Deceit: Yuri Felsen

‘It is impossible to live without deceit.’ ‘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, and whose legacy and archive was destroyed by the Nazis. Written in the form of a diary, the novel recounts the unnamed narrator’s complex and emotionally fraught relationship with his love interest and sometime muse.