BBe forewarned: if youare expecting thisbook to be a titillating

account full of, in no particu-lar order: bats, fangs, wid-ows peak hairdos, capes,looming castles, heavingcleavage, blood, coffins,crucifixes, stakes, innocentmilkmaids in low-cutpeasant blouses, andcreepy guys with lineslike, "I vant to bite yourneck," you've got anotherthing coming.

This is a scholarly work withenough $10 words to send you scur-rying to Webster's. But in academia,you not only have to walk the walk,you gotta talk the talk. The importantthing here is Bruce McClelland spentyears meticulously researching histopic, here and abroad, in particular,in his favorite foreign country,Bulgaria.

So what is it about vampires any-way? McClelland is asked this ques-tion all the time. He patientlyexplains, "The vampire is a major cin-ematic literary character that has beenaround for 100 years." In fact, he con-tinues, "at one point, Dracula was aswidely known as Santa Claus in termsof a name that was recognized…[so]there's this literary vampire; it's gotbats and fangs and drinks blood.Many novels and movies are basedon that. And then there are theseSlavic people living in villages in theBalkans; the word vampire probablygoes back a thousand years. What's

the connection?" He pauses. "So, I'vebeen spending my academic careertrying to figure that out."

What he found was that the Slavicword vampyr first appeared in writingin the 11th century. It had little to noconnection to the modern vampirewe've come to fear and loath today."The vampire in Slavic society is ascapegoat, like the witch. The differ-ence is, a witch is a live person.When you torture witches as scape-goats, somebody gets hurt. A vampireis a corpse; serves the same function.You imagine them as alive and thenyou punish them. You solve the samesocial problems, and nobody getshurt." He looks up and smiles. "Isn'tthat brilliant?"

So vampires were convenientlyblamed for all kinds of things thatwent wrong in these remote Balkanvillages. How about this one? Awidow becomes mysteriously preg-nant. Blame it on her dead husband,who arose from the grave, not herbrother-in-law who slipped in to uh,console her, if you get my drift. "Avampire is guilty of impregnating hiswidowed wife. A woman gets preg-nant after her husband dies. Well howcould THAT be?" smirks McClelland.

The Eastern Orthodox Church,which was trying to convert theseBalkan pagans naturally jumped allover this vampire stuff, saying it waspagan ritual, and later heretical.Meanwhile the Roman CatholicChurch was doing a brisk businessburning witches at the stake duringthe Inquisition. Funny, it was alwayslive women in the west and dead menin the east.

Then came the Enlightenment.Queen Marie Theresa ofAustria/Hungary dispatched a widely

respected doctor/scientist fromHolland, by the name of Van Sweiten,to travel to the nether regions of herempire to specifically debunk vam-pires following an epidemic of vam-pire sightings/slayings in the 1730s.She didn'twant to returnto the bad olddays of theInquisi t ion.But the storieskept swirlingaround.

Then in1897, BramStoker, anIrishman liv-ing in Londonand workingas a theatricalm a n a g e rpenned thenovel, Draculaand, inChapter Oneof BruceMcClelland'sbook, "sincethen, thevampire talehas beenretold withvariations, inhundreds ofnovels, short stories, plays and mostsignificantly, films." It should benoted that in Stoker's novel, a widelyrespected doctor from Holland by thename of Van Helsing is summoned toidentify and slay Dracula. Soundfamiliar?

McClelland once taught a course atUVA entitled Blood and Sacrifice.Dracula was required reading. Hechallenged his students to find anyreference in Dracula to blood drink-ing, rising from the dead, changinginto animals, all of that stuff. "If youcan find any of this information that isnot either ambiguous or compro-

mised, let me know and I'll give youan A." His grade book was safe.

Words change in meaning overtime, and vampire has become ametaphor. "What it means now bearsno resemblance to what it meant

then. Wordschange theirm e a n i n gdependingon circum-s t a n c e s…they allthink it hadto do withblood drink-ing. Theblood drink-ing aspectd o e s n ' tshow upuntil at leastthe mid-1 8 0 0 s . "Even KarlMarx usedthe wordwhen hereferred tocapitalists."It justm e a n sanathema,"says Brucesuccinctly.

It became folklore.Fast forward to American television

programs…The Night Stalker, The X-Files, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, andyou come to realize that vampires arenow metaphors for hidden evil andtheir slayers the forces of good thatcan identify and kill that evil.

So, corpses that rise from the deadand feed on the blood of the living isimpossible, right?

Right! But then again…there wasthat morning after that dinner party inBulgaria when McClelland woke upand couldn't move a muscle becausehe felt so…drained.

SLAYERS ANDTHEIR VAMPIRESiinn

SSIIDD

EErr

BByy

PPhh

iill AA

uuddiibb

eerrtt

AApp

rriill

1122

,, 2200

0077

OOrraannggee CCoouunnttyy RReevviieeww iinnSSIIDDEErr,, AApprriill 1122,, 22000077

SS o anyway, Bruce McClelland of Gordonsville is at a din-ner party in Bulgaria with some heavy-hitter Slavic aca-demics and politicos, and everyone is eating and drink-

ing and smoking and the conversation turns away from MonicaLewinsky and Bill Clinton to the topic of vampires. Now that's asubject McClelland knows a little something about.

So he starts advancing theories and asking questions aboutthe origin of the word 'vampire,' and "this guy who was aRussian Jew got a very intense look to him; he kept looking atme with a half smile; there was something sort of devilish aboutit."

The party broke up and McClelland went home and fell intobed. The next morning, "I can't get out of bed…I woke up and Icouldn't move. And it wasn't paralysis; it was lack of energy, noenergy whatsoever." He pauses and thinks about his choice ofwords, and then says it anyway, "I was drained."

Well…not really…he still had blood running through his veins.

Bruce McClelland:

Bruce andCindy

McClellandtook their

dog Louiseto Russia

where theylived for two

years.Today,

Louise at age13, sticks alittle closerto home in

Gordonsville.

Photo by Phil Audibert

of Slavsand Vampires

and Poets

SLAYERS ANDTHEIR VAMPIRES

A CULTURAL HISTORY OFKILLING THE DEAD

Bruce McClelland, author of Slayers and TheirVampires; A Cultural History of Killing the Dead.

Photo by Jen Fariello

Bruce McClelland's most recent book is adetailed and scholarly work on the origins of

vampires. Note that on the cover, there is afountain pen through the heart, not a stake.

OOrraannggee CCoouunnttyy RReevviieeww iinnSSIIDDEErr,, AApprriill 1122,, 22000077 OOrraannggee CCoouunnttyy RReevviieeww iinnSSIIDDEErr,, AApprriill 1122,, 22000077

"I didn't have a headache, I didn't have a fever, Iwasn't paralyzed; I just had no energy. I couldn'twalk. I didn't know what to do." He didn't fully recov-er until the next day.

"There was no nausea, no diarrhea, no flu symp-toms, no food poisoning…and I was a medicalwriter; I knew what to look for." Was it the vodka?Nope, he doesn't drink. The cigarettes? Doesn'tsmoke. Thegrapes they nib-bled on…coppersulfate residue?"You'd have to eata lot of grapes toaffect you thisway. I didn't eatthat manygrapes," he sayswith a note finali-ty.

"To this day Ihave no ideawhat it was, butmy fantasy wasthat it was relatedto this guy andthis smirk, thisdevilish aspectthat I kept read-ing in him."There's no wayto prove it, but"Maybe he wasjust fooling withme, just lettingme know that he had that power, that there are suchthings, not enough to do any damage, but 'Okay,we're going to show what you're really into, whatyou're messing with.' It was that kind of feeling."

Bruce went on to publish his dissertation sealinghis doctorate degree, and the dissertation becametwo chapters of his book, Slayers and theirVampires, A Cultural History of Killing the Dead.Just recently he had a book signing at Barnes andNoble during the Festival of the Book inCharlottesville.

So now what? Believe it or not, Bruce McClellandwants to go back to the Balkans, to Transylvania,and do research for a novel on what it was like to beDracula…from Dracula's point of view!

Okay, Dorothy, we're a long way away fromGordonsville here, but bear with us. This past July,Bruce and his wife Cindy celebrated their 25th wed-ding anniversary, and he turned to her and had thegall to say, "Okay it's our silver anniversary, whydon't we go to Transylvania to a silver mine?" By theway, he believes that's the origin of the silver bullettheory.

But back to the story: she had a pretty goodcomeback to the Transylvanian silver mine idea.

"'Why can't you do something about Italian folklore,'"hinting that Venice or Tuscany or Rome would bemore appropriate locales for an anniversary. Bruceshrugs and says, "I think she tolerates my interestin all these weird places."

How about the time they picked up and moved toRussia to live for two years! All she knew aboutRussian housing is what she saw in picture books:

Tolstoy's and Chekhov's quaint dachas. "In the mid-dle of winter, we're flying into Moscow, she looks outthe window and she sees these Lego boxes all grayand everything's covered in snow and she startedcrying." He plants tongue firmly in cheek and adds,"It never got better."

They even brought their dog, Louise! And so,they're running around Sheremetovo Airport, "it'sone of the most unhelpful airports I have everseen…we're looking for our dog. Nobody knewwhere our dog was and we finally found her at oneof those carousels…her crate was just going roundand round." For the record, the dog was fine, evencame home with them in 1998, and lives to this dayto tell about it to two feline friends in Gordonsville.

But it was close there one time when Cindy tookthe dog out for a walk outside their drab gray apart-ment building without her passport and more impor-tantly without any knowledge of Russian. So a mili-tia guy comes up to her and asks her for identifica-tion.

She managed to work her way out of that one, butRussians are notorious busy bodies. "In winter if youdon't wear a hat, the old women will come up andyell at you," says Bruce, who by the way, is fluent in

Russian, so fluent he actually wrote a novel in thelanguage! He has also translated a book of poemsby Osip Mandelstam, and all told, he can read in 11languages, including Greek, Latin, Old English andOld Slavic, but shucks he can only speak four orfive: Russian, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, with asmattering of French and German. But, hell, who'scounting?

So what are these good folks doing in Moscow in1996? This is the era of Boris Yeltsin, the velvet rev-olution has already happened. Gorbachev is a has-been, and Clinton and Yeltsin have become drinkingbuddies. There is a thaw here; both sides are "try-ing to open channels," and Vice President Al Gore,who claims to have invented the Internet, wants tomake sure that the World Wide Web is truly worldlyand wide.

Bruce McClelland accepts a position as Directorof a United States Information Agency (USIA)Internet Access and Training program in Russia."We set up Internet sites at universities andlibraries. We would provide the computers and wewould pay for the Internet access," he explains. Sowhile Cindy was getting lost on the Moscow subway,Bruce was running around the remnants of the for-mer Soviet Union: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan,Belarus, Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia, "wherever wehad a consulate or an embassy, we would run thisprogram."

Actually the wisecrack about Cindy getting loston the subway is more frightening than funny.Cindy had landed a job at the US Embassy in theCultural Affairs Department. She was also co-chairof the Moscow Oratorio Society, but that's a wholeother story.

By now, she had learned a few Russian wordsand the letters of the Cyrillic alphabet. She evenknew how to sort of say her address. Remembernow, there were still some sore losers in this wholeglasnost thing, old Communists who liked to makelife difficult for Americans. Cindy, with blond hairand an open smile, was so obviously American, thatshe was singled out. "She had rocks thrown at her,and spit on her," confirms Bruce.

So, she makes a wrong train change on the sub-way and "she was clearly lost and some man cameup and asked her if she was lost, and she said 'yes,'and asked where she lived, and she spat thatout…and he grabbed her by the arm and put her onthe train." Cindy keeps saying "Nyet, nyet." And theguy takes her a couple of stops and pulls her off thetrain and makes a cell phone call, and another manjoins them.

Bruce takes a big breath. "Now there are twoguys with her, and they get on another train. Shehas no idea what's happening to her…so they final-ly get out and they let her go, and she goes up thestairs (of the metro station) and there she is…theytook her where we lived.What she didn't understandwas that they were holding her so she wouldn't get

separated. She thoughtshe was being kidnapped,but actually they werebeing very nice to her."

A close call. "Thatcountry is in sad shape,"continues Bruce. Hepoints out that with thebreak-up of the old USSR,they lost 100 million peo-ple, and now of the 150million Russians left,"they're losing 500,000people a year to disease,bad health care, earlydeath. They're dying andthey're not replacingthemselves…Young peo-ple see a bleak future andare not having children."

This population decaywas rammed home to himwhen he auditioned for abit role in a Russianmovie. They were lookingfor a 50-year oldAmerican man who spokebroken Russian. Bruce at48, was perfect for thejob. "I could fake a brokenaccent. I put on a kind ofsouthern drawl…Theyliked me, but they wantedsomebody who looked50, and to them some-body who looks 50, to uslooks 65."

Bruce McClelland'sfirst contact with Russiacame from a Polishteacher in a country dayschool in St. Louis wherehe and Cindy grew up. "Istarted studying Russianbecause everyone elsewas studying French andGerman," he says mis-chievously. It was also inSt. Louis that he saw hisfirst horror movie. "Iguess that scared meand I liked the feeling ofbeing scared. I liked mon-ster stuff as a kid."

McClelland went on tomajor in Russian at Bard,the liberal arts college inupstate New York.Classmates includedChevy Chase and Walter

Becker, of the highbrowrock band, Steely Dan.McClelland was also afree verse poet. So, itwas only natural that hissenior project was totranslate the Russianpoet, Osip Mandelstam.

"Russian poetry isvery regular in its metri-cal and rhymeschemes," says Bruce."English doesn't trans-late that stuff very well."He points to the quin-tessential Russian poet,Pushkin. "His languagehas got this music to itbut it's also so simple itsounds like somebodycould actually be speak-ing it." Translations failto convey this. "It endsup sounding stilted andjust terrible."McClelland reworkedhis original senior proj-ect into a book, and itwas nominated byLibrary Journal as oneof the best books of1988. But he is still trou-bled by, what he terms"some mistranslations."

Bruce McClelland isnot exactly a householdname here in the states,but in Russia he's quitewell-known, havingbeen published in ananthology of Americanpoetry. "Apparently Ihave a reputation inRussia, I didn't knowthis… as a greatAmerican poet," heshrugs, wide-eyed andclueless.

And if Internet shar-ing, improving languageskills and working on hisdissertation weren'tenough, "I wrote a novelin Russian; it was kind ofmy homework." Anexcerpt was actuallypublished in a Russianliterary magazine.

So what happened tothe horror movies?

Back to 1976. Bruce is studying linguistics atPenn. He, uh, pens a work called The DraculaPoems, inspired in part by a charming Slavic rulerby the name of Vlad the Impaler. "My girlfriend haddumped me and my cat had died…I was drinking alot; I don't drink anymore…and it came out of thatdark transformation I guess." And so, the connec-tion between Slavs, Poetry and Vampires wasforged.

So was the connection to Cindy. High schoolsweethearts, they broke up for eight years, until hecalled her at 1:00 in the morning during this darkperiod, and she picked up the phone and saidsomething to the effect "Well it's about time youcalled." She realized right then and there that hewas "the love of my life."

Fast forward to the early 1990s, when they movedto Charlottesville, so that Bruce could be close toUVA professor, Jan Perkowski, who wrote, TheDarkling: A Treatise on Slavic Vampirism.Meanwhile, Cindy established and runs, withdaughter, Amy, the Charlottesville women's apparelstore, Eloise. She brings with her a wealth of expe-rience in business enterprise, having served asgeneral manager for one of the top 100 restaurantsin New York City, among many other things.

Three years ago, the McClellands bought ahouse in Gordonsville. Bruce holds a day job withthe Battelle Memorial Institute in the Research Park."I work with software; I work with a number of things,research and development," he says cryptically.

Of Gordonsville, he says brightly, "I love thattown. My wife and I just love it…we live right in towntoo. We have the baseball field and the swimmingpool and the train, all of those sounds." Bruce jumpsup from his chair in the book and CD-laden livingroom of their 19th century Gordonsville home andcharges into the kitchen to make his third doubleespresso.

Two Greek Gods: Apollo and Dionysius.In broad terms, we are divided into two personal-

ity profiles aligned with these two guys. Apollo…he's left brained; he's the guy with the pocket pro-tector and the calculator and he's figuring out num-bers and battle plans and strategies and logic andthe like. He is ruled by reason. Dionysius, on theother hand, is the creative flake, the artsy person,the party animal, the one ruled by emotion. BruceMcClelland is full-bore both! He's a poet and a com-puter geek all at once. Best of all, he is fabulouscompany.

Dressed in head-to-toe faded black on the day ofthe interview, he can run with just about anything youthrow at him. "Given my druthers, the Dionysian sidewould be the one that wins out," he smiles, hastilyadding, "the other one (Apollonian) pays the bills."

And isn't it interesting that Dionysus was aThracian God…of a Greek people who settled in theBalkans…where all this vampire stuff got started inthe first place.

Bruce McClelland of Gordonsville can speak four or five languages, includingRussian and Bulgarian, and he can read in 11.

Photo by Phil Audibert

Covers of two other books penned by Gordonsvilleresident, Bruce McClelland. Tristia is his transla-

tion of a Russian poet, published in 1988. TheDracula Poems were written in 1976 while Bruce

was studying Linguistics at Penn.