In this month’s online reading group, we will discuss Deceit by Yuri Felsen. Felsen was a leading modernist writer of the interwar Russian diaspora, known by his contemporaries as the ‘Russian Proust’. He evokes in rich, poetic, idiosyncratic prose not only the zeitgeist of interwar Europe and his émigré milieu, but also its psychology and the existential crisis of the age. Felsen died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, his life and legacy destroyed by the Nazis.
Deceit is Felsen’s debut novel, published for the first time in English. It is available in our bookshop here. The meeting will be facilitated by our bookshop co-curator Sasha Padziarei and community engagement curator Alisa Oleva.
The online Reading Group will help to improve inclusivity and accessibility, giving the opportunity for those who cannot attend in person to join us for discussion. We encourage you to join us in person if you can, and leave the online places to those who would benefit from them.
Written in the form of a 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 extemporisations 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. What Nabokov achieves with images and the physical world, Felsen does with the emotional and metaphysical; Nabokov himself considered Felsen’s work to be “real literature, pure and honest”.
2021 saw the opening of Pushkin House’s very own physical bookshop in addition to our online store. While it is still being honed and developed, we are keen to highlight literature that inspires, encourages, moves and validates our readers. We also want to amplify the voices, writers and readers that historically didn’t get and, perhaps, still don’t get the visibility, power and appreciation they deserve. Most of all, we want to create a physical (and an online) place for connection where people can come and share their views.