Dispatch – May 17: Carmilla

It’s been a habit of those of us from Georgian provinces that whenever we go back to where we came from, we go with a grand mission of gaining expertise on “what’s going on out there,” but end up gaining weight instead. This last Easter, however, I gained neither. Heavy rains disrupted networking, and the fuss that moved inside the closed rooms distracted from absorbing food. But then, on Monday, the town fell quieter than it was before the holiday. Families rushed back to the capital to avoid traffic, and those who stayed took to cleaning.

That’s when I decided to give it another try. I took a ramble through the small town, overtaken by a strange feeling that the desolate streets would reveal something to me. It was the right instinct: passing by a local stationery shop, I was startled by a familiar yet very unexpected figure staring back at me. What was Carmilla doing in my town?

Here is Nini and the Dispatch newsletter, exploring darkness on Georgia’s dark anniversary.

Carmilla is a 19th-century Gothic vampire tale written by Irish author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. 

The story, told in simple sentences but with a rich and haunting voice, is about a relationship between Carmilla, the charming vampire, and her new victim, Laura. The vampire tricks her way into the remote castle where the victim lives, deceiving her family through her innocent appeal and befriending her. The friendship quickly grows into an obsessive attachment. Overcome by love but unable to let go of predatory habits, Carmilla haunts Laura night by night, secretly sucking her blood in small doses and pushing her towards the fate of her previous victims – slow death by anemia. 

Originally published in 1872, the novella is known to have inspired broader vampire fiction, including Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and some notable screen adaptations. In less than one hundred pages, it breaks several taboos of the time. Mixing themes of vampirism with those of women’s empowerment and toxic obsession, the story goes to explore the relationship between the two women, which far transcends friendship. 

I read the book online months ago, after tracing it through a sequence of searches and algorithms and other things. While not exactly a print purist, I still had a sense that this particular story demanded to be printed as a copy that would do justice to the book’s Gothic aesthetics. Yet no hard copy was available in the bookshops I stalked across Tbilisi, neither new nor used. 

I only found it last fall, during my year’s only foreign trip. The trip marked my first return, after seven years, to Berlin, where I once studied. I was wandering around the large, most famous local bookshop when, suddenly, there it was: illustrated in a red-and-black drawing that merged elements of dark hair, black cat, and predatory lips, the book asked for attention and got mine. Carmilla was a beautiful book, with its edges, too, colored blood-red, and text in Gothic font. I instantly grabbed it and brought it back to Tbilisi, convinced it was the first such copy to cross that national border.

But then, who had brought Carmilla to my hometown? 

Rouge Et Noir

The book, also an English-language edition with the same black-and-red cover, had been placed in a glass display. Aside from books, the stationery shop sold watches, toys, and church candles – the latter for 10 tetri each,  the door sign said. The glass, and thus Carmilla’s dark figure, faced the small town’s main street, mirroring its dull routine and the country’s central railway line that passed through. The copy was put between Georgian and English bestselling books, with a selection ranging from Lana Del Rey’s poetry to Georgian thief-in-law fiction that had reappeared on bookshelves after some years in the shadows.

The place where the shop was located used to be a popular hangout spot, referred to as “Hollywood.” In Soviet times, it housed a cinema which, of course, could not be revived in the years since (though there were some attempts). Later, it hosted a shop called “Hollywood”, with a striking exterior painted in Carmilla-red. On the left, a man used to sell CDs and DVDs, introducing the town’s youth to the world of music. But then the internet took over the film and music industry, supermarkets took over the place, and a thick veil of uncertainty took over the town and the rest of the country. 

During my previous visit in March, I felt alienated from my hometown like never before. It coincided with International Women’s Day, and I found a municipal newspaper, a special issue dedicated to the town’s distinguished women. Some articles, however, written – unsurprisingly – by men, respected neither women nor language. They lamented that women were losing their modesty and somehow blamed it on “Brussels bureaucracy.” The out-of-context intrusion into the periphery made the propaganda concepts produced in the center sound all the more absurd. 

What’s happened to my town, I asked myself, depressed, as I mourned the darkness descending on a place once known for a rare ability not to take such things seriously.  

Maybe nothing happened, and that’s how it has always been: in a society stuck in search for identities, opposite things coexisted, at times in a single body, and one’s view of “what’s going on out there” has been a mere product of isolated, accidental encounters and one’s will to know. Stop everyone in the street and ask them what they think, or what others around them think – every answer will be right, and every answer will be wrong. Do we ever truly know what we think and who we are? Do we know who we’ll become once we are visited by a charming, dark-haired vampire?

Having spotted Carmilla in the glass display, my immediate instinct, again, was to grab it. I tried the shop door several times, but it was locked, even though there was light inside. It was still a holiday. I gave up – to love is not to possess, after all.

Fear No Dark

In the weeks that followed, I again stalked the bookshops in Tbilisi and found the English-language stock replenished. I found books that were gothic, gay, horror, about vampires, about doomed love, about obsessive love, but I never found Carmilla. She was not there – at least not on display like in my town.

Upon closer inspection, I found one explanation. The two Carmillas had largely the same cover, but were not the same edition. The one I found in Berlin advertised itself on the cover as “The Dark Sapphic Romance that Inspired Dracula,” which was the only thing I disliked about the copy: the word “sapphic” there somehow sounded less like an acknowledgment of queerness and more like a marketing strategy. The edition in my town kept the mystery, reading in the same place, “The Cult Classic that Inspired Dracula.” 

The hometown edition must have been the earlier one, possibly written off and sold for a lower price after publishers traded mystery for marketing. That’s how I think English editions usually reach remote, poorer places in Georgia: no one’s paying 15 U.S. dollars for a book. 

But who was paying even that lower price for Carmilla — the English-language 19th-century gay gothic fiction – in a small Georgian town? Or why did shop owners, with so many other books to sell (the room seemed quite full), decide to put that one on display? 

There could have been a demand I was unaware of, but it could be that Carmilla was here to create that demand. Just like its protagonist, the book appeared to have used its charm, beauty, and innocent look to sneak into the shop, put itself in the most visible place, and lure its next prey — at least, it has lured me back to my estranged town since. Maybe Carmilla ended up in the town because she was naturally drawn to places that were just like her — lonely, languid, and torn between love and toxicity. 

Or she might have been simply drawn to places called dark: she must have known that not all darkness should be feared.

Because darkness can be the place where good things disappear, where democracy dies, where terror reigns. But darkness is also where all things special, different, and bold hide before they dare to come out.