RSSS 315 Tier 2: Fifth Week Tuesday

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RSSS 315 (Tier 2) Fifth Week (Tuesday)

• Vampires and Werewolves Slavic Folklore in Our
  Culture

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Announcements Last Weeks Creatures

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Types of vampires

• Folkloric supernatural characteristics, cultural
  variation
• Psychotic person with mental illness criminally
  attacks victims in the manner of Stokers Dracula
• Psychic people who feed on others emotionally
• Literary Stoker has the paradigm

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Literary vampire

• Fits needs, desires of the age
• Fits styles (conventions, tastes) of the age
• Many other vampires before Stokers

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Polidoris Vampyre

• Urbane, sophisticated
• Gentleman
• The Vow is the Thing
• Violence is there, but offstage and understated
• Is it psychic vampirism?

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Even before that.

• Byrons Giaour
• Goethes Bride of Corinth
• Burgers Lenore (see first chapter of Dracula)

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Dealing with Vampires

• Christian and pagan means
• Rituals communion (wafers and wine)
• Symbols crucifixes, holy water
• Circles and seeds and garlic

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Evidence of Bogomilism

• Limited power of Christian symbols
• Power of Dracula himself (and evil)
• References to the dark forces

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Contamination with other traditions, legends

• Demonic possession
• Poltergeists and witches

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Romanticism (early 19th century)

• Slavic (Russian) Nikolai Gogol
• Gogols story Vij (1842)
• 1967 film

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Story Itself

• Part of Mirgorod collection
• Gogol said it was based on folk stories, beliefs
• No evidence for the claim no Vij (Viy)
• Witches, sorcerers
• Connections with religion Khoma relies on
  knowledge not given officially
• Magic circle pagan, and later Christian

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Contamination

• Poltergeist lots of noisemaking
• Succubus (very close to vampire here)
• Shape-shifting powers (as other people)
• Feeding on energies released in sex
• Repeated visits to victims in dreams
• Mara death of victim results (usually by
  suffocation here Khoma faints and dies)

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Story vs. Film

• Erotic elements stronger
• Vampire elements stronger

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Literary Vampires

• Derived from folk stories
• Poetry references
• Other influences late 18th Gothic

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Gothic Literature

• 18th Century English
• Poetry and prose
• Influential romanticism and modernism

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Gothic features

• Mystery, gloom, fog, night, storm
• Desolation, isolation
• Animals wolves, bats
• Distant past (unforgotten) sense of nostalgia
• Old castles, mansions, graveyards, churches
  (cobwebs, spiders)
• Mysterious sounds (howling, flapping, scratching)
• Mysterious figures, secrets, threat of violence
• Dark colors (black), blood, pale features

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Later Developments

• Androgynous heroes (bisexuality)
• Distinctive music, attire (1980s, 1990s)

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Goth Culture
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Background for Stoker

• Biography 1847-1912
• Irish college civil servant, journalist, drama
  critic
• Personal secretary to Henry Irving (actor) in
  England
• Married, one child
• Wrote novels and short stories (18 books)
• Dracula 1897 best known

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Chapter One

• Obviously researched
• Old names Harker does research before leaving
• Destination
• Very precisely dated diary entries (in
  shorthand!)
• Travel early warnings of trouble (peasants
  worried about him)
• Blue flame everywhere howling of dogs

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Cultures in contact

• Ethnographic generalizations
• Stories along the way I must say they were not
  cheering to me, for amongst them were
  "Ordog"--Satan, "Pokol"--hell, "stregoica"--witch,
  "vrolok" and "vlkoslak"--both mean the same
  thing, one being Slovak and the other Servian for
  something that is either werewolf or vampire.
  (Mem., I must ask the Count about these
  superstitions.)

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Excerpt

• Once there appeared a strange optical effect.
  When he stood between me and the flame he did not
  obstruct it, for I could see its ghostly flicker
  all the same. This startled me, but as the effect
  was only momentary, I took it that my eyes
  deceived me straining through the darkness. Then
  for a time there were no blue flames, and we sped
  onwards through the gloom, with the howling of
  the wolves around us, as though they were
  following in a moving circle.

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Excerpt 2

• At last there came a time when the driver went
  further afield than he had yet gone, and during
  his absence, the horses began to tremble worse
  than ever and to snort and scream with fright. I
  could not see any cause for it, for the howling
  of the wolves had ceased altogether. But just
  then the moon, sailing through the black clouds,
  appeared behind the jagged crest of a beetling,
  pine-clad rock, and by its light I saw around us
  a ring of wolves, with white teeth and lolling
  red tongues, with long, sinewy limbs and shaggy
  hair. They were a hundred times more terrible in
  the grim silence which held them than even when
  they howled. For myself, I felt a sort of
  paralysis of fear. It is only when a man feels
  himself face to face with such horrors that he
  can understand their true import.

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Excerpt 3

• All at once the wolves began to howl as though
  the moonlight had had some peculiar effect on
  them. The horses jumped about and reared, and
  looked helplessly round with eyes that rolled in
  a way painful to see. But the living ring of
  terror encompassed them on every side, and they
  had perforce to remain within it. I called to the
  coachman to come, for it seemed to me that our
  only chance was to try to break out through the
  ring and to aid his approach, I shouted and beat
  the side of the caleche, hoping by the noise to
  scare the wolves from the side, so as to give him
  a chance of reaching the trap. How he came there,
  I know not, but I heard his voice raised in a
  tone of imperious command, and looking towards
  the sound, saw him stand in the roadway. As he
  swept his long arms, as though brushing aside
  some impalpable obstacle, the wolves fell back
  and back further still. Just then a heavy cloud
  passed across the face of the moon, so that we
  were again in darkness.

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Excerpt 4

• When I could see again the driver was climbing
  into the caleche, and the wolves disappeared.
  This was all so strange and uncanny that a
  dreadful fear came upon me, and I was afraid to
  speak or move. The time seemed interminable as we
  swept on our way, now in almost complete
  darkness, for the rolling clouds obscured the
  moon.

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Excerpt 5

• We kept on ascending, with occasional periods of
  quick descent, but in the main always ascending.
  Suddenly, I became conscious of the fact that the
  driver was in the act of pulling up the horses in
  the courtyard of a vast ruined castle, from whose
  tall black windows came no ray of light, and
  whose broken battlements showed a jagged line
  against the sky.

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Vampire Epidemics 17th and 18th Centuries

• Hungary?
• South Slavic areas?
• Romania and Albania?

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Key Works

• Dom Augustin Calmet 16721757
• French biblical scholar, a Benedictine abbot at
  Nancy and Sens
• Major work Dissertations sur les Apparitions
  des Anges, des Démons et des Esprits et sur les
  revenants et vampires de Hongrie, de Bohême, de
  Moravie, e de Silésie, Paris, 1740

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Erzsébet Bathory