This publication is an attempt to recreate the complex and contradictory portrait of the Wallachian ruler Vlad Basarab, whose gloomy image was used by the Irish writer Bram Stoker as the basis for his famous “Dracula” (1897). It is this consideration that dictated the composition of the book, which includes, along with a new translation of the novel, the chapter “Dracula’s Guest”, which was not included in the canonical text, as well as written testimonies of two contemporaries of the pathologically cruel Wallachian ruler: an anonymous Russian author (presumably the influential tsarist diplomat F. Kuritsyn ) and the Austrian minnesinger M. Beheim. A serious scientific apparatus - articles by famous Russian philologists, detailed notes and fragments of the fundamental work of R. Florescu and R. McNally “In Search of Dracula” - distinguishes this original historical and literary project from purely commercial publications. The editors believe that the Russian reader will appreciate the new translation of the legendary work, carried out by Doctor of Philology T. Krasavchenko, which the author himself, close to the circle of the Order of the Golden Dawn, did not at all consider to be a classic “horror novel” - rather a complex system of occult symbols concealing the hidden the meaning of the story about the sinister vampire.