Lamenting — At Length

Deceit, Yuri Felsen, trans. Bryan Karetnyk

Prototype, 320pp, £12.00, ISBN 9781913513238

reviewed by Andre van Loon

Deceit is a ruminative and slow-burning novel that reveals as much as it conceals. Written in the form of diary entries by an unnamed narrator, the first impression is of a great candour, even pedantry at getting things exact on the page. The writer, a Russian who has fled the Bolsheviks to live in exile in Paris, begins by unfolding his thoughts with a Proustian languor: paragraph-long sentences; an array of commas and semicolons; strings of adjectives and adverbs. But soon, a sense of anxiety, uncertainty and ultimately of falsehood spreads beneath the words.

The story itself is simple to the point of prosaic. The diarist spends his days without apparent aim, floating here and there as his fancy or boredom dictates, and the outside world — in terms of real others, bricks and mortar, wind, sky or rain — is kept at bay. For example, we never get a sense of Paris. The city of lights is mute — the story could have been set in Rome, London, New York or any other city without a significant loss of atmosphere.The young man suffers from an unnamed ailment, perhaps depression, as is clear from his opening lines:

Everything I have is superficial — appointments, acquaintances, time-keeping — dull and dry, and it hopelessly anaesthetises what little in me remains alive. . .

He appears to be a bored ‘underground man’, a Dostoevskian hero without ideals — until a Berlin-based friend of his writes to ask him to look after her niece coming to Paris, the beautiful socialite Lyolya Heard. The pair meet and the young man becomes obsessed with Lyolya. She flirts with him, then with others; they go to cafés, restaurants, friends’ houses; she leaves, returns, goes again; lives near to him without seeing him; they reunite and talk; she leaves again — and so it goes on.

At the level of narrative, Deceit is deeply familiar: an outwardly quiet, apparently mediocre young man, rich in introspection and desire, pins his affections on a woman who likes him — but probably not that much. The essential drive calls to mind the Hugo Williams poem, ‘Duran An Absence’: ‘Now that she has left the room for a moment/to powder her nose,/we watch and wait, watch and wait,/for her to bring back the purpose into our lives.’

From starting by lamenting — at length — the lack of things to care about, Deceit turns into a long reflection about caring too much, too deeply, about someone not in the room. It is more remarkable, however, at its stylistic and semantic levels. How the ‘I’ of the diary entries reveals and conceals emotion is far more important than facts or unfolding reality — which explains the novel’s disinterest in capturing 1920s Paris or the reality of other lives.

The young man writing his diary is sometimes sadly aware of the essential gridlock to his life:

I reread these entries and am amazed at the change I see in myself, a change that is incomprehensible yet seemingly not accidental - that I choose my business affairs, my women, practically even my own moods - yet it would appear that I am right only superficially; deep down, nothing has changed . . . this current identity is but the resurrection of my old deathly solitude. . .

It is as though the diary is written under water, and the narrator can see only dimly, through the waves, what life outside could be like. The thought of Lyolya becomes all-important, but at the same time, it is based on little more than the narrator’s imagination. One day, having decided to listen to nothing but Tchaikovsky’s ‘Pathétique’ Symphony, the young man writes:

Like everyone, I have my own, maybe obsessive, futile, maybe in some way authentic, vision: all of a sudden, I will imagine the entire homogenous world as it is revealed to us - the streets, the cities, the rooms, those intelligent beasts of a sad and predatory nature, who have learnt to stand on their hind legs . . . for me the only means of defending myself from our terrible fate is love, my love — Lyolya.

Having not seen or spoken to Lyolya in a long time, nor having spoken meaningfully with her the last times they met, the ‘my love’ appellation appears hopeful, if not obtuse. The diary entries go on, with often precise linguistic beauty, in this delusional vein.

Deceit was largely forgotten after its first publication in 1930. Its author, Yuri Felsen, had a moment of fame during his years in Paris, following his departure from Russia in the wake of the Russian Revolution, before being deported from France to Auschwitz by the Nazis. He was killed in the gas chambers, the Nazis destroying his archives and legacy. This first English language edition owes much to its translator, Bryan Karetnyk, who re-discovered Felsen’s importance while delving into 1930s literary studies and writings. Though Deceit doesn’t entirely escape the pitfalls of literary lassitude — long diary entries about nothing much can be frustrating, even if stylishly written — its narrator’s curious psychic predicament retains the reader’s interest, and frequent fascination.


Andre van Loon is a freelance literary critic, specialising in new British and American novels and studies of Russian 19th- century literature.