Un Monde à part de Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, version « goulaguienne » du « voyage en Russie »

Gustaw Herling-Grudziński (1919-2000) was arrested by the NKVD in March 1940 near the Polish-Lithuanian frontier, and after seven months' imprisonment was sent to one of the Kargopol labour camps, south of Arkhangelsk, where he remained until January 1942. He relates that experience in A World apart (1951), whose title is a reference to Dostoevsky's House of the Dead. This book reveals Herling's outstanding powers of observation, his constant interest in people - here, his Russian fellow-prisoners -, and his remarkable literary gifts, so that it can be seen not only as one of the earliest accounts of life in the Gulag, but also as one of the great works of twentieth-century Polish literature.