JURI FELSEN »GETÄUSCHT« DIE ÜBERSETZERIN ROSEMARIE TIETZE AUF DEN SPUREN RUSSISCHER WELTLITERATUR

Moderation: Judith Merchant

We meet our nameless narrator in Paris in the 1920s, where he finds himself an emigrant after the Russian Revolution. At the request of an acquaintance, he meets the beautiful, clever and sociable Lyolya, who has also fled Russia. What begins as a casual friendship quickly turns into fascination and obsession, as she sends ambiguous signals and stalks other men.
As Lyolya continues to lead a life untainted by the forces of social convention and history, our narrator's revelations, written in diary form, become increasingly painful, intimate and rich in psychological introspection.

Juri Felsen is the pseudonym of the author Nikolai Freudenstein. Born in St. Petersburg in 1894, he emigrated to Europe in 1921 and settled in Paris in 1923. In France, he became one of the leading writers of his generation. Influenced by the great modernists such as Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, his work placed him at the forefront of aesthetic and philosophical trends in European literature. After the German occupation of France, Felsen attempted to flee to Switzerland; however, he was caught, arrested and interned in the Drancy concentration camp. Yuri Felsen was deported in 1943 and murdered in Auschwitz. He was only rediscovered in 2012 and translated into English in 2022. His work is also available in German for the first time ever in the translation by Rosemarie Tietze.

Literary translator Rosemarie T ietze teaches translation and presents her authors and the art of translation in readings and in the media. She has translated Russian classics into German (Pushkin, Tolstoy - her "Anna Karenina" became a bestseller), works from the period of Russian emigration (Nabokov, Gasdanov) as well as contemporary works (Bitov, Aksyonov, Petrushevskaya, etc.). She has received several awards, including the Johann Heinrich Voß Prize from the German Academy for Language and Poetry and the Celan Prize from the German Literature Fund.

In cooperation with Café Camus and the Bonn Memorial and Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism
Supported by the Kunststiftung NRW and the German Translators' Fund