Death of a Prototype

This is the first work by Victor Beilis to make it into English since the single-volume publication in 2002 of a duo of novellasThe Rehabilitation of Freud & Bakhtin and Others(translated by Richard Grose). Much like the novellas that preceded it, Death of a Prototype is a hyper-allusive and self-consciously difficult work. Beilis engages closely with an entire spectrum of Russian and European cultural traditions, from classical antiquity to twentieth-century postmodernism. Structurally heterogeneous and fragmented with styles, genres and narrators succeeding one another at great speed, Death of a Prototype is also highly balanced and controlled, in some ways recalling a contrapuntal musical composition abounding in thematic echoes and correspondences. Death of a Prototype simultaneously challenges and rewards the reader, especially one attuned to fine-grain detail.