The Dracula legend is reworked in a doorstop of a novel by Elizabeth Kostova who discovered Dracula when she was seven. Anna Carey meets the author
Elizabeth Kostova discovered Dracula when she was seven. The Connecticut-born author's father was a university professor whose work took him all over the world. When Elizabeth was seven the family went with him to eastern Europe for several months. It was a revelation. "It was my first European trip, and it was such a formative experience, especially for an American child," she says. "To be taken to the Old World, to discover that castles aren't just fantasy, was a stunning experience. It really made history come alive for me." It was during this period of exploration and discovery that her father introduced her to Dracula. Against the dramatic backdrop of the Slovenian countryside, he told her stories about the famous vampire.
"My father had grown up on all the wonderful Bela Lugosi films, and his knowledge was based on the early Hollywood classics," she says. "Back then I wasn't aware of the historical Dracula at all, and I imagine at that point my father wasn't either." For several years Kostova's father's Dracula was the only Dracula she knew. "I didn't read Bram Stoker until I was a teenager. And at the same time I discovered a book about the history of Vlad the Impaler." But Kostova didn't become a teenage goth, obsessed with vampire lore. "I forgot about the whole thing until about 11 years ago, when I remembered my father telling me these wonderful stories in beautiful places in eastern Europe. And I thought it could make a good basis for a novel."
The novel in question is The Historian, an epic reimagining of the Vlad the Impaler story. It tells the tale of a young girl who discovers a mysterious book in her diplomat father's library. The book is blank, apart from a central woodcut of a dragon bearing the word "Dracula". The nameless heroine is compelled to find out more about the legendary figure, but, as we - and she - soon discover, she's not the first person to attempt to find the real Dracula and his mysterious burial place. As she and her father travel across Europe, he confesses his own youthful confrontation with the vampiric creature, who was once a sadistic Carpathian war lord, and our heroine discovers how closely her family is linked with the monster and his Ottoman enemies.
As she has written the most acclaimed vampire novel in recent history, it's rather surprising to discover that Kostova has never read any other vampire fiction. "I'm a one-vampire girl," she laughs. "I'm very loyal to Stoker. I tried a few other vampire novels, just dipping in to the first few pages. But nothing really grabbed me." In fact she's not a fan of horror and fantasy fiction in general. "I don't read gothic literature; I don't read genre literature in general," she says. "I'm a literary reader. I'm really steeped in classic literature."
But does she see a fixed line between genre fiction and literary fiction? "I think there are many books of which you can clearly say, This is genre literature, because they fulfil plot conventions. You know what you're going to get. And I think in some of that literature, although there are brilliant exceptions, the craft of writing is not really heeded," she says. "I think of literary fiction as fiction that challenges the reader, that is attentive to language as well as to the story."
Perhaps the one real flaw of The Historian is that it is almost too attentive to its high literary standards. Although it contains several pleasantly chilling moments of real creepiness, the book often reads as if Kostova is so worried about veering away from respectable literature and into the dreaded horror genre that she becomes almost prim.
The Historian is, however, a very enjoyable book, especially when you stop thinking of it as a literary fantasy à la Susanna Clarke or Susan Cooper and start thinking of it as a modern version of the grand Victorian novel, with its large scale, evocative descriptions and slow but steadily moving plot. "I love Victorian novels," says Kostova. "And I had that era very consciously in mind when I was writing The Historian. I wanted to capture that sense of having a big long story and all the time in the world to listen to it. You have room for a leisurely plot and a big cast of characters."
Kostova borrowed another literary trick from one of the less epic Victorian writers, Wilkie Collins, by telling her story through both the heroine's narrative and the letters and diary entries of other characters. "The Moonstone was a major model for me," she says of Collins's witty and ground-breaking detective story. "All those twists and turns and different narrators showing different elements of the story." She also wanted to evoke the uneasy atmosphere of the Victorian ghost story. "I never wanted to write a horror novel, but I did want to write a book that had chilling moments, because history is chilling. And I wanted to write a book in the tradition of 19th-century uncanny, not 20th-century gore."
She may not have been interested in fantasy fiction, but Kostova was always interested in its predecessors. "Since childhood I was interested in folklore and fairy tales," she says. At university she became interested in Balkan folk music and folklore, researching and singing traditional Balkan songs. After leaving college she travelled to eastern Europe, arriving in Bulgaria in 1989, seven days after the fall of the Berlin Wall and six after Bulgaria's communist ruler had been deposed by his own generals.
"It was a very exciting place to be," she says. "Everyone in Sofia took to the streets. It was a little bit scary, because we didn't know what was going to happen, but it quickly became clear that it wasn't going to turn violent. And it was very moving, because all these people were celebrating this tremendous change."
It was during this time that she met the man she would later marry, Georgi Kostov. "He was one of a group of young Bulgarians who were studying English and were involved in the Green Party. He and his friends would get together with our group of Americans, and they'd practise their English and we'd practise our Bulgarian." Kostova stayed in Bulgaria for five months; Kostov visited her in the US the following year, and "we realised pretty quickly that we wanted to stay together". They have been together ever since.
Kostova's first book, a travelogue that she wrote with her artist friend Anthony Lord, appeared in 1995. She had already started work on the book that would become The Historian. She had no idea that she was embarking on a 10-year journey of writing and research, during which she would support herself by editing and teaching creative writing. She also had no idea how engrossed and surprised she would be by her research, much of which ended up as part of the novel's plot.
"I had always been interested in medieval history and the history of the Byzantine empire, but I had never really studied them until I started the book," she says. "So I found a lot that surprised me, like the extent to which Vlad the Impaler was genuinely feared by the Ottoman Empire, even though he was a small warlord and the empire was a huge force."
Kostova was also intrigued by the mystery of Vlad's burial place. "In the 1930s archaeologists opened what had always been believed to be his grave, and found it empty," she says. "There was another grave with some anonymous remains, but no one was able to confirm whether they were his or not. And then those remains disappeared during the second World War." Such discoveries fuelled both Kostova's writing and her passionate interest in uncovering the past. "I believe that history is the most important subject we can study," she says. "Without studying history we don't know who we are, we don't know where we came from, we don't understand our own interactions with other cultures."
Although she admits that she'd like to try writing some ghost stories, her next book, which she started last year, will steer clear of the supernatural. It will, however, see her returning to the past. "I don't want to say too much about it yet, but I will say that it's also about history," she says. "It mixes a 21st-century story with an older story. I've realised that I'm not interested in the straight historical novel. I'm interested in how we as modern people encounter history and what it means to us." And so she is going back to the library for yet more historical research - which is fine by her. "You can get tired of your own writing," she says. "But you never get tired of history."
The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova, is published by Little, Brown, £14.99