A World Apart (G. Herling-Grudziński)

Cover from the English edition of “A world apart”. Publishing house: Heinemann.

Title:
Inny świat [A World Apart]

Author: Gustaw Herling-Grudziński (1919-2000)

Years of writing: July 1949-July 1950

Year of first publication: 1951

Publisher: Heinemann

Place of publication: London

Description:
Inny świat (A World Apart) is a unique work of concentration camp literature, written by a Polish expatriate who emigrated to Italy during the late Stalinist era. Of Jewish origin, Gustaw Herling-Grudziński grew up in Kielce, where he was born in 1919. In 1937, he enrolled at the University of Warsaw. His youthful interest in Marxism, literature and Benedetto Croce’s philosophy of freedom was superseded by a more active resistance when Herling joined PLAN (Polska Ludowa Akcja Niepodległościowa), a Polish liberation organisation, after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939.
He took part in the partisan resistance against the Sovietisation of the Białystok and Lviv regions and was arrested by the NKVD in Grodno on charges of espionage. He was imprisoned in Vitebsk and on 20^th September was sentenced to 5 years hard labour (cf. Herling 2006: 27-37). From December 1940, he served his sentence in Kargopol’Lag (Ercevo station), in the Archangel’sk region, where he was imprisoned until 20^th January 1942, when he was released following the Sikorski-Maysky pact. During his imprisonment, he read Zapiski iz mertvogo doma (Memoirs from the House of the Dead) by F. Dostoevskii, a text that would strongly influence A World Apart. As Alberto Cavaglion recalls, with Herling, it is “necessary to keep in mind Dostoevsky’s legacy, his concept of safeguarding human dignity, his perception of time and ability to adapt, the redemptive role of literature, experiences lived ‘as dreams’, and that superior realism that denounces evil and affirms good…” (Cavaglion 2004: 16). Herling’s experiences of war had a profound influence on the writer. After being liberated from the gulag, he enlisted in the Polish troops under the British aegis of General Władysław Anders, producing reports on events of the war. He travelled through Russia, Kazakhstan, and the Middle East and with the Second Polish Corps landed in Italy, where he took part in the Battle of Monte Cassino.
After the war, Herling was involved in “Kultura”, a magazine published in Rome and Paris (under the direction of Jerzy Giedroyc), which became a channel for underground Polish literature. He helped to found Instytut Literacki, Giedroyc’s parallel editorial project, which gave voice to various Polish authors, including Adam Mickiewicz (Book of the Polish Nation and Pilgrims). In his literary wanderings ‘towards freedom’, Herling hoped for the development of a democratic Poland and warned against Stalinism, but also against nationalist extremism and messianism which he felt was latent in the most conservative Polish ideologies.
During his time in London, where he lived between 1947 and 1952, he contributed to Mieczysław Grydzewski’s weekly publication “Wiadomości” and wrote A World Apart between 1949 and 1950. Thanks to the positive response of Bertrand Russell, who wrote the preface to the English edition, the book was published in 1951 by Heinemann, with the title A World Apart (cf. Herling 2017: 343-344). The success of his work alleviated Herling’s precarious financial circumstances (cf. Cataluccio 2017: XIV-XV). In 1953, the text was published in Polish in London with the title Inny świat. Zapiski sowieckie; having secured a job at Radio Free Europe in autumn 1952, Herling had moved to Munich. His stay in Germany was tainted by the suicide of his wife, the painter Krystina Stojanowska-Domańska, whom he had met in Iraq in 1945. From 1955 onwards, the author settled in Naples, where he married Lidia, the third daughter of Benedetto Croce.
After much procrastination, the publisher Vito Laterza published the work in 1958, with a brief note by I. Silone and a translation by Gaspare Magi, a pseudonym for Lidia Croce and Antonio Maresca (cf. Herling, Marrone 1995: 14-23).  The Italian publication of Inny świat was greeted with criticism from the Left.  To many, such as Franco Fortini, Herling’s uncomfortable testimony sounded like an indictment of Soviet socialism, although there were favourable reviews, for example from Paolo Milano in “L’Espresso” who acknowledged the admirable impartiality of Herling’s narration: “this, more than a document or a memoir, is a Bildungsroman, the novel of an education, not in the shadow of a bourgeois family, but behind barbed wire and in the snows of a labour camp” (Milano 1958: 17). In 1965, Rizzoli published Herling’s work, largely thanks to Domenico Porzio.  Again, apart from Giancarlo Vigorelli, the publication met with indifference and was attacked by communist critics, including Gianni Toti in “Paese Sera” (cf. Cataluccio 2017: XXIV).
In France, too, the Left greeted the work with hostility; in a letter dated 25^th June 1956, Albert Camus, informed Herling that although he appreciated the text, the publisher Gallimard opposed its publication for “commercial reasons” (cf. Herling 2017: 196-7).  In 1965, in Paris, the text was published in Polish, thanks to “Kultura”; a French edition was not published until 1985.
Despite the animosity of the Italian and French Left, Herling collaborated with many newspapers and magazines from the 1950s onwards, including “Tempo presente” edited by Chiaromonte and Silone, “Il Mondo” by Pannunzio, and “Il Corriere della Sera” under Spadolini (at the end of the 1960s). The result was an abundance of publications and reviews in Italian, as well as prose works, including Upiory rewolucji (The Spectres of the Revolution) in 1969 and Dziennik pisany nocą (Diary Written at Night), in which the author describes his own struggle as a “tumult among the dust” in the “accelerated rhythm of history” (Herling 1994: 23-24).
Herling was fascinated by Russian literature, seeing its roots in the ideas of Herzen and the works of Dostoevskii, Mandel’shtam and Bulgakov, and its flowering in authors close to him, such as Solzhenitsyn and, above all, Shalamov. A World Apart circulated in Russian at first in the West, under the title Inoi mir, translated from the Polish by Natal’ia Gorbanevskaia (London, Overseas Publications Interchange, 1989). An updated St. Petersburg version published by Ivan Limbakh, came out in 2019. Since 1988, the work has been available in Poland. Herling was able to return to his homeland in May 1991, when he was awarded an honorary degree in Poznan. An Italian translation revised by the author was reissued by Feltrinelli in 1994. Of particular interest is the 2017 Oscar Mondadori edition which is enriched by archival documents (cf. Cataluccio 2017; Herling Archive). Thanks to the efforts of his daughter Marta Herling, the historian Francesco Cataluccio and Italian academics such as Luigi Marinelli, Herling’s work has been re-evaluated in the last two decades (cf. Marinelli, Herling 2014; Ajres 2018).

Marco Sabbatini
[30th June 2021]

Translation by Cecilia Martino

Bibliography

• Ajres A., L’autobiografia italiana nei racconti di Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, “Polonica”, no. 4, series of Polish language and literature, Aracne, Roma 2018.
• Cataluccio F., La trappola del mondo a parte, in G. Herling, Un mondo a parte, Mondadori, Milano 2017: V-XXXI.
• Cavaglion A., Il tempo del disprezzo, “L’indice”, 02/2004: 16.
• Gustaw Herling-Grudziński Archive (at the Foundation “Biblioteca Benedetto Croce”) http://www.fondazionebenedettocroce.it/it/53/archivio-di-gustaw-herling-grudzinski , online (last accessed: 30/06/2021).
• Herling G., Un mondo a parte, transl. into Italian by G. Magi, revised by the author, Feltrinelli, Milano 1994.
• Herling G., Un mondo a parte. With texts and documents from the G. Herling archive, Feltrinelli, Milano 2017.
• Herling G., Marrone T., Controluce, afterword by S. Romano, Tullio Pironti Editore, Napoli 1995.
• Herling G., Il pellegrino della libertà. Saggi e racconti, edited by M. Herling, L’ancora del Mediterraneo, Napoli 2006.
• Herling G., Etica e letteratura, edited by K. Jaworska, Meridiani Mondadori, Milano 2019.
• Marinelli L., Herling, M. (eds.), Dall’Europa Illegale all’Europa Unita. Gustaw Herling Grudzinski: l’Uomo, lo Scrittore, l’Opera, Polish Academy of Sciences Library and Study Centre in Rome, Roma 2015.
• Milano P., Un mondo a parte, “L’Espresso”, 09/06/1958: 17.