Yuri Felsen, a leading émigré writer in Paris between the wars, died in Auschwitz in 1943 — Bryan Karetnyk’s fine translation of Deceit is Felsen’s long-overdue debut in English. Deceit takes the form of a confessional diary, charting the highs and lows of his relationship with his muse Lyolya. Felsen has been described as the Russian Proust, and his intensely layered psychological self-scrutiny is comparable to the French great, although without Proust’s rich imagery. We are trapped in the narrator’s head as we’re trapped in our own consciousness; this is Felsen’s power.

Women’s bodies do come under the microscope — size of hands, length of leg, texture of skin are examined objectively. This dates Felsen but if his rejected lovers are made to suffer humiliations, “Zina ... came over to me ... (I was sitting by the little table adorned with fruit) and, resting her hand on my shoulder, slightly crouching on her long legs, reached over me to the apples ... ” — his psychological insight compensates. Unable to respond to Zina because his other lover, Ida, is present, “I thought how distressing it is to recognise in everything the inequality that we have wrought (even when it is in my favour) ... ” — the humiliations suffered by the narrator are boundless. Proust’s wicked humour comes to mind. Felsen is a master of human expectations and the subsequent accommodations of those expectations. When he does focus on an object, he works it beautifully. In the first flush of their relationship, Lyolya insists on mending his glove. Later on “I asked Lyolya to mend an old, soiled glove of mine. Just as I had anticipated, she marvelled at this request and replied, half-incensed: ‘Your concierge will do it far better than I’ ... it was not difficult to discern ... an accompanying renunciation of any sweet concern ... for me ... a note of squeamish disgust directed specifically at the glove ... I had poisoned that delight forever”.

His insight is so sharp yet he cannot help himself. The relationship descends into hell — a cardigan sheltering Lyolya’s infidelity with another lover provides some wicked hilarity. Yet despite all his cynicism — he asserts that “It is impossible to love without deceit” — he continues to offer up his “dwindling strength to the cruel ... whims of love’s divinity.” Human beings just can’t help themselves.