Pushkin House and Prototype Publishing invite you to the launch of Happiness by Yuri Felsen, a leading modernist writer of the interwar Russian diaspora. We will be joined by the translator of Happiness Bryan Karetnyk, writer and critic Matthew Janney, and Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature Maria Rubins. Together, they will explore the book’s literary style, its place in interwar emigre literature and beyond, and resonant themes such as the uneasy bond between emotional suffering and artistic creation, and the elusive nature of happiness.

Influenced by the great modernists such as Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Yuri Felsen’s writing stood at the forefront of aesthetic and philosophical currents in European literature. Happiness (1932) is the second novel in his cycle The Recurrence of Things Past, following Deceit (1930), and is set among the exiled Russian community of interwar Paris. It offers both a vivid social snapshot and an unnerving psychological portrait, and its exploration of desire, rivalry, masculinity and self-deception, shaped by shifting sexual and emotional mores, feels strikingly modern.

Written as a diary addressed to his beloved Lyolya, Happiness unfolds as an intense stream of consciousness in which Volodya – its anxious, self-scrutinising narrator – revisits the fragile equilibrium of their difficult relationship. When new figures enter Lyolya’s orbit, Volodya’s hard-won certainties begin to collapse. Forced to contend with a series of rivals – a Soviet film star, a dashing ex-soldier, a wealthy businessman – he is driven ever deeper into jealousy and self-analysis, with tragic results. 

Yuri Felsen’s writing has only recently been rediscovered. At the height of his career, following the Nazi occupation of France, he was deported and killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, and his legacy and archive were largely destroyed by the Nazis. The translations by Bryan Karetnyk of the earlier Deceit, and now Happiness, mark the first time Felsen’s work has been translated into another language.

Yuri Felsen was the pseudonym of Nikolai Freudenstein. Born in St Petersburg in 1894, he emigrated in the wake of the Russian Revolution, first to Riga and then to Berlin, before finally settling in Paris in 1923. In France, he became one of the leading writers of his generation, alongside the likes of Vladimir Nabokov; he was influenced by the great modernists such as Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Following the German occupation of France, Felsen tried to escape to Switzerland; however, he was caught, arrested and interned in Drancy concentration camp. He was deported in 1943 and killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Bryan Karetnyk is an Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Slavonic Studies, University of Cambridge. He is a writer and translator whose recent translations include major works by Gaito Gazdanov, Irina Odoevtseva and Boris Poplavsky. He is also the editor of the landmark Penguin Classics anthology Russian Émigré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky. He is translator of Deceit (2022) and Happiness (2026) by Yuri Felsen, published by Prototype Publishing.

Matthew Janney is British-Georgian writer and editor based in London. He is a regular contributor to the Financial Times, with work also in the Guardian, Prospect Magazine, TLS, New Statesman and others. He writes predominantly about literature and culture with a focus on the Caucasus, Russia and Eastern Europe. He also co-hosts Zeg, an annual storytelling festival in Tbilisi, Georgia.

Maria Rubins is Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies of University College London. Her books include Russian Montparnasse: Transnational Writing in Interwar Paris (2015), Redefining Russian Literary Diaspora, 1920-2020 (2021), and Crossroad of Arts, Crossroad of Cultures: Ecphrasis in Russian and French Poetry (2000). She is a translator of fiction from English and French into Russian, including books by Elizabeth Gaskell, Judith Gautier, Maurice Dekobra and Irène Némirovsky. Rubins is the editor of several book series, including Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics at Brill and the FRINGE Series at UCL Press. For more information visit: www.mariarubins.com.

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