Sexy Curses: Part 1

A couple of weeks ago I finished the first season of “True Blood.” It didn’t take me long, watching an episode a night, and after the finale I missed having evenings with the supernatural. I then watched season one of “Deadwood,” but its gritty and often grim depiction of life only accentuated my need for otherworldly elements. At the same time my two younger sisters also got into the vampire scene with the release of the movie “Twilight.” In thinking about why this brand of the supernatural appeals to us, I remembered an essay I wrote during college about the symbolism of vampires.

My thesis, vague as it is, argued that in Mikhael Lermontov’s novella, A Hero Of Our Time, the narrator’s comparing himself to a vampire has different implications in the context of the Lermontov’s time period than in the context of my/our time period. The symbol of the vampire shifts between 1839, the novella’s publication date (Stoker’s Dracula was published in 1897), and 2004, my essay’s “publication” date. In the essay I focused on how an understanding of the 1839 vampire gives a 2004 American reader a new understanding of the narrator’s self understanding. Upon recently rereading the essay, however, I began to wonder if this shift in vampire symbolism could give insight beyond the analysis of a nearly 170-year-old Russian novella...