The Vampire (Russian: Упырь, Oupyr) is a gothic novella by Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, first published in Saint Petersburg in 1841 under the pseudonym of Krasnorogsky.

[3] The novella was poorly received by critics, discouraging Tolstoy from publishing three other vampire-themed works that he had written at the time.

[2] Tolstoy's writing on the subject of vampires was at least partly influenced by The Vampyre by John William Polidori, which had been published in Russian translation in Moscow in 1828.

Youthfulness, as he saw it, manifested itself in "too ardent and intense an imagination which is yet to be tempered by life experience and be balanced by the other qualities of the soul."

"Despite the superficial nature of this invention, the multifacetedness and intricacy of it belie great strength of imagination in the author, while his masterful rendition and the ability to draw characters out of mere faces and catch the spirit of the place and time... along with his beautiful, often poetic language, bear the mark of a strong literary hand," Belinsky wrote.