Product Description

This omnibus volume collects under a single cover the entire oeuvre of writings by Jan Louis Perkowski on the vampire theme in mythology and folklore, including his three previously published monographs ("Vampires, Dwarves, and Witches Among the Ontario Kashubs," 1972; "Vampires of the Slavs," 1976; and "The Darkling: A Treatise on Slavic Vampirism," 1989), in addition to 18 previously uncollected articles on the subject, one newly written for this volume.
As Bruce McClelland notes in his Preface to the volume, in the folklore of the Slavs, the vampire plays a specific role in a broader system of folk belief. Where in the West, the vampire is utterly monstrous, the symbol of pure evil and darkness that is nevertheless romaniticized and eroticized, its moral status is more nuanced and ambiguous in the Slavic conception. Yet the ancient Slavic folkloric vampire represents the historical basis of the pop cultural vampire about which movies, television shows, and video games are still being profitably made.
Some of the materials here are enormously useful because they reveal historical stages in the conception of the vampire that are quite different from what most would know about the vampire who are familiar only with the Western literary tradition. This corrective aspect of Perkowski's Vampires, which exposes a tradition directly linked to Balkan or at any rate Slavic folklore that follows a path that is quite independent of the 19th-century literary/metaphoric notions of the vampire, has had a difficult time getting traction in popular consciousness in the West, which suggests an entrenchment of the Romantic and Gothic traditions, and a concomitant resistance to correction by legitimate ethnographic research.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1695608 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 618 pages

Review
[T]he lore of new, postmodern urban Slavic vampire is thriving in Russia and Eastern Europe. In addition to the Moldovan pop group O'Zone's vampiric references in the music video version of their global eurodisco hit from 2004 "Dragostea din tei" ["Under the Linden Tree"], more recent publications and films in Russia on the subject of vampires, such as Viktor Pelevin's 2007 "Ampir 'V'" and Sergei Lukyanienko's trilogy of "Night Watch" (2003), "Day Watch" (2005), and "Evening Watch" (2006), along with the corresponding "Dozor" films of Timur Bekmambetov, have restored the centuries-old position of the vampire in Slavic culture--from ancient to classical to popular. Perkowski's volume is a timely and useful contribution to the growing interest ... in the study of the Slavic regions and their lore of the vampire. --Thomas J. Garza, "Slavic and East European Journal"

About the Author
Jan Louis Perkowski is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. His courses on vampire mythology and folklore are always in great demand with students. In addition to his lifelong work on vampires, other research and teaching interests include Slavic mythology, Russian language, and issues in diachronic Slavic linguistics.

Customer Reviews

A veritable tome of Vampire Folklore
WOW! I never knew such a book existed. Although this book is expensive ($40), it is definitely worth every penny. The problem seems to be that all the best books are definitely the most expensive. This book is heavy, entertaining reading, and useful to Vampire scholars and folklorists.