Elizabeth Kostova: The vampire chronicler

Elizabeth Kostova's love affair with Eastern Europe led her to resurrect Dracula and put him back in history. Julie Wheelwright talks to an American adventurer

"I wondered whether this would make a good structure for a novel," Kostova tells me, wide-eyed from jet-lag, at the Bloomsbury hotel where she's staying for her British publication. "At the end of each of these tales, the young listener realises that Dracula himself is listening to the story. Then I got the chills and immediately began working on the book."

The story is told by Paul, an American diplomat, to his daughter through a series of letters, journal entries and through fictional ancient documents, all of which are based on authentic publications. Part of Kostova's gift for storytelling is evident as she unpeels layers of intrigue, imbuing the mission of 15th-century monks with a hugely dramatic flair.

Her Dracula emerges as a figure so obsessed with the past that he lures historians into his master plan to colonise his undead followers throughout the globe. Paul and Helen, a Romanian exchange student, become embroiled in an attempt to rescue Paul's supervisor, an eminent historian, from Dracula's clutches. Their story, set in the late 1950s, takes them into the farthest-flung corners of Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.

Kostova's meticulous research revealed that there is a genuine mystery about the burial site of Vlad Tepec, the 15th-century ruler of Transylvania whose brutal methods earned him the epithet of Vlad the Impaler. "No one knows what happened to his body after his death," says Kostova. "It's a question that's been examined by archaeologists and historians for centuries, so I took this as the starting point of my speculation." Kostova believes the fascination with Dracula stems from a primitive desire to understand whether death is a permanent state. She discovered that the Orthodox church had strict sanctions against the exhumation of bodies, which was common as a way to verify whether someone had really died - or joined the Undead.

Unfailingly polite and impressively articulate despite her arrival at 6am the previous day, Kostova dismisses the idea of any personal belief in the supernatural. "I don't believe in vampires and I have a very scientific outlook on life, but I do believe in the power of myth in our psyches." Indeed, the characters in her novel approach their quest for Dracula through the accumulated knowledge of previous generations, aghast that they are reduced to stuffing their pockets with cloves of garlic, carrying silver bullets and wearing crucifixes to ward off evil.

The book has been a huge success in the US, where it earned a $2m advance after going to auction. Kostova, who spent long years working away in odd moments, and taking jobs that ranged from moving lawns to teaching writing, has shot into the public consciousness.

After stoically enduring a year of gruelling publicity, she seems unfazed by the fuss. Indeed, she has worked hard to ensure her family's privacy - because she has already been besieged with e-mails from Goths and vampire fans. These ghoulish followers may well have been disappointed by the lack of gore in Kostova's novel. "I promised myself that only a cup of blood would be spilled," she tells me. Instead, the book is steeped in historical and anthropological detail.

The story is told from the daughter's vantage-point in 2008, and sends Paul and Helen across Europe. Although Kostova had to conjure some visits from her imagination and travelogues, she admits that from childhood she was fascinated with Eastern Europe. As a seven-year-old, she spent a year in Ljubljana, where her father was teaching at the local university.

During that time, Kostova was a awed by the setting, coming as she did from the "raw new world". She would take side-trips to many European cities with her father, David. "Dad took me to Venice and Vienna," she remembers. "It was the formative experience of my childhood."

While studying later at Yale, Kostova joined the Slavonic choir. Then, in 1989, she got a fellowship to study village music in Eastern Europe. Kostova arrived with a group of fellow American students, seven days after Bulgaria's Communist dictator Todor Zhivkov had been placed under house arrest.

On that trip, Kostova met her future husband, who became of the first 100 citizens of Bulgaria to be granted a passport. "If we had met even six months earlier, our relationship would not have survived," she explains, "because the political problems would have been immense and his family would have been in danger. It was a very exciting time to be there, people felt free to talk to Westerners, even in villages."

While witnessing Bulgaria's own "velvet revolution", Kostova remembers seeing people leave demonstrations to gather in the American embassy, where they would watch themselves in live action replay on CNN. "They clearly had a sense of themselves making history."

But Kostova's mission to record traditional music also took her into isolated villages in Bulgaria, Bosnia and south-west Russia, where she witnessed rituals dating back to the Middle Ages. An elegant and engaging storyteller, she sets many scenes against the background of these locations, describing Bulgarian fire-dancers, exotic spreads of delicacies, crumbling monasteries and libraries rich in hidden medieval treasures.

Kostova's interest in her husband's country has inspired her to learn Bulgarian, and she says his relatives are always shocked to hear an American speaking their language. Through them she came to understand that, despite having lived under a dictatorship during the Cold War, people could be relatively happy. They fell in love, got married, bought each other birthday presents and raised their children while the government was just a backdrop to their lives

"Those journeys gave me a sense of a world that's closer to a European past and was preserved by the creation of the Iron Curtain," says Kostova. "It preserved the mystery of Eastern Europe for the rest of us. I tried to express that as a love story, the bridging of these two worlds, east and west. I've realised that there is, of course, a certain autobiographical flavour to it."

In The Historian, Kostova neatly switches genders to mirror her own relationship. The fictional Paul is a Waspish American who encounters Eastern Europe, and Helen a dark-eyed Romanian raised in Hungary. Through Helen, Paul encounters not only a seam of extraordinary historical detail but the often crude reality of the Soviet political system of the 1950s. Helen wears a cheap suit and seems to own a single pair of shoes; she is initially suspicious of Paul, and offers information to strangers only on a need-to-know basis.

Kostova says that her husband, who came to live with her in Philadelphia after they were married in 1990, proved to be an extremely helpful reader. "What Paul sees and feels in this book, the way he's moved by the hospitality he encounters, is very much part of my own experience in Eastern Europe, and my husband was able to check and answer questions about even the Cold War era," she says.

Although Kostova drew upon the late-Victorian writer Bram Stoker's creation and the literary legacy of the vampire myth, The Historian is equally a metaphor, she believes, for the evils of contemporary conflicts. Kostova arrived in London barely a week after the attempted suicide bombings on the Underground, but is sanguine about explaining the root causes of terrorism.

"I come from a country that is sadly ignorant of the world," she says, smoothing her beige skirt over her knees. "We can't be naïve about the murderous intentions that we're encountering now in the West, but it seems to me that we exacerbate them by ignoring the world's poverty and injustice. I am deeply disappointed that the current version of my society isn't making better use of history and knowledge of the world."

Biography: Elizabeth Kostova

Born Elizabeth Johnson in New London, Connecticut in 1964, America's latest bestselling novelist moved with her two younger sisters throughout her childhood. Her father, David Johnson and her mother, Eleanor, had jobs at universities in New York, Indiana, Tennessee and North Carolina. She earned a BA in English studies from Yale University in 1988 and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, where she currently teaches. After meeting Gyorgi Kostov in Bulgaria, they married in 1990. She has won several writing awards and the film rights to The Historian, published by Little, Brown, were sold earlier this year for a seven figure sum. Elizaneth Kostova lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan