SOURCE: Polet, Jeff. “A Blackened Sea: Religion and Crisis in the Work of Pär Lagerkvist.” Renascence 54, no. 1 (fall 2001): 47-63.

In the following essay, Polet discusses how Lagerkvist's characters mirror his own search for eternal peace and the Kingdom of God, by exploring the connection between social order and freedom and the deepest questions of what he called “human destiny.”

A variety of literary figures have been highly regarded as critics of totalitarianism: Camus, Kundera, Orwell and Solzhenitsyn among them. Generally absent from this list is Swedish Nobel laureate Pär Lagerkvist. This is an unfortunate omission, and in the English speaking world his work has become all but neglected. Quickly after his death in 1974, two books were published giving American readers an overview of Lagerkvist's work, though neither was an in-depth study. Since then, no books and only two articles, both of them comparing him with other...