Radu Florescu as the father of Russian Draculology

Abstract

The article emphasizes the fact that the cultural affiliation of authors (researchers, prose writers, philologists, essayists) largely determines their interpretation of the image of Vlad Dracula. Thus, English-language authors are mainly guided by the works of Kurt Treptow and Elizabeth Miller. As for the contemporary Russian philologists and essayists studying Dracula, they are largely dependent on the views of the Romanian historian Radu Florescu, despite the fact that this topic is comprehensively covered in the fundamental work of Ya.S. Lurye, published six years earlier than the book of Florescu. It is shown that direct references to the text of the Romanian historian and uncritical borrowings from it are found in the works by M.P. Odessky, T.A. Mikhailova, V.L. Gopman, F. Morozova, V.V. Erlikhman, and others. Russian prose writers such as E.V. Artamono¬va, S.S. Lyzhina and V. Zadunaisky are less influenced by Florescu’s assessments in their interpretations of Dracula, but his influence and indirect citations from his book are evident in their works as well. The author of the article stresses that Florescu’s work, however, is not a scholarly history or a biography of Vlad III Basarab. The Romanian scholar wrote his book in the USA and exclusively for the American reader: he wanted his work to become as successful a bestseller as that of B. Stoker. To this end, Florescu presented episodes from works of fiction and obviously fictitious political pamphlets as reliable historical sources. The result, however, was incredible: the fictional vampire novel first sparked a flood of similar works of popular culture and then began to influence historians, philologists, and professional resear¬chers. It is concluded that the real image of Dracula differs from that generally accepted in fiction and scientific literature.