Yuri Felsen (1894–1943)

Yuri Felsen was the pen name of Nikolai Freudenstein, born to a Jewish family in St. Petersburg, Russia, that emigrated from Riga, Latvia. His father was a doctor. Felsen studied law at Petrograd Imperial University and graduated in 1916. After the Bolshevik Revolution, he fled with his family to Riga, where he began publishing his writings. In 1923, he went to Berlin, and later that year settled in Paris. There met many French writers and other Russian émigré writers, including Vladimir Nabokov. He published three acclaimed novels that earned him the reputation as "the Russian Proust." After Nazi Germany invaded France in World War II, Felsen tried to escape to Switzerland but failed. He was deported first to the Drancy internment camp and then to the death camp at Auschwitz, where he was murdered in February 1943. His manuscripts, letters, and personal effects were lost. After his death, his work fell into obscurity, but is now being rediscovered and translated into English. His autobiographical first novel, Deceit (1930), translated by Bryan Karetnyk, is being published in the USA in February 2023.