Вампир: естественная история воскрешения.

First and foremost, it is a narrative of the first great wave of fear of vampirism, which began in 1732, the so-called “year of the vampires,” and ended in 1755, when Maria Theresa of Habsburg issued the so-called Rescript on Superstition, which appointed Vienna with all jurisdiction over the dead to be dug up (and witches to be burned). At a deeper level, it is a book that – in a kind of “interview with the vampire” – does not limit itself, as has been done by other works, to recounting the fears and perplexities that such rumors spread in Western Europe. The perspective is thus not the usual one of storytellers west of the Danube: a similar viewpoint would lead to a kind of “imperialistic bias,” which has undermined so much research thus far. Instead, an effort has been made to reconstruct, paradoxically, the point of view of the vampires themselves, who were “given a voice” so that they could speak: not so much of the dimension of superstition and misery in which they were imagined, but of the contradictions of Western society, which denied and feared them at the same time. A society that, prideful in its Enlightenment snobbery, felt superior as well as immune to such phenomena (which it, too, experienced in its more peripheral realities). The story of death is used to tell the story of life. And the story of the imaginary vampires of Eastern Europe who is used to recount and interpret the stories of the very material protagonists of Western Europe.