Word: rossie
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After noting that she embarked on a quest to piece together the mysterious past of her diplomat father Paul and his Ph.D. advisor Bartholomew Rossi, our historian eerily asserts: “we all found ourselves on one of the darkest pathways into history. It is the story of who survived that search and who did not, and why. As a historian, I have learned that, in fact, not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it. And it is not only reaching back that endangers us; sometimes history itself reaches inexorably forward for us with its shadowy claw...
...letters, written by Rossi while he was a young scholar at Oxford in the 1930s, contain a fantastical claim: Vlad the Impaler, a despotic 15th century prince who inspired Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel “Dracula,” really was a vampire—and really was undead...
Although the young Rossi had dismissed Stoker’s “Dracula” as mere fiction—“useless as a source of information about the real Dracula”—our historian mulls over the very question of literary truth. Since Rossi believed Vlad the Impaler was actually a vampire, could “a novel...have the power to make something so strange happen in actuality?...
...Rossi had received a dragon book identical to one our historian later finds in Paul’s library. When a colleague and close friend dies from a suspicious neck wound, Rossi defects for Cambridge, Mass. Kostova, a Yale graduate, has her characters using all sorts of amusing circumlocutions—the “excellent university,” the university of the “distinguished American scholar”—to describe our fine institution, Rossi’s chosen haven...
...course, by the time Rossi is advising Paul’s dissertation in the 1950s, even Harvard Yard—the haunt of graduate students identifiable by their “barely veiled fatigue” and guileless undergraduates “attending some kind of study group, comparing notes sotto voce”—has become unsafe for Rossi...