Zenon (inspired by Joseph Conrad, perhaps?) is a successful Polish émigré novelist living in perpetually foggy, late nineteenth-century London. A skeptic by nature, he watches his circle of friends succumb to the temptation of Spiritualism. While Zenon thinks their séances to be nothing more than suggestive smoke and mirrors, he cannot help but be drawn to the enigmatic, demonic femme fatale Daisy, whose capacity to bend the laws of physics challenges his tenacious rationalist worldview. Betsy, his somewhat naïve but unwaveringly faithful fiancée, won't let the ominous Daisy snatch him from her wholesome embrace without a fight. To complicate matters, Ada, an old flame from Poland, has just arrived in England to reveal a shocking secret. Zenon won't pass up this opportunity for closure...
Originally published in 1911 and available in English for the first time, The Vampire is not only one of the earliest works of horror in Polish literature. It is also a love story, a timeless and moving account of immigrant nostalgia, and above all a memorable time capsule of fin de siècle Spiritualist London, where séances were all the rage, Europeans were discovering Far Eastern mysticism, and Madame Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley were celebrities.
This book has been published with the support of the ©POLAND Translation Program
Autorentext
Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont (1867-1925) was a Polish novelist of the realist period (the period of "Organic Work," as it is known in Poland, for its rejection of revolutionism and its dedication to preserving Polish culture among the three partitions by work among the people), and, especially, the Young Poland period, often equated with "Polish Modernism." He preferred to work as a labourer than to follow his parents' wishes into higher education, training as a tailor and labouring on the railroad. His fame as a novelist is based on two works, the epic Chlopi [The Peasants, 1902-1908] and Ziemia obiecana [The Promised Land, 1897-1898]. In 1924 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Bunt [The Revolt of the Animals, 1922, 1924], his last major work, was suppressed by the Communist régime of the People's Republic of Poland on account of its blatant rejection of Marxism and satirising of revolutions.