inherited the curse. As a vampire, she had already killed Dasha’s mother and was prepared to kill Dasha. In the end he became a believer in the supernatural, although Dasha dismissed everything that happened and believed a more naturalistic explanation.
Tolstoy first read the story at one of the local salons and then, after passing a censor, had it published under the pseudonym Krasnorogsky in 1841. It was followed by a second supernatural tale, “The Reunion After Three-Hundred Years,” a ghost story. Tolstoy returned to the vampiric theme in his third story, “The Family of the Vurkodlak”. (The vurkodlak was the vampire of the southern Slavs.) Written in French, it began with the Congress of Vienna in 1815 where the Marquis d’Urfé entertained some aristocratic friends with his story. While traveling through Serbia, d’Urfé stopped for the night. The family he stayed with was upset as the father had left to fight the Turks. Before he left, d’Urfé told the family to beware if the father returned in less than ten days—it was a sign that he had become a vurkodlak and should be impaled with an aspen stake. Almost ten days passed before the father returned. The older son was about to kill him but was overruled by the family, although the father refused to eat or drink and otherwise behaved strangely. The father then attacked the family, including the daughter to whom d’Urfé had been attracted. D’Urfé continued on his journey but returned to the village some months later. He was told that the entire family had become vampires. He sought out the young girl but soon discovered that, in fact, she was now a vampire. He barely escaped from the family.
After writing “The Family of the Vurkodlak,” which was not published during his lifetime, Tolstoy wrote a fourth supernatural story, “Amena.” These four stories formed a prologue to his formal literary career that was really thought to have begun when he started writing poetry in the late 1840s. The high point of his career as a poet came in the late 1850s, the period after his service in the Crimean War (1855–1856). In 1861, he resigned from the Imperial Court and devoted the rest of his life to his writing. Tolstoy has been hard to classify, as his works do not readily fit into any of the major schools of nineteenth-century Russian writing. A loner, he rarely participated in the literary circles of his time, and, after leaving the court, settled on his estate in the Ukraine. Tolstoy approved of some Westernization but did not like the more radical activists. He did inject the vampire theme into Russian writing, a theme that would later be picked up by Nicol Gogol and Ivan Turgenev. In 1960, Italian director Mario Bava brought “The Family of the Vurkodlak” to the screen as one of three Russian stories in his La Maschera del Demonio (released in the United States as Black Sunday). Boris Karloff, who narrated the breaks between the stories,
Literature Reviews
The first story is “The Vampire”, penned by Tolstoy in 1841. This is a rollercoaster of a tale. We get the vampires or oupyr, who can be destroyed by ramming a stake between their shoulder blades, reveal themselves to each other with clicks of the tongue and, in the case of at least one, feast on their immediate family. We also get familial curses, hallucinations, ghostly visitations, intrigue, devil worship and a lamia. It is a story that deserves a film, and as I read it I imagined it as a Roger Corman production – at his peak – perhaps with a Masque of the Red Death sensibility.
Next is the erstwhile mentioned “Family of the Vourdalak” and that is followed by “The Reunion After Three Hundred Years”. Whilst this is a ghost story it is more than interesting as it prequels Vourdalak – indicating what occurred between d’Urfé and the Duchess de Gramont that set him on his course to Moldavia.
The final story is “Amena”, a story of pagan Gods, the Roman attack on Christianity and a cursed man. The curse is bestowed upon him by Amena and whilst there is no definitive vampiric activity it is bestowed by a bite and renders the man immortal.
The volume has occasional but glorious illustrations by Mel Fowler and the stories were translated by Fedor Nikanov.
The novella Vampire (1841) opens with young man, Runevsky, attending a ball. One guest comments about the number oupyrs (vampires) present at the event and points them out to Runevsky. Of course, Runevsky falls in love with the granddaughter, Dasha, of one of the purported vampires and begins to court her. Strange things happen to him when he visits the family. When they tell fortunes by reading random passages from books, Dasha reads the chilling, “And the grandmother will suck her granddaughter’s blood.” Then Runevsky spends the night in a room that contains an old-fashioned portrait of a deceased relative, who naturally resembles Dasha. Known as the first modern Russian vampire story, The Vampire also weaves elements of Greek mythology and contains interesting dream states.
The short story Family of a Vourdalak is the story of a Russian patriarch that leaves home to fight a band of bandits. He tells his family if returns after sunset on a particular day not to let him inside, for he will be a vourdalak (vampire). Since he arrives immediately at sunset, the family is uncertain what to do and allow him entrance. Wrong decision.
La Famille du Vourdalak was written about 1839 on a trip to France, while Tolstoy was with the Russian Embassy in Frankfurt. It is the story of a womanizing French diplomat, the Marquis d’Urfé, who encounters a Serbian family (with a beautiful daughter, naturally), whose patriarch disappears into the mountains to hunt down a bandit who has been terrorizing the countryside. Before leaving, he warns his family not to let him back into the fold if he is gone more than ten days, because by that time he may have been turned into a vourdalak (vampire). Luckily, he returns home just in the nick of time — or did he?
The story is told in flashback, during an evening round of ghost stories (a traditional winter tale format, which is one of the reasons I picked this story).
A vourdalak, by the way, is a made-up beastie. Tolstoy probably based the name on the Serbian term for the werewolf, vlkoslak, though Sabine Baring-Gould claimed that the same term also refers to vampires:
The Serbs connect the vampire and the were-wolf together, and call them by one name vlkoslak. These rage chiefly in the depths of winter: they hold their annual gatherings, and at them divest themselves of their wolf-skins, which they hang on the trees around them. If any one succeeds in obtaining the skin and burning it, the vlkoslak is thenceforth disenchanted. [The Book of Were-Wolves, 1865]
Tolstoy’s description of the vourdalak is a bit different:
I should explain to you, mesdames, that vourdalaks, as the Slavic peoples call vampires, are believed in those countries to be dead bodies that come out of their graves to suck the blood of the living. Their habits are similar to those of all vampires, from any country, but they have one characteristic that makes them even more dreadful. The vourdalaks, mesdames, prefer to suck the blood of their closest relatives and dearest friends who, once dead, become vampires in turn. They claim that in Bosnia and Hungary entire villages have become vourdalaks.
The Vampire is an early work of Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, but less well known than his vampire story The Family of the Vourdalak. On his father’s side, A. K. Tolstoy was a scion of a prominent aristocratic family (which also included the famous Leo), but since his parents divorced when he was just six weeks old he spent his childhood with his mother’s literary-minded brother far away from the circles of power. That changed when his mother moved back to St. Petersburg in 1826 – Aleksey would have been 8-and-a-half years old then. The boy became a friend and companion of the 8-year-old Tsarevich and later received training for the diplomatic corps (studying languages and history, amongst other things). His frequent travels were serving his thirst for culture and knowledge much more than serving any real diplomatic purpose. Tolstoy often asked for extended vacations, and throughout his life he repeatedly quit government service in order to concentrate on his writing.
The Vampire is not the first piece he wrote (The Family of the Vourdalak, for example, is slightly older), but it is the first he published (in May 1841) – albeit under a pseudonym. The reception of this short Gothic novella was mixed. At any rate, Tolstoy himself considered it as a minor and insignificant work. This may have contributed to his decision not to publish his few other vampire stories during his life-time.
Tolstoy wrote some of his early, short prose not in Russian, but in French and – allegedly – German. The Vampire, however, seems to have been written in Russian because the East German edition I read was translated from Russian into German.
Although it is a very short novella, The Vampire tells several intertwined stories at once. In this regard it is similar to Matthew Lewis’s (much, much longer) novel The Monk. Other similarities include the general tone, as well as the existence of the characters and stories in a mundane environment of realism on the one hand and yet next to a supernatural fringe on the other, with doubts concerning the question if (or which) supernatural occurrences actually happened and which have been a figment of the imagination.
The frame narrative involves a young man, Runevsky, who seems to be a member of the upper middle class. The way he describes his environment and the people around him (carefully dissecting their social standing, the quality of their characters, and their cultural refinement (or lack thereof)) speaks of Tolstoy’s lifelong interest in socio-political issues; but it also has the effect of appearing a bit like a Jane-Austen-type story – especially since it also involves a blossoming love story, gossip, jealousy, etc.
Runevsky is warned by a stranger (Rybarenko) about the presence of vampires at a social event they are both attending. Runevsky seems not surprised by the existence of vampires, but he regards it as unlikely that they should move in the same circles as him.
When their paths cross again, Rybarenko seems keen to convince Runevsky that he is not crazy, but confesses that his health as well as his mental state have been affected by a supernatural event in Italy a few years earlier.
This Italian story involves Rybarenko and two other men, each of whom have more or less extended nightmares that are all recounted as well: so it is not just one story, but one story with three other stories attached. Hence this Italian episode takes up a good chunk of space, roughly half-way through the novella, interrupting the frame narrative. This extended sequence and the precise description of the Italian surroundings stand testament to Tolstoy’s love for the country which goes back as far as his first visit, aged 13.
With the frame narrative (which in itself contains at least two fever dreams or nightmares) coming to an end, a marginal character decides to tell yet another story – which provides background information for several of the events. That backstory takes place in Russia as well as Italy.