The Family of the Vourdalak

The Family of the Vourdalak is a gothic novella by Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, written in 1839 in French and originally entitled La Famille du Vourdalak. Fragment inedit des Memoires d'un inconnu. Tolstoy wrote it on a trip to France from Frankfurt, where he was attached to the Russian Embassy.

It was translated into Russian by Boleslav Markevich, as "Семья вурдалака" (Sem'yá vurdaláka), published for the first time in The Russian Messenger in January 1884. The original French text appeared in print in 1950, in Revue des Études Slavs, vol.26. The Reunion After Three Hundred Years (Les Rendez-vous Dans Trois Cent Ani) which was written at about the same time and which might be regarded as a sequel (for protagonist Marquis d'Urfe and Countess Grammon appear in it) first appeared in a compilation Le Poète Alexis Tolstoi by André Lirondelle (Paris, 1912).

The word vourdalak occurs first in Pushkin's 1830s poem of the same name, part of his Songs of the Western Slavs cycle, and was taken up in Russian literary language following Pushkin. It is a distortion of words referring to vampires or werewolves in Slavic and Balkan folklore.