The historian

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The Historian (OT: The Historian , 2005) is a novel by the American author Elizabeth Kostova . Kostova's debut work combines historical and popular traditions on the figure of the Romanian prince Vlad III. Drăculea (Dracula) with the search of a young woman for her missing father, who in turn had researched the Dracula legend for a long time. The novel stands in the tradition of magical realism in which fiction and reality converge and ultimately interweave, so that the eventual entry of Dracula into the real world of the narrator rounds off the novel.

The story can be assigned to several genres such as vampire novel , horror novel , adventure novel and detective novel .

content

The novel has three parts, each starting with a quote from Bram Stoker's Dracula novel .

Part 1

The action begins in Amsterdam in 1972. The narrator is mad about books and finds an old book and a bundle of yellowed letters in her father Paul's library. The pages of the book are blank except for one page with a wood print of a dragon and the words Drakulya . Her father - a rationalist - tells her that while he was a student at Oxford in 1950, he mysteriously found the book and asked his PhD supervisor Bartholomew Rossi for advice. Rossi had found a similar book in 1930, also with blank pages and a picture of a dragon. At that time Rossi began to research the story of Ţepeş and the myths surrounding Dracula. He traveled as far as Istanbul, but some incidents terrified him. He then stopped his research, returned to Oxford and completed his doctoral thesis. Rossi gives Paul the results of his research. He believed Dracula was still alive.

After Paul leaves Rossi's office, Rossi disappears. In his office there are traces of blood on the desk and on the ceiling of the room. Paul is certain that something cruel must have happened to Rossi, and he makes it his business to find him again. While doing research in the university library, he meets a young woman who appears to be reading Bram Stoker's Dracula novel. Her name is Helen Rossi and she claims to be Rossi's daughter, but she never met him because he left her mother after an affair in Romania. She wants to get revenge for this by publishing her work on Dracula before Rossi. It turns out that her research on Dracula has advanced further than Paul's own research.

Paul suspects that one of the librarians is trying to prevent the two of them from investigating. Helen, however, distrusts Paul until the librarian attacks her and bites her neck. The two pursue him and minutes later they find him dead in front of the library. He was hit by a car while he was on the run.

Part 2

Paul and Helen set out on a search for Rossi to discover the secret of the Dracula legend. They believe Rossi may have been kidnapped and buried by Dracula. Legend has it that Vlad Ţepeş was buried in Snagov , one of Rossi's records is a map, but it indicates another grave. You travel to Istanbul and look for the archives of the Ottoman ruler Mehmed II , an arch enemy of Ţepeş. Fortunately, they meet the Turkish professor Turgut Bora from Istanbul University, who also found one of the strange books. Together with friends of Bora, they research the archive and find important documents. Suddenly the librarian appears who was run over in the USA, who apparently survived the accident and appears to be a vampire . He's chasing Helen and Paul. It turns out that he wrote a name on a historical document listing important works about Dracula. The name is Bartolomew Rossi and the work is called The Spirit in the Amorphous . This confirms Helen and Paul in their suspicion that Rossi was kidnapped by Dracula.

From Istanbul the search leads the two to Bucharest , where they visit Helen's mother, who may have more information. In 1930 Rossi's search for the grave took him to Romania , where he had met Helen's mother in a remote village. Helen is now learning the full story of Rossi and her mother for the first time. He was only in the village for a few days doing research, but fell in love and even wanted to get married, but then suddenly disappeared. To one of his mother's letters, Rossi replied that he had never been to Romania. The mother says that she and Helen are descendants of Vlad Ţepeş.

In the meantime, Bora has translated other documents in Istanbul and found out that the trail leads to Bulgaria. Helen and Paul travel to Bulgaria.

part 3

Bora reports that he is a member of a secret order that was once appointed by Sultan Mehmed II from the elite of the Janissaries to prevent the Dragon Order from conquering the Ottoman Empire even after his death . In Bulgaria Helen and Paul seek the help of the scholar Anton Stoichev. Stoichev relates that Dracula's grave is in Bulgaria in a monastery called Sveti Georgi, which, however, is not recorded in any document or map.

In the 1970 plot level, the narrator continues to search for her father with Barley and finds his things in a hotel room in Les Bains, France, where there is also a stack of postcards, all of which are addressed to the narrator and come from her mother. The cards were all written after the supposed death of the mother.

After many obstacles, Helen and Paul find Sveti Georgi's whereabouts. They find Rossi in a sarcophagus . He has a gaping, pulsating wound on his neck and appears to be paralyzed. He wakes up and warns the two of them to leave because Dracula wakes up when it gets dark. He warns her that his hunger will set in with the dark. You should first get a book from Dracula's library in which he had hidden letters with his experiences of imprisonment.

Helen and Paul chase a silver dagger through Rossi's heart to save him from his fate. They find the library, but are followed by the librarian and politicians who are also looking for the grave. But the grave is empty and Dracula has already disappeared. The letters say that Dracula or Vlad Ţepeş was not only a ruler, but also a scholar, a historian. Over the past 500 years he has built a library of rare books and documents. The mysterious books with the woodcut were printed by Dracula himself and distributed to scholars all over the world who were to find Dracula so that he could put them in his service forever. Rossi was the first to really make it there. Paul and Helen go back to the United States and get married, Helen gives birth to a child - the narrator. However, Helen suffers from depression.

In 1970 Barley and the narrator find their father Paul in the crypt of the Saint-Matthieu-des-Pyrénées-Orientales monastery. Legend has it that Dracula got his undead eternal life in this place and he comes back here every 16 years. Dracula appears and is struck in the heart by a silver bullet shot by a person from a shadow. It's Helen.

The narrative arc between 1930 and 1970 closes. Helen says the cause of her depression is that she felt contaminated by the vampire's bite and was afraid of putting her daughter in danger. On a private trip to the monastery of Saint-Matthieu-des-Pyrénées-Orientales, she felt the presence of Dracula and wanted to take her own life, but survived, but was never able to face her husband and daughter again, she only decided to live with her To lead a family when she knew Dracula was destroyed.

In the epilogue of the book, which takes place around 40 years after the events, the storyteller mysteriously finds an old, empty book with the woodcut of the dragon in a library. Dracula either survived or his helpers continue his work.

background

The author worked on the novel for ten years before it was published. The publisher Little Brown acquired the publishing rights in an auction for 2 million dollars and launched a massive marketing campaign. The book was published in the USA on July 14, 2005 and immediately reached number 1 on the New York Times bestseller list . In the same year the German first edition was published by Bloomsbury Verlag in Berlin.

The film rights were sold for $ 2 million. The historian has been translated into 28 languages.

reception

On the first day of sale in the US, more copies of the historian sold as of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code ( The Da Vinci Code ).

Kostova's first work was largely positively received by public literary criticism. In his review of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, however, Peter Körte criticized the lack of timing and the textbook use of topoi .

For the first chapter of The Historian , Kostova received the Hopwood Award for Creative Writing .

expenditure

Adaptations

  • Audiobook, Jumbo New Media, Hamburg 2005, ISBN 978-3-8337-1434-4 . (Spokesperson: Maren Eggert and Bernd Stephan)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Peter Körte: Kostova, Elisabeth: The historian . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , September 2, 2005, p. 36 (review, PDF).
  2. ^ The Vampire Code . In: The Age, August 8, 2005.
  3. ↑ Bigger Than Dan Brown Portrait of the author and short review by Gary Younge in: The Guardian, July 18, 2005
  4. ↑ How to stake a novel, review by Peter Körte in FAZ from September 2, 2005
  5. ↑ Vita Elizabeth Kostova ( Memento of the original from October 8, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Homepage Fantastic Couch , online magazine for fantastic literature @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.phantastik-couch.de