"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 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 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...