BLISSFUL, INANE HOPE
Deceit by Yuri Felsen; translated by Bryan Karetnyk
Prototype PublishingJune 2022Selected by TANK
Russian author Gaito Gazdanov famously lamented that the Russian emigration had produced only a single great author: Vladimir Nabokov. He later qualified this, however, saying: “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 honourable fatality, a battle of one against the many, lost before it is begun.” By the time Russian Jewish writer Yuri Felsen – born Nikolai Freudenstein – was murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz in 1943, he had written three novels, Deceit (1930), Happiness (1932) and Letters on Lermontov (1935), as well as numerous short stories, essays, and criticism. He was revered by his fellow authors in exile – Vladislav Khodasevich, Georgy Adamovich, Zinaida Gippius – and it is only because his legacy and archive were destroyed by the Nazis that his introspective, stream-of-consciousness prose isn’t better known. Indeed, Nabokov himself labelled his work “real literature, pure and honest”. Deceit – a diary-style novel set in Paris between the wars – is the first of Felsen’s books to be published in English.
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. Throughout my years of loving tenderness and incessant jealousy – covetous, hasty, though never apt to bear a grudge and quick to forgive – I had, in a sense, greater magnanimity, would blithely turn my back on those sinister and terrible comparisons (with “everybody else”), on the absurd inevitability of the end, and considered my own sublime sense of nervous tension unique. Now, however, when all this comes back to me every so often – limp, numb and impoverished – and afterwards follows a period of deep, somnolent repose, I succumb to an error one so often descries in people – that the present will never change – and so I conclude: my sense of romantic exaltation has ended once and for all, as have all my private thoughts and feelings, but in such moments, so reflective of the past, one need only seek to discern something, to uncover it and communicate it — for the remnants of those emotions, of that exaltation, are preserved, that old anxious haste no longer interferes with them, and perhaps their bothersome recollection, which painstakingly reconstructs what was once achieved but has now been left behind, constitutes the entire sense, the whole bizarre purpose of these lonely and wasted years. But then, no sooner does a sliver of blissful, inane hope appear – from a touching similarity, a smile, attention paid to my words – than in an instant I alter, no longer do I see my present humdrum rut, and I forget that all these private thoughts and feelings are over, and only my obstinately suspicious nature – that vestige of experience, failure and the eternal attribution of value to everything – unexpectedly and opportunely sobers me: but then suddenly comes despair or treachery all over again. Or else in the wake of sobriety I experience that belated, blistering, vainly defiant sense of regret, which sometimes brings women (seemingly without provocation) to tears – because of the opportunity to have something rare and dangerous, something that was meant to be, and because now that opportunity has been lost irrevocably.
I suddenly felt this opportunity for something blessed, dangerous and new as I was reading a letter from a Berlin acquaintance of mine, Yekaterina Viktorovna N., who has written to inform me that her niece, Lyolya Heard, is coming to Paris – “Remember our conversations about her? Help her, look out for her – you surely won’t regret it.” Katerina Viktorovna, a colonel’s widow, a faded army woman cut from a hulking, much too masculine cloth, and possessed of a coarse, grey face and a booming wooden voice that manneredly gave commands, would for days on end, in the Berlin pension in which we had found ourselves cast together, regale me with stories of her beloved niece, “a rare, exotic creature, quite unlike any of these local girls”, whereupon she would smile boastfully and suggestively, with just a touch of sympathy, as it were: “That’s her, my darling – what a great pity you haven’t met her.” ◉
The book is marked by this veering between intense emotional states, such as where the narrator describes waking up with a hangover: “the sense of having made an irreversible mistake now permeates everything … 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.”