Esentially, Gustav Herling-Grudzinski’s prose style exhibits a subtle, almost unnerving quality at its core. The acclaimed Polish émigré’s calm sense of presence/absence on the page seems to be guided by an instinct for metaphor (and allegory) that curiously renders his work more, rather than less, intimate, in its effect on the reader. This 'manly poetics' is particularly poignant in Herling-Grudzinski’s detailed account of life in the vile gulag system of imprisonment under Soviet rule, titled A World Apart (first published in English in 1951).
In what is considered by many, on both ends of the critical divide, the first great book to emerge from the Gulag, Herling-Grudzinski recounts the eighteen months he spent in the secret Soviet camp system, through which almost twenty million people lost their lives.
We ask: What was Herling-Grudzinski’s crime?
Before the beginning of the Second World War, Herling-Grudzinski was a stanch anti-Nazi activist, a commitment which led to his subsequent arrest by the N.K.V.D. (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) as soon as the Soviet Government signed a treaty with Hitler. The twenty-year-old future writer was then sentenced to five years of hard labor in a gulag near the Artic circle. Fortunately, he was released after almost two years (he was assigned to join the Polish forces under Soviet control that fought against the Nazis), managed to escape through Persia (present-day Iran) to England, where he reconnected with the Polish government in exile.
Consequently, A World Apart documents the deferral of basic civil liberties under a government-led brutality, in some fashion similar to the vial policies enacted by the Third Reich. However, the relevance of Herling-Gruzinski’s work does not solely lie in the historically-specific revelation of the events described, but in the way the author-participant chose to portray them. Often compared to Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz and Fydor Dostoevsky’s House of the Dead, due to its shockingly vivid and thorough account of life in a prison camp, Herling-Grudzinski’s work possesses a distinct resonance that is both engaging and repelling. The spiritual aggravation and bedeviling alienation that plague Herling-Grudzinski’s ailing companions draw the reader in, making it difficult and yet irresistible to follow, to partake, to try and to understand.
How are we to understand something so belittling to mankind by mankind, in the name of freedom and protection for all?
I am not certain that we can ever understand the essence of why these atrocities were/are administered. Nonetheless, reading Herling-Gruzinski’s diaresque recounts of reality at its most trenchant is the requisite first step towards reaching into our mutual (infamous) history, noting how it ironically intertwines with our “liberated” present, finally realizing that facts do not simply occur in space and time, but that they constitute the outcome of people’s decisions, choices made, lives lived.
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