John Polidori
Il Vampiro

I take inspiration from the beautiful review by Carmilla to talk about the story "The Vampyre" by John Polidori. As is known, it is considered the first literary text dedicated to the figure of the vampire. Its author, of Italian origin, was a personal physician and, until 1816, also a friend of Byron. He composed it for fun at Villa Diodati, near Geneva, where Byron and his circle stayed during those years and passed the time by inventing and telling each other stories (or so it seems).

The story was published in 1819 and had many admirers, among them the great Goethe, who described it as Byron's best work. Meanwhile, poor Polidori, a true proto-romantic hero, had committed suicide in 1821 due to gambling debts. The story is worth reading, but one should not expect something similar to the various vampire novels to which we are more or less accustomed. Lord Ruthven is indeed a vampire and like all vampires is an undead, loves the night, and does evil for the sake of evil, but is also and above all a romantic dandy, clearly modeled on Polidori's own friends, foremost among them Byron. In short, he is an (English) aristocrat with a perverse charm, a real "Byronic type". The more horrific, sometimes even trashy aspects and colors will be added to the figure of the vampire, of which Lord Ruthven is precisely the prototype, over time and with the publication of other works. It's interesting to pose a question: why does the vampire literarily originate in those years? Certainly, it is a child of Gothic literature, started by Walpole, but we must also say or hypothesize something else, taking into account the fundamental topos of vampirism, namely blood. For example, the following sociological notes can help us contextualize the story:

1) From 1789 to 1815, Europe sees a river of blood flow due to the Vendée and the Terror, the wars against the Revolution, those waged by the Revolution, and the Napoleonic wars.

2) In 1796, the first vaccinations were practiced (we must not forget that Polidori was a doctor and that with vaccination, the disease is inoculated into the blood, albeit in a minimal dose and for good purposes).

3) The vampire sucks blood, thus, it can be metaphor for the parasitic aristocrat who sucks the blood from the third and fourth estates (in fact, Byron and his friends were pro-revolutionary, indeed pro-Jacobin, and even Byron himself would die shortly after fighting for the freedom of Greece).

In any case, beyond sociologisms, I recommend Polidori's story for its beauty and for those characteristics which, as already mentioned, distinguish it from subsequent works, even though it paved the way for them.