Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
This is the first work by Victor Beilis to make it into English since the single-volume publication in 2002 of a duo of novellas—“The 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.
Beilis’s novel is demonically and tantalizingly allusive: it is a complex web of explicit and veiled quotation and stylization, parody, pastiche and paraphrase. Here is the gamut of Russian and Western European cultural traditions, from antiquity to postmodernism: Russian greats from Pushkin to Venedikt Erofeev, via Osip Mandelstam, Vladimir Nabokov and the illustrious House of Tolstoy; European literature from Ovid to Oscar Wilde via Rilke and Goethe; and the philosophical canon, embracing Vasily Rozanov, Sigmund Freud and Mikhail Bakhtin. https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/victor-beilis/