Book Title: How to Quiet a Vampire: A Sotie
Author(s): Borislav Pekić; Borislav Pekić; Stephen M. Dickey; Bogdan Rakić
Category: Nobel
Publisher: Northwestern University Press, Year: 2005
ISBN: 0810117207,9780810117204
Description:
How to Quiet a Vampire: Published to acclaim in 1977, this controversial 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 to a brother-in-law, Rutkowski lays out his ambivalent reactions to war and unthinkable violence, connecting his own swirling ideas to those of some of the major figures of European thought: Plato, St. Augustine, Descartes, Nietzsche, Freud, and others.
But the novel is more than an intellectual meditation. Pekic was himself a frequent political agitator and occasional prisoner, and he drew on his firsthand knowledge of police methods and life under totalitarianism to paint a chilling portrait of intellectual acting as a tool 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 it from totalitarianism is not as clear as we like to think.
