Novel by Russian writer perished in Auschwitz to be published in UK

The debut novel by Russian writer Yuri Felsen, who died in Auschwitz in 1943, is going to be published in English for the first time, Guardian reports.

Yuri Felsen is the pseudonym of Nikolai Freudenstein, who was born in St Petersburg in 1894. He emigrated after the Russian revolution and settled in Paris in 1923. He was regarded as one of the prominent modernist Russian writers of his time, and was even compared to Vladimir Nabokov. He failed to escape to Switzerland during the Nazi occupation of France, and was later killed in Auschwitz’s gas chambers in February 1943. 

Academic and translator Bryan Karetnyk found out about Felsen when reading literary criticism. He translated Felsen’s first novel Deceit, which was first published in Russian in 1930, into English. The story is set in Paris between the two world wars, and is written in a form of a diary. The book will be released next May by Prototype Publishing. 

Only brief extracts of Felsen’s writings have previously been translated into English. His collected works were republished in Russia in 2012. 

Russkiy Mir