Russian Classics and the Russian Fate in the Works by the American Writer Maurice Hindus

This article examines the hitherto undiscovered American writer M. Hindus (1891–1969), who for half a century studied Soviet Russia and its “interpretation” of the West. The research notes that Hindus paid close attention to Russian classics, whose work was based on their citing and comprehension. The books of Hindus reveal three main issues: the theme of the village and peasant life, the Russian national character, and love and human relationships. In his early works of the 1920s and 1930s, he tried to confirm his conclusions and observations about the positive changes in the socio-public life of the USSR with examples from Russian classical literature. In the later period of his work, he turned to Russian classics in search of answers to profound questions about the national character, Russian mentality, values, and life orientation by which ordinary people and the entire Soviet society live. Hindus was one of the most prominent foreign writers who studied our Fatherland, a kind of mirror in which we see the change in the attitude of foreign intellectuals to the historical fate of Russia and its classical literary heritage.