"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
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
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.
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
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.