The Russian writer Aleksandr Grin (1880–1932) is generally regarded as the author of romantic adventure stories with exotic locations and positive heroes. The study challenges this classification with the help of the prism of the foreign in two ways: On the one hand, through a critical review of the history of reception, it shows the mechanisms that led to the current, but selective and alienated image of the author. On the other hand, it opens up a new perspective on the writer and the thematic diversity, complexity and high aesthetic quality of his work through detailed text analyzes and the inclusion of works by Grin that have hardly or not been considered at all in research. In addition, she develops her own structuralist-phenomenological theoretical approach to the analysis of the most diverse manifestations of the foreign, which can also be transferred to other works and authors as well as non-literary contexts.