Florescu, Radu R.
Florescu, Radu R. (1925–)
(pop culture)Radu R. Florescu is an Eastern European historian who, along with his late colleague Raymond T. McNally, has been one of the most prominent scholars calling attention to Vlad the Impaler, the historical Dracula, and his relationship to the vampire legend. One of his ancestors, Vintila Florescu, was Vlad’s contemporary but was a supporter Vlad’s brother, Radu the Handsome, who took the Wallachian throne in 1462 at the end of Vlad’s reign. Florescu seemed destined for an obscure life as a specialist in eastern European politics and culture. His first book was The Struggle Against Russia in the Romanian Principalities (1962). However, in the early 1970s he teamed with his Boston College colleague Raymond T. McNally as the author of In Search of Dracula (1972), a popular book on the vampire myth. Their book drew upon the historical data concerning Vlad the Impaler, the fifteenth-century Romanian prince who had been associated with the vampire legend by Bram Stoker. Some years previously, McNally had become interested in tracking down any real history behind Stoker’s novel. His search led him to Vlad the Impaler; after McNally joined the faculty at Boston College, Florescu discovered that the two shared a mutual interest. In the late 1960s they formed a team with Romanian historians Constantin Giurescu and Matai Cazacu to perform research on Dracula and vampire folklore. It was found that in Romania, vampire folklore was not tied to Dracula (until very recently). Stoker possibly learned of Vlad from Arminius Vambéry, a Romanian scholar he met in the 1890s in London.
In Search of Dracula was designed as a miniature encyclopedic survey of aspects of the Dracula legend. Some reviewers, noting the lack of footnotes concerning the historical Dracula, suggested that Florescu and McNally had made up the details of his life. Those reviews led to their next work, a complete biography of Vlad titled, Dracula: A Biography of Vlad the Impaler, 1431–76, published in 1973. This study not only spurred further work on the fifteenth-century prince by Romanian historians but also altered the treatment of Dracula in the movies. Among several such movies, two versions of Dracula—the 1973 version with Jack Palance and the 1992 version by Francis Ford Coppola—emphasized the relationship between Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the historical Romanian prince. A number of recent novels, such as the several books by Peter Tremayne and Dan Simmons’s Children of the Night, also built their plot on the connection. In 1976, a Swedish documentary about Vlad, with actor Christopher Lee, took Florescu’s and McNally’s first book as its title.
Florescu continued his productive collaboration with McNally. In 1979, (coinciding with the release of the new version of Dracula [1979] with Frank Langella), they completed an edited version of Dracula under the title, The Essential “Dracula”: A Completely Illustrated and Annotated Edition of Bram Stoker’s Classic Novel. This edition was noteworthy for its extensive use of notes that Stoker made while writing the novel. More recently, Florescu and McNally issued a comprehensive presentation of Vlad’s life in its context in the broad sweep of fifteenth-century history, Dracula, Prince of Many Faces: His Life and Times (1989). The fall of the Cheshescu government in Romania has allowed increased contact and collaborative activity between Romanian scholars and their Western counterparts. In 1991, building on an idea first proposed in the 1970s by Florescu and McNally, Kurt W. Treptow brought together Romanian, British, and American scholars to create an anthology of contemporary research on Dracula. Florescu contributed a paper to this work called, “Vlad II Dracula and Vlad III Dracula’s Military Campaigns in Bulgaria, 1443–1462.” Florescu was one of the speakers at Dracula ‘97: A Centennial Celebration in Los Angeles and received an award from the Transylvanian Society of Dracula for his contributions to Dracula scholarship. Most recently Florescu has been able to combine his interest in Romanian history with an exploration of his own family’s contribution in General loan Emanoil Florescu: Organizer of the Romanian Army (2007).
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