Popular Culture Review Vol. 19, No. 2, Summer 2008 | Page 60

56 Popular Culture Review What follows is a sampling of the various kinds of evil that appear in the novel. In 1930, Professor Rossi sees a vampire servant, complete with neck wounds, in a library in Istanbul. Twenty-plus years later, Rossi explains the dangerous dragon book legacy to his American graduate student Paul, adding that “human history is full of evil deeds” (35). Moreover, once Rossi, and Paul, and later on Paul’s daughter (the unnamed narrator) learn that Dracula lives on, they cannot stop themselves from pursuing Dracula. In 1930 at Oxford University, Professor Rossi’s friend and older colleague Hedges is brutally attacked by a vampire as a warning to the younger Rossi not to pursue Dracula research. A characteristic juxtaposition occurs when, only a few pages later, we read about how, in 1972, the young female narrator is in an Amsterdam library reading about the atrocities committed by Vlad the Impaler in 1456 when he was appointed Lord in Wallachia. This is Kostova’s method of connecting evils throughout the novel. Instances of evil and menace abound in The Historian. In 1972, Paul and his daughter are being watched as they travel throughout Europe and as Paul gradually tells her the Professor Rossi story. A particularly bloody death awaits Johan Binnerts, the Amsterdam librarian who helps Paul’s daughter learn more about vampires. Several times in the novel, whenever a character speaks aloud the name of Dracula, a vampire appears and threatens the person who dares to speak the magic “word” (111). A person who receives three vampire bites is doomed to become one of the undead. Professor Rossi will eventually receive three bites; his daughter Helen will receive two bites and thus escape undead status. Helen and Paul eventually marry, and their daughter is the unnamed narrator who, when sixteen, is accosted on a train in France by Dracula himself. She escapes unbitten. In 1930, Rossi is trying to track down Dracula’s tomb in Transylvania. He meets evil along the way, as a stranger gives Rossi a drink called “amnesia” to make him stop his search and forget his discoveries. But 20 years later, Rossi resumes his research, and Dracula violently kidnaps Rossi from his office in an American university. At one point, we read about the “Little Plague” of 1477 that swept the Carpathians in the year after the human Dracula’s first death. We are meant to connect this disease to the evil vampirism of Dracula. We also read about how the human head of Dracula was separated from his body after his death in 1476, as a way to prevent Dracula from becoming undead. But his followers eventually retrieved the head, and so Dracula lives on as an immortal. Finally, Helen—we recall that she is Rossi’s daughter, later Paul’s wife, and later the young narrator’s mother—tells Paul that the two of them must destroy the preternatural Dracula to help prevent evil from spreading. For instance, Dracula’s undead, vampiric evil is associated with Stalin who admired Ivan the Terrible who admired Dracula. “Can you imagine a world in which Stalin could live for five hundred years? . . . Or perhaps forever?” wonders Helen.