Abstract

The main purpose of the essay is to describe the reception of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s debut novel

One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) in Swedish newspapers. The reception itself comprises the 1963’s Swedish reviewers opinions on the novel as to how it was controversial or not and the literary quality of the novel and Solzhenitsyn’s writing. In the analysis, seventeen reviews from seventeen different newspapers is included, studied and compared. All of these reviews were written one year after the original release of the book, i.e. in 1962. The analysis will also include five other articles from five different Swedish newspapers, not about One Day, but rather about the Swedish view of the Soviet Union Solzjenitsyn lived in and loathed. The reason I included those articles was because they were written just a few months before the reviews, which makes them interesting when interpreting the image of the novels controversial content, something that could differ very much between the Soviet and the Swedish point of view.