Death of a Prototype : The Portrait

Death of a Prototype’s plot focuses on the artistic endeavours of a group of Muscovite intellectuals and unfolds against a backdrop of serious and jocular conversations, distorted-mirror parodies and riddles. The male protagonists— predominantly writers and visual artists—expend their creative energies in fashioning an authentic portrait of Adele, the ever-metamorphosing “prototype” of the title. However, they are themselves forever changing and morphing into other characters. Likewise, the stories they tell—and the pictures they paint—are never the same.

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.