Elizabeth Kostova mined a rich vein of history and myth to create her best-selling debut, “The Historian.” Her seamless blend of fact and fiction has found a receptive audience looking to journey with a young woman and her father as they pursue the historical mystery associated with Vlad the Impaler, popularly known as Dracula.
During a recent Denver book-tour stopover, Kostova talked about her work. For her, Dracula stories are intermingled with childhood memories of time spent with her father, a professor of urban planning who is now retired. “When I was a little girl, my father had a research fellowship in Slovenia, which was then still part of Yugoslavia,” she said. “On this trip we took to Eastern Europe … he told a series of tales about Dracula that were based on the Hollywood classic films that he grew up with. And I loved these stories, and for years Dracula was associated in my mind with travel and also these beautiful historic places in Europe.”
Her father relayed these stories as they shared time in magical settings, at the Piazza St. Marco in Venice, Italy, and “while we were sitting on a bench against a medieval castle wall in Slovenia.”
It was, she said, “the kind of thing that
comes into your mind as a child and stays there. So, about 11 years ago, when I had been writing and publishing short work, I suddenly remembered these scenes and wondered if they would make a good structure for a novel. And then I thought, “What if at the end of each of these tales the young listener realizes that Dracula himself is listening also. Why would that be? Why would Dracula want to hear stories about himself? I started working on the book almost immediately. Then I realized how much I wanted to bring in the historical Dracula. Then I just started doing the research.”
The resulting novel is compelling but one that defies easy description. Kostova admits the difficulty, saying, “If someone told me about the book, and just told me the facts, I would say ‘Oh, I don’t read vampire books.”‘ But “The Historian” is not the typical vampire novel, nor does it find a home in the horror genre.
“I’m not at all a fan of horror as a genre,” Kostova said. “I don’t read horror; I don’t have the stomach for it. I’m distressed by the idea that we would find violence entertaining, though I think obviously that violence is a very important part of serious literature.
“But just gratuitous, just violence for its own sake, no,” she said. “I promised myself when I started the book that I wouldn’t shed more than a cup of blood in it. And I didn’t.” And while the book holds its share of chills, she said she hopes readers will walk away from the book with the sense that “the horrors of history are the real horrors we should be paying attention to.”
Kostova describes her work as a “novel in the tradition of the epic Victorian mystery.” And, she said, “it’s the story of three generations of Western historians who find themselves going deep into East European history on the track of the historical Dracula.”
Historical research revealed the true puzzle at the heart of the novel. “When I started reading about Vlad the Impaler and his life, I was very startled to find that there is this real mystery about what became of his remains. When I stumbled on this real mystery, I thought it was so perfect for the Gothic novel.”
Describing “The Historian” as a Gothic novel aptly captures its mix of history, mystery and psychic tension. “I’ve always loved the eerie and the uncanny,” Kostova said, citing the ghost stories of Henry James, “which are essentially psychological,” and Wilkie Collins’ “The Moonstone” as models for her work.
Character and plot entwine in equal measure to drive the story, and Kostova said that while she felt close to the father and his narrator daughter, she has a real soft spot for the fictional father’s academic adviser, professor Rossi.
Mentors play an important role in the story. “I’ve had a lot of great mentors in my life. In some ways he’s a tribute as a character to some of them,” Kostova said. But Rossi also is perhaps the most challenged of her creations. “The story spans his life from the time when he’s young and rather egotistical to a time when he’s really set aside that ego and is living only to somehow prevent the evil he he’s experienced, to keep it from harming the young people that he loves,” she said.
“The Historian” is often cited as this year’s “Da Vinci Code,” a comparison that falls short of being apt. It is true that both novels are research-based, historical adventure stories. But in “The Da Vinci Code,” Dan Brown relies on fast-moving chase scenes and a lot of fictionalized history to fuel the movement of thin characters. Kostova’s novel moves at a slower pace, is backed by richer research and peopled by more fully developed characters.
Kostova, who spent 10 years writing her novel while working as a writing teacher, noted that she started working on it “eight years before ‘The Da Vinci Code’ was published. I wasn’t at all aware of that marketing trend.”
One trait “The Historian” shares with many other popular novels is that the movie rights already have been sold, to the Sony-based production company Red Wagon, which is completing work on Arthur Golden’s “Memoirs of a Geisha.”
Kostova said she is excited about the sale, “because the producers at Red Wagon have made several movies out of books and novels. They are very committed to working with the writers, which is unusual. They actually called me and said, ‘We love the book, we are happy to have it. It’s up to you, it’s completely up to you, but if you’d like to work with us on the book, we’d love to have you.”‘
Though Kostova has been hard at work promoting her “The Historian,” she is also at work on a new one, which she says “involves history but in a very different way, a completely different subject matter.”
She is again hoping to learn something entirely new in a work that weaves history into a 21st-century story. “I’m really less interested in writing straight historical fiction than I am in the way that people interact with history, in the way that modern people and history interact.
“I had promised myself that I would write a book that involved no research for my second novel, and I immediately found myself writing this book that’s going to take so much research, it’s terrible.”
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
