Incarnadine_foreword By R. H. Greene

Foreword by R. H. Greene

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ou hold in your hands a piece of revisionist literature, based on one of the most famous novels ever written. Bram Stoker’s classic tale Dracula features a title

character so iconic that it can be safely said his name recognition falls somewhere between Moses and Jesus Christ. A watershed of Gothic literature as well as a fractured kaleidoscope of the repressed sexual hysterias so associated today with the Victorian era, Dracula has been purchased more times and adapted into other media more often than any tale other than the Bible. The True Memoirs of Count Dracula is an early example of what some have called the literary genre of “counter-myth,” in which a wellknown story is reimagined—and in some cases refuted—by a trick of literary voice and viewpoint (in English, modern classics of the form would include John Gardner’s Grendel, William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner, and Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, which is shaping up as a rather enduring reimagining of the works of L. Frank Baum). In The True Memoirs of Count Dracula, we have a wildly different take on many of Stoker’s characters and events (with many additions) told in autobiographical form by the evil antagonist himself, under the nom de plume Konstantin Kuzmanov. What makes the work particularly intriguing (irrespective of the question of its literary merits) is its odd provenance and the related fact of its century of suppression. Although forensic testing indicates a manuscript well over 100 years old, The True Memoirs of Count Dracula was discovered in the foundation of an old Soviet-era farmhouse in northern Bulgaria less than half a decade ago. This is not quite as bizarre as it sounds. ix

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Because Bulgaria is a country that is still organized in part according to quasi-feudal principles of agricultural self-sufficiency dating back centuries, the likelihood of a well-hidden object lying undisturbed on one of its many subsistence farms is higher than it might be elsewhere. The farmhouse in question was owned by a parsimonious eightyyear-old man who passed away in it, giving rise to wild rumors among his neighbors that he had hidden his fortune (sacks of gold, naturally) in the foundation of his home—a structure built in 1950, but on the then-100-year-old stone foundation of a teetering mud-brick relic from the Ottoman era. Rumors of horded riches abound in modern Balkan villages, because under communism citizens were forbidden to save money or to own objects of excessive material value, such as jewelry, lest the individual’s complete dependence on the state be corrupted by the bourgeois influence of personal wealth. Treasure had to be hidden if it was to be kept. As a result, more than one Slavic attic has been found to contain forgotten lodes of currency, coins, and gems—small jackpots, typically, but large enough to keep alive an unsavory tradition of looting unguarded properties within the struggling economies of the former Eastern Bloc. The century-old foundation was judged solid enough in 1950 that it had been built over and left undisturbed until the neighbors began prospecting for “miser’s gold” within it. They found no money, but they did manage to excavate a minor literary payload in the form of the multi-volume handwritten manuscript whose first half, translated into English, you are about to read.

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o who buried The True Memoirs of Count Dracula in a Bulgarian cornerstone more than a century ago, and why? The why we will get to shortly; the who is so fascinating it begs to be dealt with first.

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The oldest available title for this property contains a provocative disclosure: The Bulgarian resting place of this text was, for a brief period in the late 1890s and early 1900s, the vacation domicile of an affluent British widow named Wilhelmina Murray Harker—the same Mina Harker who was fictionalized against her will by Bram Stoker, and who sued unsuccessfully to suppress his book. (Thankfully for world literature, she lost her case—in part because in one of his last acts before his early death from gout, her husband Jonathan, by then a powerful figure in the shadowy world of London finance, gave Stoker his whole-hearted and public blessing. This could not have helped Mrs. Harker’s chances at court in those patriarchal times). Wilhelmina Harker was a peripatetic and troubled soul in her later years, and her affinity for things Slavic (which may have been one of the real-life details that drew Stoker to use her as a model) has been well established. She has been described by those favorable toward her eccentricities as the “Schliemann of the Balkans,” an analogy likening her to the accomplished but controversial German archaeologist of the Victorian era who discovered the alleged ancient city of Troy and the equally alleged tomb of the Homeric warrior king Agamemnon—with little more than a pick axe in his hand and a worn copy of Homer’s The Iliad in his pocket. Wilhelmina Harker’s forays into Slavic lands were less celebrated than Schliemann’s exploits, but they did bring back a store of treasures. It was during just such a journey that she briefly took possession of the site where The True Memoirs of Count Dracula was secreted, using the farm plot as a sort of southern headquarters for her Slavic campaigns of 1899 and 1903 into the far reaches of northern Bulgaria, Romania and the Carpathian Mountains. As the dates of her excursions roughly correspond with the age of the manuscript itself, the circumstantial evidence would suggest that The

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True Memoirs of Count Dracula was squirreled away in its hiding place by Mrs. Harker’s own hand. In her search for what she rather grandly referred to as “the soul of the Slavs,” Wilhelmina Harker would have been instantly attracted to the Memoir author’s remarkable facility with the dead tongue that is at the root of most Eastern European languages: Old Church Slavonic, a root dialect dating back to Saint Cyril, who is himself referenced disapprovingly within the work. But if Old Church Slavonic was part of the manuscript’s allure, it’s likely that Mrs. Harker believed the book to have had at least some claim on authenticity (being herself depicted in its second half, she could hardly have failed to notice the fictional embellishments contained there). If so, Mrs. Harker deceived herself over the manuscript’s provenance, because the writer’s sentence structures give him away as a passionate amateur linguist of the mid-to-late 1800s who has somehow developed a miraculous facility in an obscure tongue. His sentences flow in a decidedly Victorian fashion (no mean trick in the elaborate and formal Slavonic dialect), and so we have the bizarre juxtaposition of a dead medieval tongue being used to craft entire paragraphs that would be structurally acceptable in the writings of Joseph Pennell or A. Conan Doyle. To span both worlds, the author would have to have been as old as Dracula himself, which may be the point of this Quixotic exercise in pseudo-authenticity: The writer may have believed that to convince a Victorian readership of the manuscript’s legitimacy, he would need to adopt a Victorian cadence (one of the assumptions that would mark this the work of an “out of the loop” amateur, since the Victorian era was a high-water mark of obscurities translated into English, and an epoch not just open but eager to assimilate extraordinary linguistic challenges).

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Conversely, the author might simply have been incapable of transcending his roots in the Victorian period, despite the obvious incongruities this introduced—another sure sign of the amateur. Or finally, the writer may have learned Old Church Slavonic as his mother tongue and then lived long enough to have his dialect influenced by Estuary English. In other words, the writer might be Dracula. Delicious as that possibility may seem, the reader should note that if the above exegesis has any analytical merit, the odds of the Memoirs being written by their ostensible subject are running two to one against. Nonetheless, the Old Church Slavonic original is a blessing to the contemporary English-language reader in one sense, because this book was translated for the first time ever not in the nineteenth or twentieth but in the twenty-first century. And this has allowed us to use a slightly more contemporary vocabulary than might have been expected in a text well over a century old. Where an anachronistic term captured the concept best, we have not hesitated to incorporate it. Hence we have Dracula talking of the “psyche” well before the popularization of Sigmund Freud, anticipating contemporary astronomy by complaining of being pulled “into the unwavering orbit” of a superior object, speaking like B. F. Skinner of Donka’s “learned response,” likening a Roma woman’s interaction with a defrocked priest to “a householder paying off a grocer” (the Victorians would have used “shopkeeper,” or “greengrocer” if they were feeling au courant), and later referring to this same Roma woman as “a nervous type.” These are just a few of many possible examples where we have chosen to modernize the Memoirs in translation, in the belief the work should speak to the reader without a bogus interlocutor based on one of the great Victorian translators (say, Richard Laurence) or

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some other long-dead scholar who never got his or her chance with this particular text. Our purpose in making this choice is to try to ensure some measure of lasting clarity at a moment when the language itself is in an accelerated ferment of flux and change, as anyone who has ever encountered an emoticon already knows. But there were limits to how far we would go in our quest for the contemporary. For example, one term brooded over was “sunstroke,” which went in and out of the translated manuscript several times. It is clearly the concept being described, but the word itself sounded too much like something a California surfer might say to put it into the mouth of an unholy terror of the Middle Ages. The narrator also seemed to us to be struggling to define what was a new concept for him, one he would therefore be unlikely to apply a term of common usage to. So we instead settled on the invented “sun sickness”—in Old Church Slavonic, “это не слово.” At the same time, we’ve striven to allow a hint of the slightly ornate and elongated rhythms of Victorian expression, believing that if an echo of the original voice is the best a translator can offer, the original author is still entitled to that echo. This is a translation, though, and its flaws should therefore be laid at the feet of this writer, who supervised the current text’s creation, rather than at Konstantin Kuzmanov’s feet.

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reliminary mutterings from within the groves of academia indicate that our most controversial choice may end up being the decision to publish The True Memoirs of Count Dracula in two volumes. We plead your indulgence. First and foremost, there are legalities involved. For though the real-world Victorian figures Bram Stoker adapted to his purposes are long dead, their bloodlines still course throughout contemporary Britain, where the slander laws are among the most severe and punitive in the world, thanks in large

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part to the durability of the Royal Family both as an institution and an object of fascination for Britain’s carnivorous tabloid press. The second half of the Memoirs takes a far different view than Stoker’s, not only of the Harkers but of other figures based on real women and men, and though the case law favors our right to publish, there are today several hundred descendants and/or relations of the Murrays, the Westenras, the Sewards, the Holmwoods, and even the Van Helsings spread throughout Britain, Scotland, Canada, Northern Ireland, and the Falkland Islands, all of whom could try to assert a claim of some imagined patronymic injury based on the revisionism that characterizes the Memoirs’ second half. Our publisher therefore hesitates to bring the complete work to market before completing a painstaking exploration of the complex legalities at issue in its latter pages—an exercise in due diligence that will probably take several years to accomplish, if it ever can be. While we considered following the Victorian practice of publishing real names using dashes (L__ W______ for Lucy Westenra, Dr. V__ H______ for literature’s most famous vampire hunter), we concluded that the archaism would be a betrayal of our attempt to make the Memoirs as readable as possible for a contemporary audience. We remain reluctant to embrace such stylistic evasions without first pursuing all other options. After much deliberation, we therefore decided that the first half of the full manuscript could stand alone as a novel in its own right, and that this may indeed have been part of the author’s original intent. It was a judgment call based on several factors: •

The natural schism that occurs in the Memoirs (which vault approximately 300 years at almost precisely the halfway point before launching into an extremely argumentative but in many ways close reinterpretation of Stoker’s event structure)

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•

The novelty of the Memoirs’ first half—a kind of revisionist origin myth with no precedent in Stoker’s work (indeed, it seems more to favor the Brothers Grimm)

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Forensic distinctions (of parchment, ink, and even mild variations of penmanship) that separate the contents of this volume from the proposed contents of Memoirs II and suggest different periods of authorship

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The nature of the Memoirs’ conversation with Dracula itself, which in the second volume becomes a sustained quarrel over Stoker’s plotting, narrative approach, characterizations, and even his cosmological view of the human condition

Also, before letting a complete if scrappy unknown go toe-totoe against one of literature’s best-loved works, we wanted to allow Konstantin Kuzmanov to present himself to the reader without the inevitable parsing and comparisons that promise to greet the second volume. But the refs say it was a close decision, and if a statutory path can be cleared for the second half of the manuscript, the possibility of a combined edition could be revisited on the basis of reader reaction later on.

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he last important mystery we need to clear up is how this manuscript came into Wilhelmina Harker’s hands and why she

buried it in the cornerstone of a farmhouse in northern Bulgaria. But perhaps that’s not such a mystery after all. We know for a historical fact that Mrs. Harker’s relationship to her much-honored husband was a troubled one, and it is believed that when the final break came, she may have blamed as a root

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cause the weird notoriety brought to their name via Bram Stoker’s novel. Desperate to unravel what had gone so horribly wrong in her personal life, she ended her days roaming the recently liberated former Ottoman territories as a monomaniacal collector of all things related to the lore and superstitions of Eastern Europe, and she is known to have paid top dollar for rare works and primary artifacts. This makes it entirely possible that The Memoirs of Count Dracula was generated for an audience of one, as a literary con against a grieving and wealthy British widow with too much time and money on her hands. Mrs. Harker’s facility with Old Church Slavonic was known to be intermittent but functional, and she would have been particularly susceptible to the work’s autobiographical structure, since the Stoker novel she blamed for wrecking her household was written in the epistolary form to give it a similar ersatz authenticity. What we can say with certainty is that Wilhelmina Harker clearly responded with singular emotion to the forgery, as her moving coda to the second volume—in which she plays along with the construct to a worrisome degree that indicates incipient psychosis—is unquestionably authentic. But it’s also entirely possible, and indeed probable, that she uncovered the deception of the Memoirs later and, mortified and in a last moment of lucidity, decided to bury the evidence in the literary equivalent of an unmarked tomb. If so, it was an unquiet grave. For this manuscript has risen again, moldering perhaps, and surely blood-soaked, from its fitful sleep. There can be no more fitting outcome for a yarn steeped in the lore and traditions of the Dracula myth. And so, with apologies to Bram Stoker, The True Memoirs of Count Dracula, Volume One. - R. H. Greene Rousse, Bulgaria