The Feminist Book Club 2/3

12.12.2024

Borislav Pekić: Kako upokojiti vampira, 1977.

At the third meeting this season, we discussed the 1977 novel How to Quiet a Vampire by Borislav Pekić. The core of this fascinating novel consists of letters written by Konrad Rutkowski, a professor of medieval history, who visits the Mediterranean town of D. in 1965, where he served as a Gestapo officer. Suddenly, his memories from 1943 collide with the present, in which he leads a seemingly peaceful married life. We devoted the conversation to an analysis of the structure of this epistolary novel and the key characters in Konrad's narrative – from the demonized figure of Colonel Steinbrecher, who thinks in the unambiguous language of interrogation that Konrad gradually adopts towards his last letters, while simultaneously destroying the language of the narrative, to his wife Sabina, whose attitudes and actions embody the collective remorse for the crimes of the Second World War. After withholding the contents of the letters from Sabina, Konrad lives a life that he reproaches the addressee of his letters, Sabina's brother Hilmar. One of the open questions in the novel is the fantastic story of one of Steinbrecher's victims, Adam Trpković, whose new monument in the town of D. evokes Konrad's stories about the past. In addition to these elements of the basic narrative, an important layer of the novel consists of allusions and speculations about the philosophical canon that attempt to explain the causes and consequences of a troubled conscience – both individual and societal. We concluded the conversation with a discussion of the relevance of this novel to reflection on contemporary violence and attempts to redeem it.