Imagining Eastern Europe - representations of Eastern Europe in 21st century French Vampire bandes dessinées

ABSTRACT

In the process of forging (Western) modernity, Eastern Europe has been constructed as an uncivilised Other of the West. The Vampire Narrative was created to represent the divide between ‘us’ and ‘the others’, including the fundamental divide between West and non-West. It has evolved over the years, reflecting the processes of inclusion. This article demonstrates that the political inclusion (into the European Union) of some countries of Eastern Europe (self-called ‘Central European’) has not actually led to the cultural inclusion of Eastern Europe in the social Western European imagery. To discover the full meanings of the 21st-century French Vampire Narrative, the study employs a complementary combination of structural analysis, deconstruction, and resistant reading. Vampire bandes dessinées (BDs) are chosen as research material due to their popularity in French culture and their two-dimensionality as graphic and literary works. The chosen analytic corpus encompasses remediations and adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, diverse versions of Vlad Dracula Tepes’ (hi)story, and perfectly new vampire tales. The representation of Eastern Europe in BDs reveals itself to be surprisingly in line with the 19th-century Vampire Narrative: Eastern Europe is a disturbing, un-real, exotic space of radical Otherness or an in-between ‘Secondary Empire’.

KEYWORDS:

• Eastern Europe
• Vampire Narrative
• bandes dessinées
• otherness
• structural analysis
• secondary empire

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The idea of Mitteleuropa was introduced in the book of Friedrich Naumann during the First World War to designate the countries of German hegemony, which, thanks to German colonisation, have become more civilised than the rest of Eastern Europe. The idea was then enabled by Hitler.

2. For the figure of folkloric vampires, see Paul Barber (1988) or Łukasz Kozak (2021). I differentiate here the vampiric figures (figure of vampiric type) from the Vampire figure sensu stricto. Vampiric figures can be found in almost all cultures since the oldest times (see, e.g. Bane 2010, Joshi 2011). The Vampire figure is, however, a product of Slavic folklore.

3. This is especially true for French narratives: in Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon’s The Virgin Vampire (La Vampire, ou la Vierge de Hongrie, 1825) and in all three vampire novels of Paul Féval (The Shadow Knight (Le Chevalier Tènèbre ;(1860)), The Vampire Countess (La Vampire (1865)) and Vampire City (La Ville Vampire (1867)) the vampire actors coming from Eastern Europe and/or their action taking place in there. Gautier’s vampire Clarimonde is a Venice courtesan and, again, the oriental references are obvious: Venice is a city of Byzantine character (dating back to the early medieval times), Clarimonde resides in Concini palace that has oriental character, and she poses as Cleopatra, the oriental queen (Pédron 2002). But the Eastern European references are also crucial for the two most famous 19th-century vampire stories. The action of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) takes place in Styria, which was at the time considered a Slavic land. And the eponymous Dracula from Bram Stoker’s novel comes from Transylvania, an Eastern European region.

4. Throughout my article, I write terms such as ‘vampire’, ‘hero’, ‘victim’, or ‘narrative’ with capital and lower letters, depending on whether I use them structurally or generically.

5. Historical Vlad Dracula had three brothers: Radu, Mircea, and Vlad – it was the last who became a monk. The authors decided to use Mircea probably to avoid the confusion that the identity of names could have caused.

6. For examples of the images, see the official website of Mathieu Lauffray: https://lauffray.artstation.com/projects/q5Zez, access 06.07.2023.

7. The narrative does not really recognise differences between Wallachia and Transylvania.

8. I made here a transcription: ‘Macha’, as written in the BD, has been changed into ‘Masha’ to save the original pronunciation.

9. See: Cybelia Chris’s book trilogy Le sang du vampire: Gabriel (2015), Julien (2015), Samaël (2016); the collection of stories Bienvenue en Transylvanie (2013), Olivier Beguin’s Swiss francophone movie Chiméres (2013), and even some stories in science-fiction collection Vampires à contre-emploi (2014).