“Your Ivan Hersey”: John Hersey’s War Prose in the Soviet Union

The article explores the literary and journalistic work of the American writer John Richard Hersey (1914–1993). The main attention is paid to the little-studied period in the writer’s biography, when he, being a correspondent of Time magazine in the Soviet Union, faced censorship, restrictions and difficulties of interaction with the Soviet cultural environment. Based on archival materials (RGALI), correspondence with Konstantin Simonov, Soviet publications and translations of Hersey’s works, the duality of his perception in the USSR is revealed: on the one hand (during the war years) — as a “fellow traveler”, on the other hand (during the Cold War) — as a representative of “hostile” ideology, who revealed to the world the destructive power of American atomic weapons. The study also highlights Hersey’s postwar career, his participation in the movement against the Vietnam War, and the complexities of integration into the Soviet literary context. The article contributes to the study of transnational cultural relations by demonstrating how the political realities of the Cold War influenced the reception of texts combining documentary and fiction.