A World Apart (book)

A World Apart

Front cover, 1986 edition
Author	Gustaw Herling-Grudziński
Original title	Inny świat: zapiski sowieckie
Translator	Joseph Marek (pseudonym of Andrzej Ciołkosz)
Country	Great Britain
Language	English
Genre	Memoir
Publisher	Arbor House
Publication date	Polish samizdat 1980
Published in English	1951 (1986, 1996 reprints)
Media type	Print (Hardcover, Paperback)
ISBN

A World Apart: The Journal of a Gulag Survivor (Polish: Inny świat: zapiski sowieckie) is a memoir written by Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, combining various literary genres: novel, essay, psychological portrait, as well as sociological and political dissertation. It was first published in 1951 in London in the English translation by Andrzej Ciołkosz. In the Polish language, the book was first published in London in 1953, then in Poland by the underground press in 1980, and officially in 1988.

The book title, A World Apart is an allusion to the Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel, Notes from the House of the Dead. An epigraph to Grudziński's book quotes Dostoyevsky: "Here there is a world apart, unlike everything else, with laws of its own, its own manners and customs, and here in the house of the living dead — life as nowhere else and a people apart". It expresses Herling's convictions that the Gulag environment 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. In addition, a number of elements of the plot are associated with the House of the Dead.

The book A World Apart contains the author's recollections beginning from his time spent incarcerated in the former USSR Gulag labour camp in Yertsevo in Arkhangelsk Oblast, and a description of the journey he took to join the Polish divisions forming in Persia. Written 10 years before Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, it brought him international acclaim but also criticism from Soviet sympathizers.