Essay
Lort-Sverige
Not translated into English
Ludvig Nordström · 1938
Synopsis
In the autumn of 1938, a writer drives through the Swedish countryside for seven weeks and goes into people's homes: he wants to see, he writes, the bedrooms and kitchens, the pantries, the latrines, the rubbish and the lice. He questions statare and smallholders, draws what he sees and describes the overcrowded dwellings and the lack of hygiene. The book takes up this report, first broadcast on the radio in ten programmes.
Context
The survey was broadcast by Radiotjänst in the autumn of 1938 in ten programmes entitled Med Ludvig Nordström på husesyn, made up of talks and interviews recorded on disc, and appeared as a book the same year. The description of the statare housing in Scania provoked protests: a Scanian daily gathered signatures against the image given of the province. The debate concerned the sanitary and social conditions of the countryside, which later became the object of reforms. The book was reissued in facsimile in 1984, and the surviving broadcasts are online at Litteraturbanken.
Who it is for
A report in Swedish, with no French or English translation; the text is online, and some of the broadcasts can be listened to.
Prizes and reception
The work for which its author is best known, regarded as one of the first great social reports on Swedish radio.
Sources for this page 6
The pages consulted to check this page.