Books by Victor Beilis

Death of a Prototype 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 delights in intertextual play, inviting the reader to unravel a complex web of quotations, references and paraphrases. The author engages closely with an entire spectrum of Russian and European cultural traditions, from classical antiquity to twentieth-century postmodernism. The visual arts unsurprisingly play a particularly important role in the novel. So, too, is visuality in general: seeing and being seen, acts of perception and observation, gazing, glancing and glimpsing. The reader is confronted with an intimidating array of literary styles, all jostling against one another. Alongside several dialogue-heavy chaptersnot all that different stylistically from much contemporary fictionreaders encounter poetic, archaicized prose, self-referential literary analysis, Joycean stream of consciousness, among others.