Lindsay, Jack

Born Oct. 28, 1900, in Melbourne, Australia. English writer, scholar, and public figure.

Lindsay moved to Great Britain in 1926 and joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1941. In the historical novels 1649 (1938), Men of Forty-Eight (1948; Russian translation, 1959), and Fires in Smithfield (1950), Lindsay used English and world history to create epic retellings of the revolutionary struggle of the masses. Heroic thinkers who participated in the most acute conflicts of their age are central to his novels. The writer places documentary material within a mythological framework in the tradition of folk art (the “annual cycle” system). Lindsay’s epic novel cycle The British Way, which includes Betrayed Spring (1953; Russian translation, 1955), A Local Habitation (1957; Russian translation, 1961), and Masks and People (1963; Russian translation, 1965), sketched the life of different social strata in Great Britain after 1945.

Lindsay, who has wide-ranging scholarly interests, attempts (not always with complete success) to bring the Marxist approach to the problems of world culture. He has written literary criticism (on J. Bunyan, C. Dickens, and G. Meredith), historical studies (Byzantium Into Europe, 1950, and Nine Days’ Hero: Wat Tyler, 1964), and art criticism (monographs on J. Turner, 1966, P. Cézanne, 1969, and G. Courbet, 1973). The Clashing Rocks (1965) and Cleopatra (1971) deal with the history of culture.

Lindsay is active in the struggle for peace. He participated in the second and third congresses of the Writers’ Union of the USSR. Lindsay was awarded the Order of the Badge of Honor in 1967 for propagating Soviet literature and its translation into English.