SOURCE: Kirtley, Bacil F. “Dracula, the Monastic Chronicles and Slavic Folklore.” Midwest Folklore 6, no. 3 (fall 1956): 133-39.

In the following essay, Kirtley traces the origins of Dracula to Russian monastic chronicles and Slavic folklore.

Bram Stoker's Dracula, that somewhat belated apparition from the sub-literary pits of Gothic horror fiction, has enjoyed a continuous notoriety since its first printing in 1897. Not only has the novel been republished numerous times, but its adaptions to the stage¹ and to the cinema have repeatedly attracted crowded audiences. In the United States the story's impact has been sufficiently pervasive to furnish popular speech with a connotative tag in the figure of the vampire Dracula, whose mere name is evoked to suggest a stereotype of that shuddery, but not uncozy, fright purveyed by certain types of class-“C” motion pictures.

As might be expected, the materials out of which Bram Stoker put together his shocker...