McNALLY, Raymond T(homas) 1931-2002

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born May 15, 1931, in Cleveland, OH; died of liver and lung cancer October 2, 2002, in Newton, MA. Educator and author. McNally was a scholar of Slavic and Eastern European cultures who became famous for his books about Vlad Tepes, who, McNally maintained, was the basis for the fictional Count Dracula. After earning his bachelor's degree from Fordham University in 1953, McNally finished his Ph.D. at the Free University of Berlin in 1956 and attended the University of Leningrad for postdoctoral studies in 1961. McNally's first academic position was as an instructor in history at John Carroll University from 1956 to 1958. He spent the rest of his career at Boston College, where in 1964 he founded the Slavic and East European Center and became a professor of history in 1970. In 1995 he helped establish the Balkan Studies Institute, and retired in 2001. McNally, who was interested in East European cultures throughout his life, became fascinated by Dracula after reading the Bram Stoker novel. Because Stoker provided so much factual information in his book, McNally surmised that the character may have been based on an actual person, so he set off to the Transylvania region of Romania to find out. His research led him to conclude that Dracula was based on Vlad Tepes, a nobleman during the fifteenth century known for his savage treatment of the Turks, who he sometimes mounted on spears while supposedly drinking their blood. Vlad's nickname was Draculya, which means "son of the devil." Together with colleague Radu Florescu, McNally wrote about his ideas in the books In Search of Dracula: A True History of Dracula and Vampire Legends (1972) and Dracula: A Biography of Vlad the Impaler, 1431-1476 (1973); he also coauthored Dracula, Prince of Many Faces: His Life and His Times (1989) and edited two other books about the Dracula legend. After his initial theories about Vlad were published, McNally heard about a Hungarian woman named Elizabeth Bathory who tortured and killed young girls and then bathed in their blood to preserve her youth. This led McNally to write Dracula Was a Woman: In Search of the Blood Countess of Transylvania (1983); he also released a CD-ROM on the subject called Dracula: Truth or Terror (1996). These books caused McNally to become a hero among fans of vampire books, and he was often invited to their conventions (he organized one himself in 1997), and he enjoyed wearing a black cape and swooping into rooms dramatically. However, McNally was always a serious scholar; in addition to his books about Dracula, he was the author of two books about writer and philosopher Peter Chaadayev, as well as of the book In Search of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (2000), which, similar to his Dracula theory, proposed that the Robert Louis Stevenson character was based on a real person, William Deacon Brodie.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

books

Who's Who, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2000.

periodicals

Boston Globe, October 5, 2002, p. B7.

Boston Herald, October 6, 2002, p. 41.

New York Times, October 20, 2002, p. A31.