Was Dracula a Vegan, Really?

Last spring, the inventor Gleb Zilberstein and his wife, Svetlana, visited the Transylvanian city of Sibiu for three days to study the papers of Vlad III, also known as Vlad Ţepeş (the Impaler), a fifteenth-century prince of Wallachia, who has come to be mistaken as the historical source for Count Dracula, from the novel by Bram Stoker. In the Sibiu city archives, Zilberstein, who is based in Israel, was pleased to find three letters written by Ţepeş some five hundred years ago, two of which were in pristine condition. Since 2012, Zilberstein has sought to collect traces of proteins from historical documents—the blood, sweat, and dietary habits of long-dead clerks and authors—which can then be analyzed in a mass spectrometer, sometimes with startling results. (I wrote about Zilberstein and his long-term collaborator, an Italian chemistry professor named Pier Giorgio Righetti, in 2018.) The night after Zilberstein began working on Ţepeş’s letters, there was a violent storm. “There was heavy rain and strong winds,” he told me in an e-mail. “Lightning flashed, dogs and some other animals howled. There was a great atmosphere to start our ‘gothic’ project.” The next morning was Thursday, May 26th, the hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Stoker’s “Dracula.” The Zilbersteins went on a tour of Sibiu’s churches. “No supernatural phenomena as a reaction of the devil’s or vampire power appeared,” Zilberstein noted.

Ţepeş and Dracula have been locked in an uncomfortable, non-consensual embrace for more than fifty years. In the early seventies, Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu, historians from Boston College, who were researching Ţepeş’s bloody life and rule, came upon Stoker’s research notes for “Dracula” in the Rosenbach Museum and Library, in Philadelphia. The notes had lain, unstudied, for decades as the vampire went global. Stoker was the manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London and friends with Oscar Wilde. He never visited Transylvania. But McNally and Florescu discovered that one of Stoker’s sources for the novel was “An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia,” by William Wilkinson, a one-time British diplomat in Bucharest, which he read on a visit to Whitby Public Library in the summer of 1890.

Wilkinson’s book briefly describes the reigns of Ţepeş and of his father, Vlad Dracul, whose surname derived from his membership in the Order of the Dragon, a chivalric order founded by the King of Hungary. In a footnote, Wilkinson mentioned that Dracula could also mean devil. Stoker liked the name. “P.19. DRACULA in Wallachian language means DEVIL,” he typed in one of his few notes on the book. (Ţepeş liked his father’s title, too: he signed his name “Dragwulya” or “Dragkwlya” or “Drakulya.”) After reading Wilkinson’s book, Stoker changed the name in the manuscript of his vampire novel from Count Wampyr to Count Dracula, and switched his origins from Austria to Eastern Europe. But, apart from a couple of jumbled references to a Voivode and “we of the Dracula blood” by the Count in Chapter 3, that’s it for fifteenth-century Wallachian history. In 1906, according to Daniel Farson, Stoker’s great-nephew and biographer, Stoker told an American reporter, “You know a lot more about Dracula than I do.”

Still, the link—a catchy surname—was there. McNally and Florescu’s book, “In Search of Dracula,” was published in 1972 and caused a sensation in the vampire field. Draculas of fact and fiction, impalers and impaled, were joined in the public imagination, even though many rival scholars found the association overplayed and deeply annoying. In 2000, Elizabeth Miller, a Stoker expert at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, felt moved to publish “Dracula: Sense & Nonsense,” a fuming, book-length refutation—in call-and-response form—of various ill-founded theories about the novel, with the Ţepeş connection among her principal targets. “The name ‘Vlad’ appears nowhere in his working papers, nor in the novel,” Miller writes. “Hold on a minute! ” she exclaims, in response to the theory that Stoker deliberately left out more Dracula backstory. “Prove it! ” Transylvania and Wallachia are in modern-day Romania, where Ţepeş was rehabilitated during the twentieth century as a proto-nationalist figure: tough, to be sure; sadistic, even—but with a knack for modernizing the state and resisting the Turks. He was a monster of his own making. “Vlad Ţepeş, the valiant and terrible Prince of Walachia has nothing in common with the fictional Dracula unjustly bearing his surname,” Nicolae Stoicescu, a Romanian historian, wrote in a monograph about Ţepeş in 1976, in which she also referred to Stoker, who was Irish, as “an unconspicuous English writer.”

Zilberstein didn’t go to Sibiu for any of these reasons. He had not read “Dracula.” He has no time for the finer points of either Stoker scholarship or the Wallachian succession. His mind follows connections of his own making. When I asked him the other day what drew him to old documents, Zilberstein replied with a Soviet joke: “The future is always the same, but the past is always changing.” Zilberstein had discovered that one of the earliest works of Russian literature was “The Tale of Dracula the Voivode,” most likely written by Fyodor Kuritsyn, a Russian ambassador in Hungary, ten years after Ţepeş’s death, in 1476. “I was surprised: Wow. The first Russian-language fictional book was about Dracula,” Zilberstein said. “O.K. I started to make some search.”

Kuritsyn’s tale is a litany of Ţepeş’s impalings, flayings, burnings, and beheadings. (He burned people alive; he dined surrounded by bodies on wooden stakes.) But Zilberstein was excited by Ţepeş for proteomic reasons. Proteomics is the study of all the proteins assembled by a given entity: a human liver, a swan, a field of maize. Paleoproteomics, which Zilberstein pursues, examines the biomolecules of the past. (The vitrified remains of a brain, preserved after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E.; the contents of centuries-old Yup’ik sled-dog poop, in southwest Alaska.) At its best, paleoproteomics is a revolutionary field that allows us to feel the stuff of vanished lives, to see the dust motes of history. For Zilberstein, Central and Eastern Europe, in the last years before Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the New World, in 1492, was enticing territory. “We should find virgin Central European microflora without traces from American things,” he said. “Like tobacco, or corn and other things—syphilis, for example.” He was also curious about signs of Europe’s Little Ice Age and Wallachia’s position on the violent, diverse fringes of the former Ottoman Empire. (As a boy, Ţepeş spent five years as a hostage in an Ottoman castle, in Turkey.)

In Sibiu, Zilberstein used tweezers to place nineteen plastic films with charged ions across the surfaces of Ţepeş’s five-hundred-and-fifty-year-old letters, to draw off their proteins. He positioned one directly over the word “Dragwulya,” signed by Ţepeş in 1475. From Transylvania, the films went to be analyzed in a mass spectrometer at the University of Catania, in Sicily. In total, Zilberstein harvested about a hundred human proteins and some two thousand from the early-modern kingdoms of life—bacteria, fungi, viruses, plants, and bugs. Of the human proteins, Zilberstein was particularly drawn to an array of peptides, which appeared only on Ţepeş’s later letters, which indicated blood, tears, and traces of retinal disease. From this he theorized, with caveats, that Ţepeş “probably suffered, at least in the last years of his life, from a pathological condition called hemolacria, that is, he could shed tears admixed with blood,” in a paper with Vincenzo Cunsolo, a chemistry professor at Catania. Zilberstein was also struck by the absence of meat proteins in the study. All the peptides that he usually associated with the human diet came from vegetables and fruit, along with trace peptides from fungi and fruit flies, indicating lean, and somewhat overripe, pickings for the valiant and terrible prince.

The findings were published in Analytical Chemistry in August. As with many of Zilberstein’s previous studies with Righetti—on Milan’s seventeenth-century plague records, on Johannes Kepler’s potential dabblings in alchemy, on Mikhail Bulgakov’s notes for “The Master and Margarita”—it made news around the world. “Pity the Bloody Tears of Dracula,” the Post reported. Zilberstein gave an interview to the Times of London about Ţepeş’s diet. “The prototype vampire may have been a vegan,” he said. He wondered whether the cold climate had something to do with it. The Daily Star, a raucous London tabloid, ran with the vegan-Dracula angle. “The wild claims,” the paper reported, “were thrown out into the public by boffins who say The Count was more likely to tuck into his five a day than peasant necks.”

Zilberstein is an entrepreneur. “Gleb, out of twenty inventions he would make, he would choose the one you want to buy,” a former colleague told me, in 2018. In a recent survey of the paleoproteomics field, led by Christina Warinner, an anthropology professor at Harvard University, two of Zilberstein and Righetti’s papers—on Milan’s plague records and on Bulgakov—were labelled as “improbable results” that “should be subject to further scrutiny.” I asked Zilberstein whether he was surprised by the reaction to his Dracula paper. “I think that it’s not a good indication about the mental health of the population,” he said. “Because people start to think and read about apocalyptic people and personalities.” He was full of plans for what to look at next. His targets included Napoleon’s gloves, from the Battle of Waterloo; a lock of Lucrezia Borgia’s hair; the logbooks of Magellan’s circumnavigation of the world; the records of the Spanish Inquisition; records from American slave plantations. So many molecules. So many fragile stories. “I hope this list of possible topics will be interesting to you,” he wrote. ♦