How to Quiet a Vampire: A Sotie (Writings From An Unbound Europe)

Borislav Pekic, Stephen M. Dickey (Translated by), Bogdan Rakic (Translated by)

$18.95

Publication Date: April 26th, 2005

Publisher:

Northwestern University Press

ISBN:

9780810117204

Pages:

432

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Description

The disquieting novel How to Quiet a Vampire is a rumination on terror and intellect in the tradition of Joseph Heller and George Steiner. Published to acclaim in 1977, Pekic's novel of ideas follows Konrad Rutkowski, professor of medieval history and former Gestapo officer, as he returns to the scene of his war crimes determined to renounce, or perhaps justify, his Nazi past. In a series of letters, Rutkowski lays out his ambivalent reactions to war and violence, connecting his own swirling ideas to those of the major figures of European thought: Plato, St. Augustine, Descartes, Nietzsche, Freud, and others.

Delving far deeper than mere intellect, however, Borislav Pekic was himself a frequent political agitator and occasional prisoner, and he drew on his first hand knowledge of police methods and life under totalitarianism to paint a chilling portrait of a supposedly free-thinking intellectual acting in the service of repression. At the same time he questions whether Rutkowski's ideology puts him outside the philosophical tradition he so admires—or if the line separating European thought from totalitarianism is not as clear as we like to think.

About the Author

BORISLAV PEKIĆ (1930–1992) was born in Podgorica, Yugoslavia. Arrested in 1948 for terrorism, armed rebellion, and espionage after the theft of a few typewriters and mimeographs, Pekić spent five years in prison, where he began to write. He worked as a screenwriter and editor of a literary journal before publishing his first novel at age thirty-five. Constant trouble with the authorities led him to emigrate to London in the early 1970s. His novels include The Houses of Belgrade (1994) and The Time of Miracles (1994), both published by Northwestern University Press. He died of cancer in 1992 in London.
STEPHEN M. DICKEY is an assistant professor of Slavic linguistics at the University of Virginia. He co-translated Meša Selimović's Death and the Dervish (Northwestern, 1996).
BOGDAN RAKIĆ is a visiting associate professor of Slavic Literature at Indiana University. He co-translated Meša Selimović's Death and the Dervish (Northwestern, 1996) and edited In a Foreign Harbor (Slavica, 2000). He is currently working on Borislav Pekić's literary biography.

Praise for How to Quiet a Vampire: A Sotie (Writings From An Unbound Europe)

"A dozen years after his death Borislav Pekić is acclaimed as one of the greatest writers in the Serbian language." —New York Times

"Northwestern University Press should be commended for its series Writings from an Unbound Europe, in which Pekić's novels and dozens of other first-rate works of fiction in translation from the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe have appeared and continue to appear." —New York Review of Books

"A brilliant and complex satire." —Slavic and East European Journal