“The Children’s Campaign,” which Lagerkvist published in 1935, studies the grim mechanism and bloody combat of a totalitarian youth corps in a fashion that obviously had a partial influence on Kallocain. All three, interestingly enough, ventured into the chill realms of dystopia. All three are melodic poets making sacrament of simple things, though Boye’s yearning for the ideal sets her somewhat apart. To American readers, she will seem most easily associated with Pär Lagerkvist, who made his debut in 1912, and Harry Martinson, who appeared on the scene in 1929. Though rarely time-bound, Karin Boye belongs to the literary twenties and thirties. There was, to return to the original image, no sure continuity of the spectrum.

It was Karin Boye’s tragedy that the two fields lay hopelessly apart. Her works reflect, on the one hand, a lyrical inwardness and, on the other, an oracular sense of public responsibility. She will be remembered for two books, the collected poetry, numbering some three hundred pages, and Kallocain (1940), which deserves to take a secure place in the literature of dystopia, among such novels as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984.

Karin Boye’s literary successes lie at opposite ends of a spectrum reaching from the private to the public and, in another sense, from a mythical past to a hypothetical future. Originally published in 1940, the book tells the story about a truth drug used to suppress any thoughts of rebellion.) Nominated for the LFS Hall of Fame Award, Kallocain is a Swedish dystopian novel about a totalitarian world state. (This essay originally appeared as the introduction to Karin Boye’s novel, Kallocain, published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 1966.

Kallo cain