The Russian writer Yuri Felsen is a fascinating figure – he wrote almost entirely in exile, having fled Russia after the 1917 Revolution, travelling first to Riga and then eventually settling in Paris. Paris became home, and in the 1920s and 30s Felsen became an important figure in the Russian literary émigré scene within France. Known among his contemporaries as ‘the Russian Proust’, he published a series of connected novels and short stories through a Russian language press in Paris. Felsen did not survive WWII – he was Jewish, and was murdered in Auschwitz – and neither did any of his immediate family. As a result, his work fell out of print for over half a century, until it was republished in Russia some ten years ago, and in recent years, brilliantly translated into English by Bryan Karetnyk.

Felsen was a very distinctive prose writer, his writing bores inward in long, lonely, intricate sentences. In ‘Extras’, Felsen’s narrator goes to a film set on the outskirts of Paris, seeking work as an extra in a new film production. Upon arrival, he meets a group of people doing the same, who are all Russian exiles. As they wait around, the story captures the stilted conversation and pained nostalgia for the recent past, while hopefully waiting for the good news of a day’s employment. There is something so powerful about what Felsen leaves unsaid in this story, always humming around the quiet but constant anxiety of statelessness, the struggle of trying to get a foothold anywhere within a world utterly indifferent to one’s presence.

Originally published, in Russian, circa 1930s. Translation found in Prototype Vol. 3, Prototype, 2021. Read here in the LARB