As the world struggles with the COVID-19 pandemic, it may be difficult to imagine how humans a thousand years ago would relate to a deadly virus neither seen nor imagined. Actually, it’s not hard. Their method is on TV, movie screens and a plethora of paperback books and pulp novels. It’s the vampire. “We really don’t know how old the vampire is, but the earliest mention comes from an old Russian text from about 1047 AD,” said Stanley Stepanic, a UVA associate professor of Slavic languages and literature and an authority on vampires. “That’s the first time ‘vampire’ appears in writing, but we ...