Foreword

by R. H. Greene

Y
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 well-
known 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
x Incarnadine

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 eighty-
year-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.

S 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.
 R. H. Greene xi

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
xii Incarnadine

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).
 R. H. Greene xiii

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
xiv Incarnadine

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.

P 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
 R. H. Greene xv

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)
xvi Incarnadine

• 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)

• 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

• 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-to-

toe 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.

T 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
 R. H. Greene xvii

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