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I also think there's a strong reading of them as reimaginings of Aubrey and Ianthe from Polidori's "The Vampyre", but that's a topic for another post.

I'm interested

Ok so essentially, Marie Nizet is remixing the basic formula of the Lord Ruthven story in her novel. Look at the bones of that plot: Aubrey, a young, naive, impressionable, and perhaps somewhat effeminate man, is drawn into the orbit of the powerful and enigmatic Lord Ruthven. Ruthven is a man of power and status, eminently respected in all his social circles, and yet simultaneously carries a fearsome reputation for cruelty and callousness, and people who associate with him tend to meet bad ends. He is also a vampire who kills and eats his brides. Aubrey, during his travels with Ruthven, learns that Ruthven is arranging a meeting with a young Italian girl, doubtless planning to ruin her reputation as he does to so many young women. Aubrey contacts the girl's family and warns them, preventing the meeting and saving her from her fate, and parts ways with Ruthven. However, Ruthven follows him in secret, and takes revenge by killing Ianthe, the Greek girl Aubrey is in love with (but disdains to marry, as she is Greek and low-class). Later they meet up again, are attacked by bandits, and Ruthven is killed, but on his deathbed he makes Aubrey swear not to tell anyone about his death. Aubrey returns home to find a miraculously living Ruthven, now under the alias Earl Marsden, engaged to his sister. Due to the oath he swore, Aubrey is unable to warn her, and Ruthven marries and kills her.

Nizet mixes the elements here around and plays with them, subverting or removing some and adding other characters as suit the needs of her plot, but the bones of the Ruthven-Aubrey dynamic especially are preserved in Liatoukine and Relia, and BOY does Nizet put MEAT on those bones. Liatoukine is Ruthven perfected: in addition to social power, he now holds institutional and hierarchical power. His vampiric nature has leaked out into his unsavory reputation, but does not impact his high status. Ruthven's habit of turning up in unexpected places when he ought to be dead, Nizet elevates into a whole new ability: that of Liatoukine to exist in two places at once. His ability to return from the dead is utilized to chilling effect, emphasizing his ruthlessness and sadism. The blood-drinking aspect of vampirism does not play a major role in Captain Vampire, but Nizet uses it to fill out her metaphor: Liatoukine's first wife is Polish, and his third, Epistimia, is half Romanian and half Serbian. The walking metaphor for the Russian state marrying these women, killing them, and drinking their blood is, shall we say, very pointed.

Relia, too, is a perfected Aubrey. Nizet takes the homosexual subtext of Aubrey's fascination with Ruthven and makes it textual, then turns it on him in horrific fashion. Gone are the fridged women every Ruthven adaptor ever loves to use to torment their Aubrey expies; Relia suffers directly, and brutally, at the hands of Liatoukine and his men. Aubrey's classism, barely a side note in the original Vampyre story, is turned into a flaw and an arc for Relia. A recurring feature in several versions of the Ruthven story is that, as a result of Ruthven's oathbinding (or in Dumas's version, some Varney-style gaslighting), Aubrey (or Gilbert or Ronald or whoever) is made to appear mad, and ends up being confined for his health. This confinement further adds to his powerlessness. Nizet ups the ante and just sends Relia to actual prison. And Liatoukine doesn't need oathbinding to silence Relia; the war takes care of that for him. (I also get the sense that, had Relia survived the war somehow, Liatoukine probably would have had him killed some other way. That boy was never going to get the chance to warn his sister.)

Mariora-Ianthe is where the comparison becomes a little less direct, as Mariora fills both the Ianthe role and that of the unnamed Italian girl I mentioned above. Mariora being ambushed by Liatoukine in the woods parallels Ianthe's fate; however, Nizet doesn't fridge her like Polidori does, because she actually gives a shit about her female characters. Mariora is the lower-class girl Relia is friends with despite his classism, but the Aubrey-Ianthe similarities end there, as Relia is gay and therefore not interested in Mariora romantically. The comparison can be picked back up if we drag Ioan into the mix; Relia is a much clearer Aubrey stand-in in terms of status and personality, but a few details of the character are getting passed to Ioan in the larger cast of Captain Vampire. Ioan is, after all, the one who survives to attend the wedding of Epistimia and Liatoukine—but by that point, he's so defeated by everything he's gone through that he doesn't even attempt to raise the alarm. And all of Liatoukine's vindictive moves throughout the story are, after all, part of the psychological game he is playing against Ioan; through this lens Mariora slots neatly into the Ianthe role, and interestingly, Relia shares it with her.

Mariora is more relevant to the Relia-as-Aubrey reading in the role of that Italian girl who, in the original Vampyre, exists only to be a plot point. Like Aubrey, Relia interrupts Liatoukine/Ruthven before he is able to commit an act of violation; and like Ruthven, Liatoukine retaliates cruelly against him. Nizet's willingness to torture Relia directly makes for stronger character writing and more effective horror, and also allows her to give her female characters (Mariora in this case) much more depth, rather than them only serving as props for the men. What if Ianthe survived? What story would she have to tell? How would she fare in the aftermath? Polidori and his stage imitators are not interested in these questions, but Nizet is, and tackles them with a deftness her predecessors can only dream of.

Epistimia is an interesting twist on her respective role. Aubrey's sister is never named; she is not characterized to any degree whatsoever. Gilbert's sister and Lord Ronald's daughter (the corresponding victims from Dumas's Le Vampire and Bride of the Isles respectively) have slightly larger roles, but are still given the bare minimum of characterization. It's the Stock Victorian Female Character, you've all seen it. But Epistimia doesn't fit that mold. She's a social climber, she's austere, she's a bully, she smokes cigarettes. Relia is Aubrey but he's also Cinderella, and Epistimia fills the role of evil stepsister at the same time as she is victim of the vampire. And although she does die as per the formula, her death is made to mean something more than a shock value ending or tragic man pain. Relia isn't even around to witness it. Rather, Epistimia's death serves to tie the narrative together symbolically, representing Liatoukine's—and through him, Russia's—final grim triumph. The Romanian bride is wedded, murdered, and drained of lifeblood, just as the Romanian protagonists are killed off and the survivors left traumatized and broken.

The grounded, brutal realism of Nizet's setting and characters proves incredibly effective at breathing new life into the elements of the Vampyre tale, bringing out the potential of these elements in a way no one before her ever had. Captain Vampire is the ultimate, perfected form of The Vampyre, the culmination of sixty years of developing tropes, And Also an ahead-of-its-time war story, because No One Is Doing It Like Marie Nizet, Before Or Since. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

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