Kiss of the Butterfly

‘Something has torn apart the once-proud Yugoslavia with ease and is feasting on it’s life essence.’

In 1991 when the Yugoslav Wars were beginning to take place, Steven Roberts, a student and teaching assistant of Professor Marko Slatina in San Diego, California, is travelling to Serbia on a mysterious ethnography grant. Steven’s scholarship involves studying a large amount of books and archival material on history, folklore and ethnography. Some of it concerns Societas Draconis, the Order of the Dragon, but most of it turns out be about vampires. Studying at the National Library in Belgrade, he e.g. reads of a vampire case on the Dalmatian island of Pasman in 1403 and of vampire investigations in Dubrovnik in the 18th century.

‘The research was tedious, and his eyes grew tired easily because of the poor lighting. Sometimes he felt he could read no more. Gradually, he uncovered small pieces of what increasingly seemed to be a much larger puzzle. Some came from historical documents, while others came from collections of folk tales recorded by ethnographers… Ducic, Novak, Zovko, Klaic, Liepopili, Karadzic … the names blurred together. Everywhere he turned he found Serbian newspaper accounts of people who were arrested and tried for opening up graves and driving stakes through the hearts of suspected vampires. He had particular problems with one 15th century document written in the Glagolithic alphabet, a precursor to Cyrillic that resembled mangled bicycles, trapezoids and triangles. It took him the better part of three days to read a two page document.’

Steven is astounded by the numerous references to vampires, and their similarities. He notes that ‘these vampires were unlike anything he had ever heard of and bore scant resemblance to film versions of Dracula,’ but the amount of material prompts him to write Professor Slatina that: ‘I suspect there might have once been some phenomenon that led to the establishments of these myths. In fact, there are days when I wonder if vampires might actually have once existed.’

Other threats are, however, more imminent than vampires. In the winter of 1991-92, the secret police in Belgrade is naturally interested in an American staying in Belgrade, and when Steven finds some interesting articles by Tihomir Djordevic on vampires, strange things happen. Apart from the well-known article from 1953, Vampir i druga bica u nasem narodnom verovanju i predanju (Vampires and other beings in our folk beliefs and traditions), ‘a veritable catalogue of vampirism, scientifically organized and categorized with instructions’, Steven discovers a rare article titled The Twelve Mighty Vampires in Legend and Fact. He asks the librarian if she can help photocopy it, but the next day the librarian is ill and replaced by another librarian who refuses to let him see the article. As Steven later learns, only 100 copies were printed, and it had been placed on a restricted list prior to publication by the Yugoslavian secret police, UDBA.

Steven, however, asks a bookseller in Sremski Karlovci, south of Novi Sad, to help him get hold of a copy, while travelling with friends to Petrovaradin and Novi Sad. At the Matica Srpska library he finds more information on vampires, in particular in the work of Stefan Novakovic, ‘the scholar who had found the original Flückinger documents about the Austrian Army vampire-hunting missions in Serbia.’ Novakovic had, apparently, found more information concerning the activities of Flückinger and other Austrians. Steven also finds information relating to the subject in the archives at the Fortress in Petrovaradin which leads him and his friends on a guided tour of the underground of that Fortress.

I am not going to disclose more of the exciting plot, but obviously Steven encounters an unexpected world in Serbia. Here evil is not an abstract term: ‘In America, if I were to talk about evil as being real they would laugh me out of the university. Yet everybody I speak with here talks of evil as if it exists and is a palpable presence.’

Source: Wikimedia

And the past and the present are intertwined. The novel sets out with Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia, following the Driva River upstream between Serbia and Bosnia in February 1476, heading to Srebrenica in connection with the Battle of Sabac. In 1991 Srebrenica is again to play a role in history. Vampire folklore, the Order of the Dragon, events in 18th Century Serbia and the conflict on the Balkans in the early 1990’s all become the backdrop of a conflict that transcends centuries.

A conflict that is related to the topic of Steven’s research, vampires that are in many ways very different from those Steven had heard of in California. They are shape-shifters, but typically turn into butterflies or moths, as in the Serbian folklore, the human spirit leaves the body in the form of a butterfly.

Kiss of the Butterfly is certainly an exciting read. The backdrop of Serbia on the brink of war, the minutiae of history, geography and customs, combined with a well-crafted mix of fact in fiction in the findings of Steven’s vampire research makes it a fascinating read as well. I recommend that readers have their smartphone or computer at hand when reading it, because it will prove handy to look up places and things on maps and in dictionaries while following Steven’s exploits. Eventually, you may find inspiration for future reading and travelling.

In short, I can highly recommend James Lyon’s Kiss of the Butterfly.

Kiss of the Butterfly is available as an e-book from Amazon.

Professor Marko Slatina: 'I am interested in real vampires, Balkan vampires, and they existed long before Dracula. The answers to the questions I have posed bear no resemblance to popular imagination. To find your answers you must undertake solid, academic research. You must comb through Balkan folklore, history and ethnography. You must find what the people who actually experienced vampires have to say. Find out how peasants, priests and soldiers fought against these dreaded creatures and what they had to do to vanquish them.'

James M. B. Lyon has over 30 years experience with the Balkans and the lands of former Yugoslavia: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia. Although he calls San Diego home, he has lived and studied in Boston, Florida, Germany, the Soviet Union, and England. He has a Ph.D. in Balkan History from UCLA and has lived in the Balkans for more than 18 years, during which time he has been involved in international peacekeeping efforts and Non-Governmental Organizations, and worked as a business consultant. A well-known political analyst, at present, he divides his time between Belgrade, Sarajevo and the Dalmatian coast.

'Vampire, see Serbia'

'Vampire, see Serbia', is what you find if you look up the word Vampyr in Dr. Christian Wilhelm Hufeland's encyclopedia on apparent death, Der Scheintod, oder Sammlung der wichtigsten Thatsachen und Bemerckungen darüber, from 1808.

The entry on Serbia, which incidentally follows an entry on the apparently dead eating themselves (das Selbstverzehren der Scheintodten: 'Man hat Beispiele von Todten, welche im Sarge sich selbst zu verzehren angefangen haben sollen...'), actually carries the title: 'Servien's Scheintodten-Ereignisse', the incidents involving apparently dead persons in Serbia. The entry concerns the incidents in Medvedja in the winter of 1731-2, although here erroneously dated 1733. Hufeland states that Emperor Charles VI asked Dr. Beyer to write an analysis of the matter, which however has not been published, but was probably suppressed by the Church ('Dieses ist aber, so sehr das Publicum auch darauf wartete, niemals öffentlich bekannt gemacht und warscheinlich durch den Kaiserlichen Beichtsvater, nach dessen Sinne es nicht ausgefallen seyn mochte, unterdrückt worden').

Hufeland finds that the vampires were in fact persons who became afflicted with some local disease and were presumed dead, and consequently  prematurely buried. Well, all things considered, it is not exactly a satisfactory theory, but that is the reason why Serbia and vampires are included in Hufeland's book.

But Hufeland is not the only one to identify Serbia with vampirism, and vice versa. In a recent book, Vampire Nation: Violence as Cultural Imaginary (Duke University Press, 2011), Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at the University of Winsconsin, Tomislav Z. Longinovic, writes:

'Until the Bulldozer Revolution in October 2000, global media networks and the public relations industry profiled 'the serbs' as avatars of post-communist violence in the Balkans. Despite the burden of all too real war crimes committed during the 1990s in the name of collective survival of their own territorial identity, global media excessively emphasized 'the serbs' as the incarnation of an exemplary and exceptional form of evil not proper to Europe, a vision that gradually excluded this imaginary assemblage from the sphere of civilization. Despite the fact that 'the serbs' belong geographically to the very core of Europe, symbolically and territorially, their borderline position was constructed as a projection of the Eurocentric fantasy about a cruel Orient in Europe.' (p. 5-6)

'The perception of pathological fixation of Eastern Europe in general and of the Balkans in particular, on the "old centuries" voiced by Stoker at the end of the nineteenth century through the persona of Dracula* is symptomatic of a cultural vision based on an interesting intersection of local and global discourses of violence. The past and its bloody memories define a refusal to yield to modernity imputed to the countries of the Balkan region, whose resistance to civilization and its laws are naturalized as inherently evil to oppose the advances of the Enlightenment and its technologies of mediation. The narrative projected onto the vampire as a beast within, enslaved to the undying, bloody past, serves as a national fetish underlying the repressed origins of Europe proper.

A small nation such as 'the serbs' is by definition led by a mysterious, degenerate leader who is ready to sacrifice others and commit bloodshed only to prolong his political power. During the 1990s, this vision of the other Europe reinforced an imaginary relationship that extended the vampire metaphor from the realm of the Gothic period's horror genre to the mundane practice of global politics, strategically deploying violence to advance civilization and the rule of law in the Wild East of Europe. The signifier that will forever sink into historical oblivion - Yugoslavia, the proper name of the country that was erased to deny the striving of culturally heterogeneous populations to live in a common state - has been assaulted by differentialist logic of the "clash of civilization" to enforce local insecurity by bringing about a collective return to the ideology of the vampire nation.

Stoker's Dracula, which founded the literary discourse of the Gothic imaginary, appears as the incarnation of those old centuries that refuse to fade away in the face of modernizing Europe. This imaginary, sparked by a belated Romantic mourning for the glory of the past boundaries of Europe, uses violence with the automatism of the beast who has no other choice but to feed itself on the blood of others. This hungry being is always engendered in zones of intense cultural and linguistic hybridization and simultaneously is imbued with the pathos of a race submerged in the narratives of its own past and viewed as a herald of a cruel modernity at hand.

Many "national" histories written and taught in the Balkans and in the rest of "Oriental" Europe are saturated with a celebration of violence that is monumentalized as just revenge and sacrifice offered to the glory of cultural life and survival. Small nationalisms contain this imaginary economy; they appear colorful but ostensibly irrational, steeped in gore despite enlightened intentions and dominated by discourses of masculine injury that claim the victim's right to feed on the blood of others as the only way to sustain survival.' (p. 19-20)

'The discourse of stolen blood reveals how the imaginary lens crafted by Stoker persists in the West as a cultural filter that defines alterity: Eastern Europe is a location where sex and violence know no limits. The image produced in British popular culture at the end of the nineteenth century has traveled to the end of the twentieth century to establish political discourses that the U.S.-led West sustains when it deals with new yet old types of revenant nationalism: the specter of 'the serbs' as the global vampires who deserve a well-guided stake of democracy.

This Gothic vision defines the boundaries of proper identity and its civilizatoinal other within Europe, a location where bad but sharp teeth, carnage, and fornication abound. The other Europe is an extension of the notorious count's ruined castle, where excessive passions and "old centuries" conspire to halt the progress and enlightenment proper only to the superior technology of the West. One of the most symptomatic returns of this Gothic vision is the mediated emergence of 'the serbs' as a phantasm of a vampire community governed by an excess of malignant historical imagination that is alien to the values of Europe and the "civilized world."

Firmly rooted in political and cultural ideals inherited from the best European traditions of nationalism and liberalism, 'the serbs' share military rationality and territorial logic of the nation-state with Europe proper. In fact, the Yugoslav tragedies of the 1990s are a legacy of the violence that formed the foundation of modern Europe: the political and cultural ideals made flesh and blood in the uncanny law binding the nation-state. The temporal disjunction between the "other" Europe steeped in old centuries of its historical imagination and the hypermodern amnesia of the U.S.-led West is at the root of this interpellated subjectivity structuring the Gothic emergence of 'the serbs'.' (p. 10)

Europe according to USA, from Mapping Stereortypes

'The extraordinary success of Twilight among youth in the United States appears as a global symptom of chronic hunger for attention from others and a craving for freedom that, paradoxically, shrinks under an invisible yet omnipresent force based on consumption and concealed forms of violence inherent in the developed modes of the current economy. Images of vampires have persisted in popular culture as a remnant of that undying demand for the extraordinary established by the Romantics and reveal, with symptomatic ambiguity, ever more powerful yet abstinent revenants who can control their craving for the blood of the ones they love. The disgusting, corpse-like appearance of the vampire has been sublimated into beauty in Goth subcultures, lending esthetic currency to the love of death that is overcome by the ever increasing levels of consumption demanded from ordinary humans.

In fact, the global media gaze that has discovered the cradle of European violence among 'the serbs' continues to act as a stake to put other vampire nations out for good. The skill of the vampire slayer equals that of the exterminator, acting with rational violence against the irrational one of the nations deemed below civilization's dividing line. The imaginary of minor and peripheral cultures of southeastern Europe has been interpellated by the political discourse based on that gaze to produce a variety of strategies of resistance to both domestic and foreign attempts at appropriation. While 'the serbs' face up to the unflattering task of confronting the real crimes committed in their name, the sublimation of the vampire on the global entertainment scene points to the displacement of Balkan topoi to account for the return of imperial desire to its rightful source.' (p. 186-7)

'In the global landscape where the force of capital naturalizes its existence to appear as the omnipotent and invisible source of death-in-life, the vampire perhaps remains the only true face of a being lost in the speculations of Western metaphysics. Its imaginary journey from the undead creature of Balkan folklore to the antihero of Hollywood blockbusters tells the story of our post-human future, shared by the most peripheral of European cultures and the political and economic centers of the West, to account for the increasing acceptance of humanity's transformation since mass ideologies of emancipation failed in 1989. The status of the vampire in popular culture suggests that the naturalized state of predation inherent in the global order of consumption marks a transition of humanity to a new stage of development in which it gradually accepts and covertly celebrates the violence whose origins remain hidden by the ruins of Dracula's castle. The notion of the nation as an effect of bourgeois liberalism that originated in the philosophy of the Enlightenment has given birth to a vampire whose current transformations manifest a dawn of a different subjectivity, detaching itself from the nation to enter the global stage of free play, and offer a model identification that transcends humanism.

The vampire as a theoretical hybrid between political science and psychoanalysis offers a kind of lay philosophy that transcends both the model of the machine and that of the animal commonly utilized by theoreticians of the post-human. The power of this hybrid to incarnate the subjectivity to come builds on the conventions that, in previous centuries, posited the vampire as the opponent of the common human subject. The precognition inherent in the imaginary flights of popular culture speaks the truth about a political unconscious that has found its incarnation in both the phantasm of 'the serbs' as a vampire nation and the vampire as a new model for the global order of being - an order that is all too (post)human.' (p. 188-9)

I have only dipped into this complex, and I think it fair to say: far from easy to read book, so in the words of another blogger I will be cautious when commenting on Vampire Nation: 'I will let others more knowledgeable than I opine on how successfully Longinović applies critical theory to historical analysis. In any case his book makes a provocative addition to the literature on the Yugoslav wars.'

The popular and globalized vampire of Western fiction is, of course, probably as popular in Serbia as in so many other parts of the world, so there is even a Vampires Serbia magazine containing photos of the stars from Twilight and other vampire films and TV series. We love Twilight, we love True Blood, and we love The Vampire Diaries in Serbia as well.

*) Longinovic refers to Jonathan Harker's diary in Stoker's Dracula where Harker while in Dracula's castle writes: 'It is the nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance. And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have powers of their own which mere "modernity" cannot kill.'