[10] Some years before, Ludwik, a recent college graduate, is spending his summer at an agricultural work camp in a rural part of the Polish People’s Republic.

[13] Many regions of Poland declared themselves LGBT-free zones in 2019,[14] and Polish president Andrzej Duda commented that "LGBT ideology [is] even more destructive than Communism".

[20] A concert reading featuring four scenes from Act 1 was performed at Indiana University on January 20, 2024 at Auer Hall of the IU Jacobs School of Music.

[1] Tim Pfaff, reviewing in the San Francisco Bay Area Reporter, highlighted the author's "nimble, refined English" in a novel composed "without a whiff of sentimentality."

He drew attention to Jędrowski's "mastery of the first-person" framework, noting that as Ludwik writes to Janusz, the second-person "you" startles the reader with "its fusion of intimacy and the inevitability of their separation.

[2] Publishers Weekly gave the novel a starred review and described it as a "dazzling debut [that] charts an evocative sexual awakening and coming of age amid political unease in early 1980s Poland".

[6] Australia's Sydney Morning Herald described the novel as "grand and gorgeously written, as passionate, as shot through with melancholy as anything by Edmund White or Alan Hollinghurst."

The reviewer predicted that Swimming In the Dark was "bound to become a queer literary classic" citing "its rather sweeping political dimension [which] breaks new ground in the genre.

"[10] In June 2020, Vogue India called the novel "the year’s best [LGBTQ-themed] debut so far" and mentioned Jędrowski's "beautiful" writing, "as measured in its tenor as it is evocative in its emotion.