Yuri Felsen, Deceit,
Trans. by Bryan Karetnyk, Prototype, 2022 [1930]
"This is ... real literature, pure and honest." - Vladimir
Nabokov
Appearing for the
first time in English, Deceit is the debut novel by Yuri Felsen, a
leading modernist writer of the interwar Russian diaspora. Known by
his contemporaries as ‘the Russian Proust’, Felsen died in the
gas chambers at Auschwitz, his life and legacy destroyed by the
Nazis.
Written in the form
of diary, Deceit is a psychological self-portrait of an unnamed
narrator, a neurasthenic and aspiring author, whose often-thwarted
pursuits of his love interest and muse provide the grounds for his
beautifully wrought extemporizations on love, art and human nature.
Modulating between the paroxysms of his tormented romance and his
quest for an aesthetic mode befitting of the novel he intends to
write, Deceit is a remarkable work of introspective depth and
psychoanalytic inquiry.
Like voyeurs, party
to his most intimate thoughts, we accompany the diarist as he goes
about Paris, making enraptured preparations for the materialisation
of his fantasy, observing not only his eagerness, dreaminess and
poetic inclinations, but also his compulsive desire to analyse his
surroundings and self. Yet amid these ravishing flights of scrutiny
we discern hints of his monomaniacal tendencies, which blind him from
the true nature of his circumstances. Thus begins an exquisite game
arranged by the author, wherein it falls to the reader to
second-guess the essence of what really lies behind his narrative.
Once considered the
"Russian Proust", Yuri Felsen tells of an obsessive love
affair set in interwar Paris in Deceit, an experimental novel in the
form of a diary.
Following the
arrival of Bolshevism in his home country, our narrator finds himself
living in exile, in Paris. When a Berlin-based friend and fellow
Russian expat asks him to look out for her niece, the beautiful and
clever socialite Lyolya Heard, he is initially hesitant, but
intrigued by Lyolya and her well-established reputation. Over the
course of the novel, this curiosity devolves into a lustful
obsession, as the hot-and-cold Lyolya sends mixed signals while
pursuing the many objects of her own affection, none of which seem to
be our narrator. In rich and introspective prose, this novel in diary
form speaks as truthfully about the timeless problem of unrequited
love as it does about the fragile reality of daily life in interwar
Europe.
Subtle and profound
in its exploration of love, deceit and betrayal, Felsen's novel is a
daring and highly original work of psychological fiction. Originally
published in 1930, Deceit was recently rediscovered in Russia after
much of Yuri Felsen's archive was destroyed by the Nazis.
Referred to by some
contemporaries as “the Russian Proust”, Felsen’s work has
recently been rediscovered in Russia. His modernist debut novel
Deceit was originally published in Russian in 1930 by Paris-based
publisher J Povolozky & Co, and the upcoming edition by Prototype
will be the first time that any of Felsen’s books have been
published in English. This new translation and publication of
Felsen’s work has been supported by the Mikhail Prokhorov
Foundation.
Prototype explained:
“Set in interwar Paris and taking the form of a diary, the novel
relates the complex and fraught relationship between an unnamed
narrator and his love interest and sometime muse, the beguiling
Lyolya Heard. Subtle and profound in its exploration of love, deceit
and betrayal, Felsen’s novel is a daring and highly original work
of psychological fiction.”
Karetnyk said:
“Felsen is one of the great undiscovered Russian writers of the
20th century, so the opportunity to bring his debut novel into
English is both an honour and a career highlight. It’s especially
pleasing that the novel’s exceptional merit has been recognised by
the Prokhorov Fund through its generous support of the publication.”
During his lifetime
Felsen, the pseudonym of Nikolai Freudenstein published three novels
as well as over a dozen short stories, and extensive essays and
criticism for the émigré literary magazines Zveno and Chisla.
Following the German occupation of France at the height of his
career, Felsen tried to escape to Switzerland. However, he was
caught, arrested and interned in Drancy concentration camp. He was
deported in 1943 and killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
‘The miracle of
Yuri Felsen is how his apparently Nabokovian rhythms lull you into a
false sense of security, before a sudden and chilling exposure to the
weather of a walk where the whole elegantly interwoven conceit of the
narrator is ripped apart. And the pain of someone like Walser glints
through a decadent surface of exiled life in Paris, to hint at darker
shadows to come.’ – Iain Sinclair
‘Towards the end
of this strange novel in the form of a strange diary the narrator
declares that “it is impossible to live without deceit”. What has
preceded this bald statement is the work of a connoisseur of deceit
in its multitudinous forms, the most potent being a subset of self
deceptions described in painful raw detail. It’s a work steeped in
absolutely joyous misery.’ – Jonathan Meades
‘Dark thickets of
language part to reveal a pearl of psychological prose and a highly
actual account of the psychic impermanence of migration.’ – Sasha
Dugdale
‘Deceit is a
strange and beautiful dream, an intimate and tragic love letter from
a lost world.’ – Camilla Grudova
‘He [Felsen] has
rightly been compared to Proust in his determination to make language
capture every atom of the mind’s workings… This translation is a
formidable achievement.’ – Literary Review
‘Felsen’s name
deserves to be conjured with, just as it was before Paris fell.’ –
The Sunday Telegraph
‘Yuri Felsen’s
Deceit offers the reader that rarest of gifts: a glimpse into
consciousness as it was constructed nearly a hundred years ago; a
portrait not only of how one Russian émigré lived in Paris in the
first half of the Twentieth Century but of what and how he thought.
This is an improbably modern novel in which, to my own surprise, I
seemed, again and again, to encounter and recognize myself.’ –
Miranda Popkey
‘As astute as it
is disturbed, as callow as it is wise, and as brilliant as it is
idiosyncratic, Deceit reads like the twisted love child of Proust and
Dostoevsky, but with a genius all its own.’ – Antoine Wilson
The debut novel by
Yuri Felsen, an author once regarded as the “Russian Proust”
whose work has been forgotten since he died in Auschwitz in 1943, is
set to be published in English for the first time.
Felsen, the
pseudonym of the Russian émigré author Nikolai Freudenstein, was
born in St Petersburg in 1894, emigrating after the Russian
revolution and settling in Paris in 1923. He was seen as one of the
leading Russian writers of his time, ranked alongside Vladimir
Nabokov, but when France was occupied in the second world war his
escape to Switzerland failed, and he was killed in Auschwitz’s gas
chambers in February 1943. His manuscripts and letters were lost –
possibly destroyed – after his arrest, and his work is almost
unknown today.
Academic and
translator Bryan Karetnyk discovered Felsen’s name while reading
literary criticism from the 1930s, finding that he was widely
praised, and going on to track down Felsen’s own writings.
“In the so-called
‘Russia Abroad’, Felsen was unanimously held up by his
contemporaries … to be one of the most original and significant
writers of his generation, next to Nabokov,” said Karetnyk.
“Felsen’s plunge into obscurity came about for a variety of
reasons. Not content with having sent him to the gas chambers, the
Nazis did everything in their power to destroy his legacy, and his
archive disappeared without trace following his arrest.”
Karetnyk has now
translated Felsen’s first novel Deceit, which was originally
published in Russian in 1930, into English, with the book due out
next May from independent press Prototype Publishing. Written in the
form of a diary, and set in Paris between the wars, it sees the
unnamed narrator tell of his fraught relationship with his love
interest and muse, Lyolya.
“It really made
Felsen’s reputation as one of the leading writers of the so-called
‘younger generation’, although of course it was banned in
Russia,” said Karetnyk. “The fine psychological portraiture of
the protagonist and his love interest, as well as the beautifully
wrought philosophical meditations on love, art and human nature, bear
parallels not only with Proust, but also with other greats of
modernism including Nabokov, Woolf and Joyce.”
Jess Chandler, who
founded Prototype in 2019, said that she acquired Deceit because she
saw it as “an extremely rare opportunity to introduce a highly
significant, undiscovered modernist work to an English readership.
“Felsen’s
writing would undoubtedly have been hugely influential had his legacy
not been destroyed, and Deceit will still feel contemporary and
groundbreaking to readers today,” said Chandler. “As a publisher
interested in freeform literary art, this novel from 1930 feels as
exciting as anything I have read in recent years.”
Only brief extracts
of Felsen’s writings have previously been translated, although his
collected works were republished in Russia in 2012. His writing, said
Karetnyk, remains resonant today.
“He consciously
positioned himself as an anti-totalitarian writer (in that he was
both anti-fascist and anti-Bolshevik), championing love, artistic
freedom and individual identity, and seeking to give them heightened
expression at a time of mounting political pressures that would
rather deny them, at a time when writers were desperately seeking out
new ways in which art could provide adequate response to political
tyranny. Without exaggeration, I believe we’re living in a time
when these ideas have renewed political, cultural and artistic
significance,” said the translator.
“On a more
literary note, given today’s obsessions with autofiction, his
profoundly psychological prose, which marries private experience with
artistic expression, is also a timely reminder that this genre in
fact has a long and distinguished European history.” - Alison
Flood
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/dec/01/debut-novel-russian-proust-published-in-english-yuri-felsen-deceit
Deceit, published in
1930 and Felsen’s first major novel, takes the form of a diary in
which the narrator recounts his fraught, on-off relationship with
Lyolya (whose real-life counterpart perished in Riga during the
Holocaust.) In what amounts to an exploration of the age-old
Madonna-whore complex, Lyolya represents Felsen’s Platonic ideal
but is unfaithful both to her husband and the novel’s protagonist
(and narrator), who in turn betrays Lyolya with two other women,
leading the reader to conclude that self-deception is the mother of
all deceit.
Yet for Felsen,
deceit contains existential properties. There is a “curious
mental exertion that can be produced only by deception, and from
which alone derives that most intriguing, most inexplicable activity
of ours — shaking off the desolate human darkness, extracting more
and more fragments of indisputable knowledge.”
Equal in importance
to deceit is the act of writing: “I find writing to be not only a
useful and distracting enterprise but also a means, perhaps the only
means, of speaking freely about what matters most to me.”
Felsen, a modernist,
has been described as “the Russian Proust”. His three novels, of
which Deceit was the first, were indeed meant to form part of a large
scale literary project entitled, at one time, Recurrence of Things
Past. Felsen, like Proust, is preoccupied by “involuntary
memory” and its relationship to fiction.
But readers
expecting a Russian version of Remembrance of Things Past will be
disappointed. Proust, as capable of looking outward as inside, draws
his readers in with what Nabokov termed “the transmutation of
sensation into sentiment”, whereas Felsen’s preoccupations with
the inner workings of his psyche can be more alienating than inviting
and his characters often little more than vehicles for
philosophising.
Yet his tortuous
style paradoxically beguiles, and, in the detailing of his inner
world Felsen frequently elicits profound truths about human nature
and its motivations. His self-regarding prose stands as a riposte to
that unchallenged dictum of contemporary writing: “Don’t tell,
show.” Given social media’s solipsism and public
self-examination, Felsen’s writing captures the zeitgeist well.
And at a time when
Eastern Europe has once again descended into nihilistic hostilities,
this autobiographical fragment sadly resonates: “I should like to
belong to the school that… for me represents a kind of
neo-romanticism, the exultation of the individual and love set in
opposition to Soviet barbarism and dissolution in the collective.”
Felsen’s narrator
wishes: “I cannot escape the persistent vain hope that one day
these notes of mine (despite myself and, as it were, as a reward for
my pains) will be read carefully by somebody.” Prototype Publishing
has performed a useful service in introducing a neglected but
intriguing Russian writer to an English-speaking readership. -
Mark Glanville
https://www.thejc.com/life-and-culture/all/deceit-book-review-intriguing-introduction-to-the-work-of-largely-forgotten-russian-emigre-yuri-felsen-78dGoJ6giCQewNU22bAYdI
In the aesthetic and ideological turf wars waged in the 1930s among
the writers of the Russian diaspora, virtually everyone had a good
word to say about Yuri Felsen (1894-1943). As the memoirist Vasily
Yanovsky (1906-89) observed, Felsen “was miraculously aided by
various influential people, many of them hostile towards one another;
each of them made sure to praise him, even inordinately, at least
once a year”. For this reason, Felsen’s work is easy to blurb.
However, as Yanovsky pointed out, it was indecent how quickly those
who praised Felsen proceeded to forget him. And, alongside just about
every affirmation of Felsen’s writerly quality, one finds, as part
of the same utterance, a deprecation of his “difficult”, “sticky”
style.
Vladislav
Khodasevich (1886-1939), a pre-eminent poet and critic of the Russian
exile, liked Felsen for his “microscopic investigation of
feelings”, but observed that his painstaking psychological analysis
lost much through his “laborious stylistic complexity”, which
rendered much of the effort demanded of his readers “unproductive”.
(For private consumption, he later wrote a humorous poem in which a
maharajah with insomnia learns Russian just so he can read Felsen as
a soporific.) The critic Pyotr Pilsky (1879-1941) appreciated the
experimental, relentlessly self-analytical quality of Felsen’s
prose, even though he found it “dark, cloying, dry and exhausting”,
of interest to critics, not readers. “Who can listen to an entire
concert for just one flute?” asked the poet Boris Poplavsky
(1903-35). Well, surely some people can and do. But something else is
apparent in all this praise: this “writer for the few” was seen
as a profoundly unthreatening competitor. Leonid Livak, in his
authoritative How It Was Done in Paris: Russian émigré literature
and French modernism (2003), describes the situation more charitably:
for many émigré writers, “no notion was more prestigious … than
the artistic failure of a writer in search of ‘truthfulness’ and
sincerity”.
Born in St
Petersburg as Nikolai Freudenstein, Felsen trained as a lawyer and
fled to Paris after the Revolution. He wrote three novels – Deceit
(1930), Happiness (1932) and Letters About Lermontov (1935) – as
well as short stories, essays and reviews. Deceit is the first
translation of Felsen’s work into English, other than a short
story, “Extras”, published in the Los Angeles Review of Books in
2020. All of his fiction is in the first person, and most of it
concerns the unrequited romantic obsession of a…- Eric Naiman
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/deceit-yuri-felsen-book-review-eric-naiman/
ON SATURDAY,
February 13, 1943, a crowd of 998 men, women, and children clambered
out of the dilapidated boxcars and down onto the Judenrampe, the
unloading platform for new arrivals at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. The
transport had been organized by Adolf Eichmann’s department of the
Reich Main Security Office, which at the time was busily overseeing
the deportations of foreign-national Jews from occupied France. This
was the 47th such group to endure the two-day journey from Drancy, a
transit camp situated in one of Paris’s northeastern suburbs; en
route three people — two men and one woman — had tried to escape,
but failed.
It is the Sabbath,
and among the crowd, a tall, elegant, slightly stooping figure, noted
for his “Aryan” good looks and fair hair, joins the men’s line,
awaiting selection. For those sent to the right, what lies in store
is the dehumanizing process of registration, tattooing, disinfecting,
and, ultimately, hard labor in the typhus-ridden camp. For those sent
to the left: oblivion. Though the figure, whose documentation lists
his profession as “homme de lettres,” is only 48, the SS doctor
examining him notices his stooping back — the result of an
affliction affecting the ligaments of the vertebrae — and duly
directs him to the left. Unfit for work, and so for life. That night,
a little after the Sabbath ends, the figure, along with 801 others,
is led off to one of two bunkers that lie to the north of the ramp,
converted farmhouses hidden from view by woodland. We cannot be
certain whether it was in “the little red house” or “the little
white house” that he met his end (although it was probably in the
latter), but we can be sure that late that same night his murdered
body would be borne out and disposed of in a nearby mass grave. Thus
ended the life of one of the most unique figures in 20th-century
Russian literature.
In all likelihood,
you have never heard of Yuri Felsen. He plied his art in emigration
in Europe, and so was already marginalized and at a significant
disadvantage. Writing “difficult” prose and being labeled “a
writer’s writer” sunk his chances for fame still lower. Moreover,
his terrible end was followed by the mysterious disappearance of his
archive, so in addition to what he published, only a handful of his
letters survive, and not a single clear photograph of him remains.
And yet, for all that fate seemingly tried to efface this man and
plunge him into obscurity, he nevertheless left an utterly distinct,
if now faint, mark.
I first encountered
his curiously un-Russian surname several years ago, as I was reading
Gaito Gazdanov’s “Literary Professions” (1934), one of his
notorious polemics on the state of Russian literature in exile.
Feeling by then the strains of deracination, Gazdanov was in a
characteristically mordant humor, and in the article he provocatively
claimed that the emigration, for all its freedom from Soviet tyranny,
had produced only one writer of genuine artistic merit: Vladimir
Nabokov. He immediately qualified this assertion, however, adding an
ominous comment that was later revealed to be sinisterly accurate:
I wrote “only
one talented writer,” but that of course was an oversight […] It
is impossible really to talk of Felsen, whose fate seems almost
foredoomed. He is an honorable fatality, a battle of one against the
many, lost before it is begun.
My curiosity was
piqued further as I observed, one by one, the major names of Russian
émigré literary criticism, even the most inveterate rivals —
Vladislav Khodasevich, Georgy Adamovich, Zinaida Gippius, Wladimir
Weidlé, to name but a few — sing Felsen’s praise. Even Nabokov,
who so importunately lampooned and travestied the self-styled “Paris
note” (one of the emigration’s major literary movements, which
sought to combine the despair of exile with the cynicism and anxiety
of the modern age), singled out the now-forgotten author as the
school’s only true artist.
A blueprint of
Felsen’s life emerges from a handful of scholarly works and memoirs
— most vividly in Elysian Fields, an outspoken, remarkable account
of émigré Paris written by Felsen’s close friend Vasily Yanovsky.
The author, critic, and essayist’s real name was in fact Nikolai
Freudenstein, and he was born on October 24, 1894, in St. Petersburg,
not long after his parents moved to the Russian capital from Riga.
The eldest son of a distinguished Jewish family (his father was a
doctor and his extended family had influential connections at Court),
Felsen read law at Petrograd Imperial University, graduating in 1916
“without the slightest vocation for it.” In the wake of the
Bolshevik Revolution, he and his family relocated to Riga, in newly
independent Latvia, where he began writing sketches and publishing in
the local press. In the summer of 1923, he made his way to Weimar
Berlin, and then, toward the end of the year, on to Paris, the
capital of “Russia abroad.” Conversant in French, German, and
English, Felsen set himself up in business there, engaging in what he
himself termed “independent ventures” — which is to say he
played the stock market and pursued various commercial enterprises,
among other things, as a means of supporting himself as a writer.
He debuted under his
literary pseudonym in 1926, and by the time of his death 17 years
later he had published three novels — Deceit (1930), Happiness
(1932), and Letters on Lermontov (1935) — as well as over a dozen
short stories and scores of feuilletons, essays, and criticism. The
publication of his first novels secured for him a serious reputation;
it also marked the beginning of a great literary project, variously
titled The Recurrence of Things Past and A Romance with an Author,
which would span the rest of his days and encompass each of his
subsequent novels and the lion’s share of his later short stories.
The scale of Felsen’s literary ambition, combined with his thematic
interests and baroque, stream-of-consciousness prose style, earned
him the moniker “the Russian Proust.” His chef d’œuvre
presents a fine, sustained psychological portrait of a neurasthenic
would-be author, Volodya, and his eternal object of desire, Lyolya,
while at the same time elaborating beautifully wrought philosophical
meditations on love, art, and human frailty.
For me, the real
revelation in reading Felsen was his beguiling use of language and
the sheer depth of his psychological introspection. His long,
tortuous periods take the reader on a journey into the human psyche.
To paraphrase Adamovich, the emigration’s foremost critic (as well
as Felsen’s friend and early mentor), reading him is by no means an
easy undertaking, but for those willing to engage with his work, the
rewards are exquisite. His style is unlike that of any other writer
in the Russian canon, and with this rich, idiosyncratic, poetic prose
he evokes not only the existential angst of his milieu, but moreover
the innate psychologies of his characters, which are drawn with a
lightly cynical, wry humor. Time and again I find myself reading and
rereading passages, marveling at Felsen’s ability to give
expression to the counterpoint of thoughts and emotions, profound and
trivial, that we can experience in a single moment. Take, for
instance, Volodya’s at once comic, perceptive, and ultimately
touching attempt to justify a shopping spree intended to impress his
beloved:
Without stopping
at home, I set out post-haste for all the shops I required —
earlier, before the money’s arrival, in order not to tantalize
myself needlessly, not for anything would I have lingered by shop
windows (much too enticing and beyond my reach) — today, however,
as soon as I left the bureau, where the debonair old boy had
paternally slipped me a primed envelope containing a check, I
immediately began totting up how much I would spend on what,
adjusting the figures, swapping one decision for another and proving
to myself once again that I was quite able to make spontaneous
decisions — indeed, I drew up a half-mock (though quite serious)
budget, carefully adhered to it, and then hastily bore off my
purchases, so as to lay them out together all the quicker. At home
each purchase seemed to me a miracle of good taste (as we find
everything that bears the hallmark of our selection, our accidental
favor, our slightest efforts, and to which we immediately cede both
our sense and our serene equanimity), and each of these tastefully
chosen items, gifted to myself, unexpectedly drew me closer to Lyolya
— for her sake alone had I chosen them, and so in every respect,
even in this act (not only mentally and emotionally), did I prove
myself worthy of her.
Or his crystalline
description of the indignity and dread that follows a night of
inebriated over-indulgence:
Now this
“tomorrow” has dawned, one of those maddening days that are
spoilt from the very outset, when, having awoken, you do not know
what went wrong the previous evening, when you look for something to
find fault with and then recall some heated, unnecessary words, a
careless act that might seem frivolous, deceitful, irrevocably
binding, and the sense of having made an irreversible mistake now
permeates everything, irrespective of what happens before sleep comes
again, and there remains (because of the impossibility of undoing
what has been done or taking back what has been said) but one sole
desire — to hide, to sleep, and never to wake up.
While many writers
have successfully conjured up the atmosphere of the Parisian cafe,
with its Russian waiters, “gypsy” music, and romantic
anticipation, few, I think, have captured, with such nuanced,
expressive clarity, the internalization of that atmosphere. In
Deceit, Volodya diarizes an evening spent there, as he waits for his
beloved Lyolya to arrive the next day:
Now the gypsy woman
urgently sings out my favorite “everyone remembers their beloved”
— and, one after another, muddled thoughts race through my mind:
that without fail “everyone” will remember (there is a touching
grandeur to the enormity of the generalization); that I too shall
remember is, for me, the most important thing, but this alludes not
to the past (though the music might easily have stirred that up), but
to tomorrow’s Lyolya, in sudden proximity, alive and almost
palpably in love with me. Then comes a new, dancelike, lulling meter
and new, peculiar words — “the heart is spent on caresses” —
they have the charm of a humble, uncomplaining, eternal readiness to
sacrifice, but my objection is unwavering: no, the heart is not
“spent,” but enriched — one need only crack open the heart’s
riches, and they shall prove inexhaustible.
In Felsen’s world,
it is precisely these inner riches that are able to engender poetic
vision and raise the quotidian and prosaic to an apotheosis of
artistic beauty. For all her cruelty, the mercurial, beautiful, and
enigmatic Lyolya forever remains the center of Volodya’s
psychological and emotional world, and his love for her the impetus
for his writing. How sobering and poignant, then, to learn that the
original of Lyolya — Felsen’s “Beatrice of Riga,” as
Adamovich dubbed her — would ultimately share in his woeful fate,
also perishing in the Shoah.
In the Talmud it is
written, “Blessed be the one who resurrects the dead.” I cannot
resurrect Felsen, but perhaps in trying to raise him from obscurity I
can do the next best thing. And what better place to begin than his
art, which, for all that has been lost and destroyed, shall forever
remain the truest testament to Yuri Felsen’s life.
Will Felsen finally
find his audience? Perhaps Gazdanov again holds the answer. The
off-the-cuff remark that began my acquaintance with Felsen, despite
its grim foreboding, went on to elicit from me a wry smile. To
illustrate the author’s predicament, Gazdanov thought it prudent to
draw a parallel with a little-known German poet, who had died some
eight years prior. “How many readers have heard of Rilke,” he
asked, “one of the most remarkable poets and writers of Germany?
You read him and are amazed: how and why is this name not famous the
whole world over?” Gazdanov was ahead of the curve. And it thrills
me to think that there may be hope for Felsen yet. - Bryan
Karetnyk
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-truest-testament-on-the-life-and-art-of-yuri-felsen/
“DEEP DOWN nothing has changed: by no means have I chosen my
present identity (buried as it is under layers of women, books and
cafes).”
Displacement and the
search for identity form the heart of Deceit, a novel by the Russian
Jewish émigré author Yuri Felsen, which was published in Paris in
1930 and now appears in English for the first time. Meticulously
translated by Bryan Karetnyk, and with a thoughtful, informative
introduction by Peter Pomerantsev, the novel takes the form of a
diary written by an anonymous Russian émigré in 1920s Paris. Each
of the entries is a deep psychological exploration of the nature of
love, heartbreak, and deceit, and collectively they chart the
diarist’s obsession with a fellow émigré, the alluring but
ultimately unattainable Lyolya Heard.
Lyolya, perhaps in
her imagined rather than her real form, offers our bachelor
salvation, as well as a link with his Russian self. Identity is
essential to survival for those forced to quit their homeland, a fact
repeatedly if obliquely emphasized by our diarist, who laments that
“everything in Russia feels taken from us forever.” This desire
to retain a Russian identity is one of the novel’s main threads.
The diarist only speaks to fellow Russians and seems permanently
ready to criticize others for their un-Russianness. Meanwhile, the
French language, always untranslated, encroaches just at the very
edges of the text and reminds the reader of these Russians’ status
as foreigners in a foreign land.
If the diarist’s
relentless quest to win Lyolya’s affection could be seen as an
attempt to find a safe harbor while he is adrift from Russia, then he
is fated to remain at sea. Lyolya, he finally concludes, “embodies
deceit.” Hidden beneath his allegedly candid diary entries,
however, is the core paradox that Lyolya has a closer relationship
with the truth than he does. As the story unfurls, the diarist’s
unwillingness, or inability, to admit to what both his friends and
his readers can see as the truth, is highlighted by his own
observations. Our bachelor describes each of Lyolya’s slights
against him in excruciating detail, and yet he continues his pursuit.
Take, for example, this beautifully timed description of his first
few days with Lyolya who, we soon learn, is adept at shutting down
her potential lover’s amorous advances. The pair have just spent
the evening with a friend, the enigmatic Monsieur De Waal, and are
finally on their own:
I began to kiss
her hands (which until then had been so singularly alluring and out
of reach, unforgettable even for a moment), but I did not kiss them
boorishly, as I might have wanted, but with that usual disingenuous
tenderness that every one of us can muster if only we ape
infatuation, which was necessary here, lest I repulse and offend
Lyolya. I was clumsy — I know this to be true – but Lyolya seemed
touched, commending me amicably and freeing herself:
“Thank you, my
dear, for the evening — you engineered it all admirably. Till
tomorrow, then.”
Lyolya’s
standoffishness does not stop him from pursuing her. Later, when he
suspects (while the reader is certain) that Lyolya is having an
affair with his friend, the diarist is still resolved to be with her.
He refuses to leave the pair on their own and sits in their bedroom
like a petulant toddler in an effort to prevent any intimate
relations. He then sequesters himself in the adjacent room, straining
to hear proof of any intimacy. While he listens, he reads, without a
trace of irony, André Gide’s Les nourritures terrestres.
Our bachelor’s
self-deception is not the only example of deceit explored here.
Despite his professed love for the uncooperative Lyolya, the diarist
pursues intimate relationships with two other women, Ida and Zina,
and drops them upon Lyolya’s return without any regrets. He is only
annoyed that he has to go through the breakup process at all. Would a
letter be too cruel, he ponders. He claims he sleeps with Ida
because he is drunk and starts a relationship with Zina in order
to make Lyolya jealous. He would much prefer to be able to meet with
his women for “immediate gratification” without performing all
the “tedious and insincere overtures” he feels obligated to make.
The reader may not
approve of our bachelor’s attitude to women, or his penchant for
watching them in cafés, but we can readily sympathize with his
anguish when he does not hear from Lyolya, and the torment he
experiences as he sits and waits for her alone in a café on a Friday
night. Recognizable too are the heartbroken diarist’s actions. When
Lyolya returns to her former lover Sergei N., our bachelor revisits
old arguments, going over what he should have said. Eventually he
writes Lyolya a letter listing all of his grievances, though he never
mentions whether he actually sends it. He tests their relationship
constantly, searching for proof of Lyolya’s feelings for him, and
even when he is with Ida, his description of physical pleasure
quickly spills over into recollections of Lyolya.
Throughout the
diary, Karetnyk’s seemingly effortless translation captures
Felsen’s wit and comic timing perfectly. The diarist considers
spending the night with a prostitute just before he meets Lyolya for
the first time, but he decides against “gifting [himself] a night
of unencumbered generosity.” Likewise, the description of his quest
for oblivion after Lyolya’s rejection is wonderfully paced: “I
began to intoxicate myself with an array of various liqueurs in turn,
trying to avoid that ambiguous, transitional state […] Intoxication
came quickly.” When he decides to visit Ida in the hope of a night
of passion, and realizes that success is near, he admits that “in
such cases I know I wear an obnoxious, triumphant smile, one that I
cannot suppress.”
Karetnyk’s careful
handling of Felsen’s intricate sentences is to be not only
commended but relished. Midway through Deceit, the diarist hopes
against all odds that Lyolya will return to him and performs a mental
trick to convince himself that he can still salvage their
relationship. He describes his thoughts as he rescues himself from
despair, layering clause upon clause to create a vivid account of his
mental process:
Without love we
fall into a stupor or despair, it covers our naked animal essence;
with the fear of death, with deliberate attempts to grab hold of some
kind of eternity, one that is at once a mystery to us and yet devised
by us, even the remains of love, even its very echo in music, imbues
us with a semblance of fearlessness, dignity and the spiritual range
to disregard death. Only by loving, by knowing about love, hoping for
love, are we inspired and meaningfully engaged in life, able to
banish the sovereign of petty day-to-day cares, to stop waiting for
the end to come; hence my conclusion, my hope — despite doubt,
despite experience, despite my perennial, easily pacified patience:
Lyolya must love — for my sake (thankfully I have mellowed, and it
startles me to think for the first time — for her own sake, too);
she cannot leave me, else she will know how feeble, how inadequate
and elusive are the remains of love, and how, before we realise it,
it will be too late. Because of the enormous triple strain —
Lyolya’s almost tangible presence all day, somebody else’s dying,
desperate music, my own foolish fever — I have ceased to doubt and
now begin to believe, with rejoicing, with relief, that Lyolya has
already staged her intervention.
One wonders what
Felsen, who was killed in Auschwitz in 1943, would make of his
long-delayed transportation from Russian into English. Had Karetnyk
not stumbled across Felsen during his research, this author, who
was heralded as an heir to Proust by his peers, might have remained
unknown to the Anglophone world. The fact that Deceit has come into
English almost a hundred years after its debut speaks not only to the
power of translators to rescue authors from obscurity, but also to
the importance of independent presses such as Prototype in
commissioning new and relevant voices, no matter where or when they
are writing from. Timely, relatable, and thoroughly absorbing, if
Deceit proves anything, it is how little both our interior and
exterior lives have changed over the span of a tumultuous century. -
Sarah Gaer
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/almost-tangible-presence-on-yuri-felsens-deceit/
Yuri Felsen, a
leading émigré writer in Paris between the wars, died in Auschwitz
in 1943 — Bryan Karetnyk’s fine translation of Deceit is Felsen’s
long-overdue debut in English. Deceit takes the form of a
confessional diary, charting the highs and lows of his relationship
with his muse Lyolya. Felsen has been described as the Russian
Proust, and his intensely layered psychological self-scrutiny is
comparable to the French great, although without Proust’s rich
imagery. We are trapped in the narrator’s head as we’re trapped
in our own consciousness; this is Felsen’s power.
Women’s bodies do
come under the microscope — size of hands, length of leg, texture
of skin are examined objectively. This dates Felsen but if his
rejected lovers are made to suffer humiliations, “Zina ... came
over to me ... (I was sitting by the little table adorned with fruit)
and, resting her hand on my shoulder, slightly crouching on her long
legs, reached over me to the apples ... ” — his psychological
insight compensates. Unable to respond to Zina because his other
lover, Ida, is present, “I thought how distressing it is to
recognise in everything the inequality that we have wrought (even
when it is in my favour) ... ” — the humiliations suffered by the
narrator are boundless. Proust’s wicked humour comes to mind.
Felsen is a master of human expectations and the subsequent
accommodations of those expectations. When he does focus on an
object, he works it beautifully. In the first flush of their
relationship, Lyolya insists on mending his glove. Later on “I
asked Lyolya to mend an old, soiled glove of mine. Just as I had
anticipated, she marvelled at this request and replied,
half-incensed: ‘Your concierge will do it far better than I’ ...
it was not difficult to discern ... an accompanying renunciation of
any sweet concern ... for me ... a note of squeamish disgust directed
specifically at the glove ... I had poisoned that delight forever”.
His insight is so
sharp yet he cannot help himself. The relationship descends into hell
— a cardigan sheltering Lyolya’s infidelity with another lover
provides some wicked hilarity. Yet despite all his cynicism — he
asserts that “It is impossible to love without deceit” — he
continues to offer up his “dwindling strength to the cruel ...
whims of love’s divinity.” Human beings just can’t help
themselves.
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/review/2022/06/25/deceit-by-yuri-felsen-translated-by-bryan-karetnyk/
Our
narrator is not a writer but a businessman, though he is writing this
diary we are reading. We are not sure what sort of businessman he is
but we do know that he struggles. (Felsen himself apparently lost a
large sum of money on the stock market in Paris.)
He
starts off as he means to go on – miserable: Everything I
have is superficial—appointments, acquaintances, time-keeping—dull
and dry, and it hopelessly anaesthetises what little in me remains
alive, my final frail impulses: I cannot achieve even a melancholy
clarity with regard to myself, a sense of remorse, however inert, or
the simple warmth of human kindness. Only more persistently than
before, more shamefully, do I sense that I am the same as others,
that, like everybody, I swill down idle days in trivial anguish, and
that one day I must, as must everyone else, rightly disappear.
Then
an old acquaintance from Berlin, Yekaterina Viktorovna N., writes to
him to let him know that her niece, Lyolya Heard, was coming to
Paris. Lyolya was divorced. She had been living in Belgrade, was now
in Berlin and was coming to Paris. He knew of her from when he lived
in Berlin as Yekaterina Viktorovna N. had mentioned her and even
implied that the pair would make a fine couple .Before she arrives,
before he has even met her, he has decided that she is the woman for
him. Though he has a negative view of life (I am often made to
feel out of sorts as a result of the fairly commonplace notion that
every expectation will be frustrated, that the joy proclaimed to us
will be robbed), he is very optimistic about Lyolya.
He
has made a good business deal and for once has some money. He books a
room for her. When she arrives she is not too keen on the room but
finally accepts and the pair seem to get on well. She had had a
relationship with an actor, Sergei, who is now famous in Moscow but
that had ended. Or had it? The relationship between out narrator and
Lyolya, at least from his perspective, does not continue well. Never
have I, with any woman but for Lyolya, been able to talk without that
ghastly, deprecating other voice that appears the moment I catch a
woman out and, for my own sake, expose her frailty or deceit .
- The Modern Novel read
more here:
https://www.themodernnovel.org/europe/europe/russia/yuri-felsen/deceit/
A perilous question always hangs over the works of exiled writers:
travelling amidst the turmoil of history, where is their place? For
the Russian novelist and critic Yuri Felsen, who perished in
Auschwitz in 1943, the Anglosphere’s answer only recently emerged
by way of translator Bryan Karetnyk, who has lifted Felsen’s works
from obscurity and translated them into English—for the first time
into any language other than Russian. In a challenging, original
trilogy that employs modernist aesthetics, intercultural crossroads,
linguistic experiments, and the soul within time, Felsen layered a
masterful prose over reality, beyond singular country or era. His
place, it appears, can be located within the complexities of any
contemporality intersecting with literature. The first novel of the
trilogy, Deceit, was published by Prototype in 2022, and the second,
Happiness, is due out in 2025. Karetnyk was awarded a PEN Translates
award for the latter, and in this interview, he speaks to us on
Felsen’s Proustian style, what these works demand of their
translator, and how they resonate through the English language.
Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): One of the most striking aspects of Yuri
Felsen’s work is his wield and command of the long sentence and his
elaborate, crescendo-ing clauses. While translating, was there any
element you prioritised—rhythm, texture, balance—in order to
maintain the delicate construction and dexterity of the lines? What
do you feel is the most important aspect to preserve in the movement
from Russian to English?
Bryan Karetnyk (BK): I’ve lived with Felsen’s prose (and been
haunted by it) for almost a decade now, and one thing I continue to
be struck by, whenever I return to any one of his works, is his keen
ability to make every sentence tell a story in itself. Russian
literature of course is no stranger to long sentences, but what sets
Felsen’s prose apart from others is the degree to which all his
cascading clauses are so interdependent on one another. You just
cannot break them down into smaller units, so he necessarily asks his
readers to hold a considerable amount of information in their
consciousness over the course of a single period. No matter whether
he’s describing external events or the narrator’s inner world,
each of his sentences has, as it were, a distinct, baroque narrative
arc that follows the narrator’s intense ratiocination—the result
of which is that his lines twist and turn in unexpected ways,
creating a dynamic tension that is as much psychological as it is
rhetorical.
As a translator, the primary duty, as I see it, is always to
reproduce that carefully crafted narrative-psychological arc—the
exposition, the conflict, the climax, the denouement, the segue into
the next thought—all in a way that brings life to the soliloquy.
Structurally speaking, one has to emulate the architecture of his
phrasing by paying attention to rhythm, tempo, poise—the point and
counterpoint of his rhetoric; yet, at the same time, that cannot
distract from the demands placed on word choice, which presents its
own set of challenges and is so vital in creating texture as well as
meaning. Felsen’s narrator is always in search of the mot juste,
and, together with a fondness for abstraction, he has a habit of
using words idiosyncratically—impressionistically even, rarely in
the straight dictionary sense. So often, the texts seem to strain at
the limits of what is articulable (he seldom seems to find that
mot—if it even exists), and you can never quite escape the sense
that some shade of nuance remains forever just out of reach. But I
think there’s a profound beauty in that.
And so all this forces the translator to delve behind the words, into
a complex psychology, and to grapple with the approximations of
language—or, rather, two languages. The result, I suspect, is a
deeply personal one that’s based heavily in my own reading and
interpretation of the text’s ambiguities. The hope at the end, I
suppose, as with any interpretation—and translation is, I believe,
a kind of performed interpretation—is that my ventriloquist’s act
looks effortless, psychologically consistent, and, in a way,
inevitable. Even if that isn’t exactly the case…
XYS: You’ve written movingly about how Felsen’s work emphasises
the emotionality and intimate psychologies of daily human life and
desire during momentous shifts of history. How do you think his works
can be read today, during an age where we are increasingly wrapped up
in news of global changes and movements? What does his particular
insistence on individual freedom of expression capture about
contemporary occupations of identity and selfhood?
BK: Though his writing may well ostensibly shun the “outside
world”, Felsen was acutely conscious of what he termed “the
tragedy of the present”. His essays from the 1930s are preoccupied
with the politics and issues of the day. Time and again, he writes,
urgently and with great passion, on the nature of freedom and
individuality; the euphemization of slavery by totalitarian regimes;
collectivist ideologies’ disdain for the individual; the stridency
of the period’s revolutionary movements set against a weakened
faith in liberal values and democracy; the irreconcilability of
fascist and communist ideologies with reality; the fundamental
incompatibility of free art with revolutionary diktat; and scorn for
those artists who abase themselves and their art by bowing to its
demands.
So very much of this seems to resonate today, as the spheres of
culture, literature, and public discourse are once again becoming
progressively ideologized. And while Felsen may address these themes
in his fiction only rarely or obliquely, I do think they nevertheless
form the ethical backdrop to everything. His entire creative output
is predicated on the convictions of his own political beliefs—beliefs
born of his private experience of successive catastrophes, including
revolution, displacement, exile, and statelessness amid changing
political winds. Its focus on interiority and individuality—in all
their perverseness, I might add—is designed to challenge those
outside mechanisms that would sooner prescribe human experience and
consciousness. By focusing so intently on the convoluted inner life
of a single individual, his art encourages us in turn to know and
accept ourselves in all our contradictions, free of collective
pressures and received ideas, and to question anything imposed from
without, especially anything that lays claim to universality.
XYS: The influence of Proust is strong in both Felsen’s tactile,
syntactically complex style and his consuming, meditative excursions
into the nature of memory, the metaphysics of love, and the
mysterious distances between the mind and the world; could you tell
us about Felsen’s existing work and its relationship to La
Recherche, as well as how the two writers differ?
BK: Proust was a massive influence on Felsen. Throughout his career,
Felsen worked on a vast literary project that, by the time of his
death at Auschwitz in 1943, encompassed three novels and seven
interlinking short stories, and which he may have been intending to
group together under the rather Proustian title The Recurrence of
Things Past. (This was purportedly the title of a fourth, unpublished
novel, which was lost or perhaps destroyed during the war.)
Cumulatively, The Recurrence presents a fictionalized psychological
self-portrait of a young Russian émigré living in Paris, a
neurasthenic and aspiring author whose frustrated amorous pursuits of
an enigmatic and cruel muse provide the inspiration for many
beautiful flights of prose on themes including love, literature, and
human frailty. Like La Recherche, each of the works develops the opus
episodically, all the while advancing the same long-suffering hero’s
romantic, psychological, and artistic evolution toward his literary
vocation.
For all these reasons, Felsen was known, even in his own day, as a
“Prustianets”—a Proustian à la russe—because of his desire
to have language capture every neuron fired in the brain, because of
his narrator’s complete self-absorption and scorn for everything
conformist, predictable, and bourgeois. In his fiction, we
re-encounter Proust’s sinuous, tortuous periods, his dialectical
reflections, his forensic analyses of every last gesture, look,
attitude, and carelessly uttered remark. And yet, as the critic
Stuart Walton so astutely observed, “What distinguishes Felsen is a
greater sense of desperation—the instinct, contra Proust, that one
doesn’t after all have all the time in the world to reach an
understanding with it.” That, and a nagging sense that what the
narrator says about his emotions, sentiments, and predicaments may
not in fact be the truth and nothing but. In this respect, amid the
traumas of exile, he seems to blend Proust’s Marcel and
Dostoevsky’s underground man—searching, as the scholar Donald
Rayfield wrote, “not for lost time but for the essence of the
present”.
XYS: Happiness is the continuation of Deceit, in which Felsen’s
fictional representative, Volodya, meets and falls in love with
fellow emigrant Lyolya, and in this second novel, their story takes
an even more unhappy and psychically tormenting turn. Felsen’s
narratives have a strong braiding of psychoanalysis throughout, and
if Deceit is his totem to the bewilderments and dynamisms of
attraction and love, what do you think is the central psychological
occupation of Happiness?
BK: In Happiness, Felsen certainly continues his neurotic ars
amatoria, although now in a darker, more jealous key. In Deceit,
Volodya’s competition for Lyolya’s affections was the inept
“nonentity” Bobby Wilczewski, whereas in Happiness we encounter
the dandyish, urbane Marc Osipovich, a new character representing
both a foil and a rival (one of several in the novel), an adversary
who cannot be dismissed so easily and who challenges Volodya’s
sense of self on a far more profound level than Bobby Wilczewski ever
could—because he is, for Volodya, like peering into a mirror. In
fact, I would go so far as to say that the chief psychological
occupation of Happiness isn’t so much Volodya’s tortured
relationship with Lyolya (although that undoubtedly remains
prevalent), but rather the angst-ridden relationship between him and
Marc Osipovich, whose role is that of an unwanted, unnerving,
dangerous double.
XYS: Felsen can be defined as a writer who teaches his readers how to
read; Georgy Adamovich once said about him that only readers who are
able to stop, think, and re-read his sentences are the ones who can
come close to the writer’s thoughts. It calls again Proust to mind,
who said that “style . . . is a question not of technique but of
vision”. How do you think Felsen’s precision and density relate
to his vision of reality, considering that Volodya makes the
declaration that “real life is literature”?
BK: It’s a very observant question. The relationship between life
and literature seems, in a way, to have hounded Felsen throughout his
life. He was born and raised in the Silver Age of Russian culture,
during which one of the great vogues was a concept known in Russian
as zhiznetvorchestvo, or “life-creation”. Essentially—and I’m
simplifying things somewhat here—it attempted to create a symbiosis
between life and art, one whose ideal was that of transforming one’s
life into a work of art, and vice versa. By the time Felsen was
writing in Paris a few decades later, the big idea among exiled
Russian writers was that literature should be a kind of “document
humain”—that it should similarly aim to make an art of the
author’s own lived reality, but stripped of all embellishment and
invention. Felsen’s good friend, the writer Boris Poplavsky, once
even claimed: “There is no art. . . Only the document exists.”
Felsen’s novels operate within that “documentary” paradigm, but
I think they also subvert it. Wherever they can, they try to pare
away the phenomenal world, documenting not a life as lived in the
public sphere, but rather the solipsism of a life lived inside the
almost inescapable confines of a cranium. In so doing, he hits upon
something that is at once deeply individual and, at the same time,
somehow essential. If for Felsen this “real life” is what goes on
within the mind, then literature is the only place where he believes
it can be fixed and set down, read and reread. (Note especially how
often Volodya himself rereads his lines—and the pleasure he derives
from it!) Of course, this is undoubtedly hard work at times. It makes
prodigious demands on the reader. But then, as Vladimir Nabokov,
another erstwhile acquaintance of Felsen’s, said: “If the reader
has to work. . . so much the better. Art is difficult.”
XYS: And do you think that Felsen’s prose has something also to
“teach” the English language?
BK: Just as Felsen was hailed in his day as “a writer’s writer”,
I would add that, to my mind, he is also “a reader’s writer”
and “a translator’s writer”, insofar as he challenges received
notions about literary style. I’ve often marvelled at the degree to
which various pronouncements on “good style” (think of Orwell’s
now-inescapable “Six rules. . .”) have been internalized over the
last few generations. Felsen’s prose fails on almost every
count—and thank God it does. It’s refreshing to encounter a
writer whose prose demands so very much of the reader, and of the
translator.
I must say, though: the complexity of Felsen’s style does test even
the Russian language’s remarkable tolerance. And when it came to
translating him, I doubt I’ve ever had so strong a sense of putting
the English language through its paces. It took a lot of trial and
error in finding the right techniques to coax his Russian into a
plausible version of English. On several occasions, I found myself in
fact looking to C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Proust’s first translator,
for inspiration. It’s been a real privilege to partake, through
translating The Recurrence, in this double conversation: Felsen with
Proust, and likewise I with Scott Moncrieff.
XYS: As a writer in exile, how did Felsen’s work represent a
turning away from Soviet socialist realism or of socio-political
themes in literature? What was Felsen’s regard towards the
political function of literature, and how did this evolve alongside
the growing hostility in Europe towards Jewish people during his
lifetime?
BK: From the earliest years of Russian emigration in the twentieth
century, many of the exiled writers transformed their plight into
purpose. My ne v izgnanii, my v poslanii, held one aphorism. “We’re
not in exile: we’re on a mission.” The mission in question was
twofold: to preserve Russian culture, on the one hand, from its
desecration at the hands of Bolshevism, and to save Europe, on the
other, from its cultural entropy in the wake of the Great War. The
emigration was effectively a microcosm of the former Russian empire,
and though it was united in its anti-Bolshevist sentiment, that isn’t
to say that the émigrés were necessarily anti-socialist; in fact,
many of those writers and intellectuals who fled the Bolsheviks had
actually welcomed the February Revolution of 1917, and the most
influential literary journal of the diaspora was set up by Socialist
Revolutionaries.
In political terms, we can be quite clear on Felsen’s stance: his
was more or less that of a classical liberal, who opposed all forms
of extremism and authoritarianism and espoused a politics of
centrality. In this respect, he finds a relatively rare kindred
spirit in Nabokov, although the two authors’ chosen mode of
artistic response differed.
Felsen was a witness of 1917 and a bearer of its traumas, and he
looked on from the vantage of his Parisian exile with a mix of horror
and disgust as the Soviet authorities, other atrocities aside,
decreed fiction as definitely as any five-year plan, sanctifying as
their artistic credo class hatred and intolerance to any show of
individualism. Like Nabokov, he too wrestled with how best to
exercise what was perhaps the sole consolation afforded by
exile—creative freedom—to oppose the day’s fetish for
collectivization, subjugation, and shows of strength and brute force.
Both men firmly believed that art could function as a prophylactic
against dictatorship, yet feared that the enduring value of that art
risked imperilment by political engagement. Where Nabokov preferred a
dialectic response, using his art as a creative laboratory in which
to test and explode all manner of totalitarian thought and
practice—be it Soviet, Nazi or otherwise—Felsen sooner turned
away from open polemic, seeking to fashion an art that extols love,
the soul, the individual—all that is enduringly human.
Still, the power of art to defend the humane was an article of faith
to which Felsen clung to the very end. On the eve of the war that
ultimately robbed him of his life, he responded to critics who, in
those dreadful years, maintained that it was no time to write of love
or sentiment, of individual need. “I cannot fight directly—my
sole act is that of observation,” he declared in his 1939 essay
“Truisms”, “but we are defending the same thing, man and his
soul.” For him, this was the ne plus ultra of art in exile:
“Everything that ought to be said about the writer’s role in our
terrible and absurd times pertains doubly to the literature of the
emigration: the emigration is a victim of non-freedom and, by its
very raison d’être, a symbol of the struggle for the living and of
the impossibility of reconciling with those who murder them. Its
literature must express this ‘idea of emigration’ with twofold
force: it must animate the spirit and protect man and love.” -
Xiao Yue Shan
https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2024/04/04/the-tragedy-of-the-present-bryan-karetnyk-on-translating-yuri-felsen/
