A World Apart (book)

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A World Apart (full title - "A World Apart: a Memoir of the Gulag", Polish title - "Inny świat: zapiski sowieckie") - a novel written by Gustaw Herling, first published in 1951 in London (first published in Poland in the underground press in 1953, and officially in 1988 ), combining various literary genres: novel, essay, psychological portrait, sociological and political dissertation. The book takes its Polish subtitle ('Soviet Notes) from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel, Notes from the House of the Dead, which expresses Herling's convictions that the concentration camp does not belong to the normal, human world, but is a type of sick and distinctive civilisation which is contrary to all previous human experience.

The book contains the author's recollections from his time spent incarcerated in the former USSR in a labour camp in Yertsevo in Siberia and a description of the journey he took to join the Polish divisions forming in Persia.

The book contains detailed, often drastic depictions from the lives of prisoners. Much of the book is given to the analysis and interpretation of the attitudes, behaviour and emotions of specific prisoners and also to the internal mechanisms and independent laws of behaviour in the camps.

The book was initially greeted well in England, with a foreword written by Bertrand Russell but had to wait until 1985 for its publication in France. According to Herling, this was due to the reluctance of the left-leaning publishing houses in that country^[1]. With greater interest in the Gulag, it has been reprinted in Britain, with the foreword written this time by Anne Applebaum.