A Book Stripped by Dracula: The Animal Passion of Lokis
“Beauty and the Beast” (illustration by Walter Crane, 1870s)
In one of the posts on her old blog, the esteemed @nosferatu-roberteggers used the expression “books stripped by Dracula.” This struck me as very witty. Indeed, what are these books that Dracula so treacherously stripped? Bram Stoker wrote his novel in 1897, that is, at the very end of the 19th century. Nevertheless, Gothic literature has a long history preceding it. The first Gothic novel is considered to be The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, written in 1764 — a century and a half before Dracula. But what came in between? Could it really be that before Bram Stoker no author ever described romantic villains in gloomy castles? (Although, okay, Stoker’s Count Dracula can hardly be called all that romantic.)
More and more people are now discovering Carmilla, which is undoubtedly a good thing. But besides Carmilla — did Dracula have other predecessors? What stories might have made a 19th-century reader tremble with both horror and adoration?
I have already written a post about Samuel Coleridge’s poem Christabel. I’m not sure whether it can be called “a book Dracula stripped,” but it is certainly a predecessor of Carmilla (you see, Carmilla herself is not without sin — she, too, stripped someone!). I also wrote about the ballad Lenore, which is unquestionably a model of Gothic romance (and one of the prototypes of Nosferatu). But this post is not about them. I discovered in Prosper Mérimée an absolutely stunning novella, one that can confidently be classified as pre-vampiric romantic prose. The struggle between rational and animal principles within a human being; love-hatred; the desire to devour as the highest form of passion — this is what this story is about. Is this not Gothic romance? (And does this not echo Nosferatu?)
As dictated by the laws of the Gothic tale, the action takes place in a remote castle, in a desolate region of Lithuania in 1866 (the novella itself was written in 1869), where Professor Wittembach, a scholar of theology, arrives in search of a rare antique edition of a Catechism. The master of the castle, Count Mikhail Shemet, is a handsome and educated young nobleman, though somewhat peculiar. Rumours circulate that he is half man, half bear. Here we come, perhaps, to the most horrifying part of the story: the account of the count’s physician, who tells how Mikhail’s mother was carried off by a bear during a hunt; later she was found alive, but insane — and nine months afterward Mikhail was born… Upon seeing her newborn child, the woman began to repeat, “Kill it, kill the beast!”
Mikhail grew up healthy, of Herculean build. The entire novella is, essentially, the story of his passion for a noble miss named Yuliana Ivinskaya, and his torment between his animal and human nature… I will not conceal the ending: after the first wedding night with Mikhail, Yuliana is found dead. Her chest torn open… by teeth. (“Kiss my heart?”) And Count Shemet was never seen again.
But Mérimée’s romantic horror is not exhausted by the mere legend of Mikhail’s beast-like origin — it unfolds in the folds of the narrative itself. An old woman with a snake in a basket, resembling a witch, prophesies that he will become the king of animals. This is not merely a prophecy — it is a symbolic naming of the hero’s essence. And it is precisely the word king that is striking here. Not a victim of instinct. Not a slave to nature. But the sovereign of the beast within.
As we move further through the text, we see how the novella increasingly undermines the illusion of the count’s stable human identity. One of the characters recounts how, in the steppes, he and his companions had to cut open the veins of horses and drink their blood to survive. Mikhail becomes strangely fixated on this idea. Once, in a moment of strange, unhealthy merriment, half in jest, he confesses to the professor that he dreams of tasting his beloved’s blood…
"And I shall taste of you"
All this might be dismissed as eccentricity, were it not for one disturbing motif: somnambulism. Yes — Mikhail, like Ellen Hutter, like Lucy Westenra, is also a sleepwalker! His nocturnal wandering is one of Mérimée’s most frightening and subtle devices. For here even the fragile boundary offered by rational explanation disappears. By day the count is the model of refinement, intellect, nobility. By night — a body moved by something that escapes consciousness. Sleep as the space where culture ceases to govern nature.
In Gothic tradition, the somnambulist is always a figure of rupture: between will and impulse, between the human world and the subtle dimension, between the social mask and the repressed content. Mikhail recounts how once, in a state of sleepwalking, he nearly killed his best friend… Truly a foreshadowing of the tragic finale!
But if somnambulism exposes the fracture between consciousness and instinct, then the scenes with Yuliana open another layer — far more unsettling: not fear, but attraction; that dangerous Gothic nerve where the desire to possess the beloved transforms into the urge to devour… And for all the horror of this notion, it nevertheless feels like an uncannily precise metaphor, the highest degree of passion.
As always, I have too much to say about the subject. So, I have to split my post. The second part is here
