Analysis of book reviews is a means of studying the reception of translations in a given culture. Discourses used in reviews reflect reactions of individual writers and attitudes of whole social groups towards the reviewed translations. The aim of this article is to introduce a case study of the reception of a Russian-Finnish translation of a non-fiction book on the political history of Finland. The discourses are examined from the point of view of the notions of foreignisation and domestication. The material consists of fifty reviews of Yuri Komissarov’s book from 1974 entitled in the Finnish translation Suomi löytää linjansa (‘Finland finds its course’). The analysis of the reviews showed that there occurred two main discourses: a discourse of acceptance and a discourse of rejection. These two discourses are described from the following point of views: 1) determining the genre, 2) reviewing the language and 3) evaluating socio-cultural effects of translation. The discourse of acceptance defends the place of Komissarov’s book as a resistant translation, a text which challenges the canon of history texts written by Finnish authors. The discourse of rejection re-determines the genre of the translated text and excludes it as a foreign element from the canon of history.