Estonian Vamps

Until early 2006, I rarely thought about, or encountered, Estonia. Certainly I'd known it from maps. Its abstract blot took on flesh-and-blood contours while living in London in the late 1980s, where I met an elderly Estonian widow. In 1940, she and her husband had been out of Estonia for a short time when it was seized by Soviet troops and incorporated into the USSR after a mere two decades as an independent nation. The young couple was abruptly dispossessed, and forever exiles; in 1989, the woman I knew believed KGB agents followed her. With the dissolution of the USSR, Estonia became independent again. This might have been all I heard about Estonian matters until Dalkey Archive Press published Mati Unt's Things in the Night in 2006 in a translation by Eric Dickens (it was published in 1990 in Estonia). It was the best novel I read that year, and the year after, and has stayed with me. Wistful, full of offbeat events, and a gentle humor, it's also filled with remarks that directly discuss the fictionality of the work, and these are aimed at the reader to interrupt the conventional reading process. They show that though the narrator knows fiction is happening around him, nothing will stop him from stepping away from the ostensible plot and the doings of almost-characters when he wants to. Goodness only knows what the author may be doing also.

In his very good afterword, Dickens briefly discussed various things that go into Unt's fiction, as well as telling those of us to whom Estonia has been an abstract blot with an unfortunate history only recently redeemed about the figures that populate Estonian literature. One of them is Lydia Koidula (1843–1886), "regarded as the first Estonian woman poet of significance, also the first poet to express an Estonian longing for independence and freedom." In Diary of a Blood Donor, Unt is having mischief with her legacy, expressing some insights into the USSR and its relation to Estonia, while wrapping all this up in a pastiche of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) that borrows many of its characters and events suitably transformed (distinct from being brought up to date).

In the 1990s, Dracula often was taught to graduate students, and those students, when they became teaching assistants, taught Stoker's novel to the young minds under their care, and so it went. Television (Buffy, Angel, etc.), books made into movies (Interview with the Vampire [1976], and now the Twilight series), and free-standing movies themselves (the Underworld trilogy, for example), have made, it would seem, any recapitulation of its plot redundant. In Unt's re-tooling, there are both a Lussi and a Minni, as well as a Joonatan Hark, and a host of other characters who recall Stoker's creations. One purpose is to bring the undead into the literature of 1990s Estonia, though the action takes place in 1986.

Diary of a Blood Donor begins with a crow, moves on to mosquitoes, a squirrel giving a "bloodthirsty stare," and much else in the way of imagery drawn from our stockpile of vampire myth and lore. Yet, one breath away from talk of blood is a sentence invoking Russian history: "The cruiser Aurora fired her gun on the night of October 25, 1917," the night the October Revolution began. The boat is the destination for Joonatan, who has been invited to its home in Leningrad by Eduard, a mysterious correspondent. Readers of Dracula will recall not only that Harkness didn't return the same man from his jaunt to the east, but that vessels play an important part in getting Count Dracula to the west. Not much farther in lines from Hamlet are quoted—"Tis now the very witching time of night, / When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out"—to be followed by these observations: "The same paper published a demand for all rapists to be castrated. // That spring there was a nuclear catastrophe in Chernobyl."

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