Grove Koger
The tradition of the vampire in literature is a pretty long one, dating back at the very least to Heinrich August Ossenfelder’s 1748 poem “Der Vampir.” However, it’s a tradition that’s had its ups and downs.
One of the earliest stories dealing with the subject, “The Family of a Vourdalak,” was written nearly a century after Ossenfelder’s poem, and it’s also the earliest one I can read with any pleasure. Its author was Count Alexis Konstantinovich Tolstoy, who died October 10, 1875. (Sources that specify September 28 are relying on the Old Style calendar.) This Tolstoy was an second cousin of the famous novelist Leo and an estimable writer in his own right, although he’s best known in Russia as a dramatist and poet.
When Tolstoy was ten, his mother took him to Germany, and as a young man he made an eight-month tour of Italy. Talented and well educated, he served in the Tsar’s private chancellery and was successful in the country’s social circles as well as being a skilled hunter.
Tolstoy wrote only a few pieces of fiction—six stories, a supernatural novella, and a novel—all of them early in his literary career. Like the novella, the stories date from the late 1830s and early 1840s, and include three that are also supernatural, one of which, “The Reunion after Three Hundred Years,” deserves recognition as having one of the most arresting titles in all of literature.
Tolstoy’s novella is titled The Vampire and was published pseudonymously in 1841, but as S.T. Joshi points out in his entry on Tolstoy in Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia (Greenwood, 2005), it’s “confused and ill-proportioned.” For Joshi (and for me), his best story is “The Family of a Vourdalak,” which, like “The Reunion,” he wrote in French—the language of Russia’s nineteenth century literary circles. According to Joshi, it was published in Russian only in 1884—nine years after Tolstoy’s death.
“The Family” is narrated by the Marquis d’Urfé (a character who also appears in “The Reunion”), and is set in the Kingdom of Serbia, which at the time was under the control of the hated Ottoman Turks. Traveling on a diplomatic mission, the young d’Urfé has arranged to stay with a Serbian family, but he finds them “in a state of profound confusion.” It seems that the grandfather of the clan, Gorcha, has set off for the mountains to hunt a Turkish bandit, but has left a stern warning that, should he be gone more than ten days, they must bar him from the house and instead pierce his heart with a wooden stake made of ash.
Given a backstory like that, we know what to expect—particularly since d’Urfe explains at this point that although their habits are similar to the vampires of other countries, vourdalaks “prefer to suck the blood of close relatives and friends, who die and become vampires also.” (Folklorically speaking, this is true.) The presence in the family of one Zdenka, a “true Slavic beauty,” adds a poignant complication to the situation.
Appropriately enough, “The Family of a Vourdalak” returned from the dead in 1963. That year, Italian film director Mario Bava filmed it and two other stories, none too subtly, as I tre volti della paura, which was released in the United States the following year as Black Sabbath. Boris Karloff appeared as a sinister host, and played Gorcha in what was retitled “The Wurdulak.” I watched this cinematic anthology as a teenager, and have a clear memory of the highly dramatic ending of the episode, one that matched the ending of the story itself closely. Assuming that I saw the movie soon after it was released (which I think I must have), I couldn’t yet have read the story, as it didn’t appear in English until 1969 in Vampires: Stories of the Supernatural, translated and with an introduction by Fedor Nikanov. However, the version on YouTube has a far more conventional ending.
A note on Internet Movie Database states explains that the order of the movie’s segments was rearranged for the English-language version, and that one of the episodes (though not “The Wurdulak”) was “re-dubbed and slightly re-cut.” However, I can’t find any mention of an alternate ending to the Tolstoy episode. It’s not uncommon to re-cut episodes of movies, but I can’t find any indication of that having happened here, so my “memory” remains, appropriately enough, a mystery.
□□□
The image at the top of today’s post is the cover of the 1969 Hawthorn Books edition of Tolstoy’s supernatural fiction, and was designed by Mel Fowler. The portrait of Tolstoy, reproduced courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, dates from 1836 and is by Karl Bryullov.
□□□
If you’ve enjoyed today’s post, please share!
World Enough 