Deceit

"Set in interwar Paris & taking the form of a diary, the novel relates the complex & fraught relationship between an unnamed narrator& his love interest & muse, the beguiling Lyolya Heard. Subtle & profound in its exploration of love, deceit & betrayal, Felsen's novel is a daring & highly original work of psychological fiction"--

Deceit is the first major work by Yuri Felsen, referred to by his contemporaries as ‘the Russian Proust’, a significant writer who died in the gas chambers in Auschwitz, & whose legacy & archive was destroyed by the Nazis.

Written in the form of a diary, the novel recounts the unnamed narrator’s complex & emotionally fraught relationship with his love interest & sometime muse. While the plot itself is relatively simple, the real revelation in Felsen’s writing is its supreme originality of language & psychological introspection.

Quite unlike any other writer in the Russian canon, Felsen evokes in rich, poetic, idiosyncratic prose not only the Zeitgeist of interwar Europe & his émigré milieu, but also its psychology & the existential crisis of the age. What Nabokov achieves with images & the physical world, Felsen does with the emotional & metaphysical.

This is the first English translation of this landmark modernist novel.

With a Foreword by Peter Pomerantsev & an Afterword by Bryan Karetnyk

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Yuri Felsen was the pseudonym of Nikolai Freudenstein. In France, he became one of the leading writers of his generation, alongside the likes of Vladimir Nabokov;  

Bryan Karetnyk is a British writer & translator.