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.”
Bryan Karetnyk is a British writer and translator. His recent translations from the Russian include major works by twentieth-century authors including Gaito Gazdanov, Irina Odoevtseva, Boris Poplavsky and Yuri Felsen. He is also the editor and principal translator of the landmark Penguin Classics anthology Russian Émigré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky (2017). His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books and 3:AM Magazine, and he is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, the Spectator and the Financial Times.
Xiao Yue Shan is a poet, writer, editor, and translator. More on her work can be found here.
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