In this elegant and inkhorny collection, Kis (A Tomb for Boris Davidovich) displays the great range of his literary melancholia; he is an Eastern European Sir Thomas Browne. He deals with gnostic schismatics and a Mandelstam-like Russian-Yiddish poet and the origins of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; and he writes in a variety of different rhetorical styles, the most striking of which here is that in ""The Legend of the Sleepers""--about resurrection, written in prose-poetry of vigorous and unbending purity. Kis's felicity is to apply highly refined literary techniques to the historically horrifying; but here it soon begins to seem more a response of convenience. Most satisfying is the Borges-like title story--a woman finding a miraculous book that summarizes the entire lives of all the dead, and reading about her recently passed-on father. It is not the metaphysical imagination that so much impresses in this story as the economy and dignity of the ""encyclopedia"" 's digest. A bit too thin-aired and self-conscious, but a pleasure for any lover of style.