Evil in the Worlds of D racula and The H istorian
57
The Reach of Evil in Kostova’s The Historian
Elizabeth Kostova’s recent comment about Bram Stoker’s “insistence that
the evils of history can reach forward into modem life” applies to her own novel
as well (Kostova, Foreword xi). As the unnamed (older) female narrator of The
Historian writes at the story’s beginning in Oxford in 2008, not only can
reaching back into history endanger us, but “sometimes history itself reaches
inexorably forward for us with its shadowy claw” (xv). This section, therefore,
examines several examples of the reach of evil in the 2005 novel.
First, the young narrator’s father Paul discovers a dragon book in 1952; his
mentor Professor Rossi discovers his dragon book in 1930, and numerous copies
of this antique book are scattered throughout the world. In other words, the evil
of Dracula as the son of the dragon is passed on to harm people. Rossi tells Paul
in 1952 that vampires are real, that Dracula still lives in the 20th century, and
that Paul “might have inherited a curse” through Rossi’s research (48). Although
Dracula died in 1476, he fo V