Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, *Another World: Soviet Notes* [1965]

Title: Another World: Soviet Notebooks.

Author: Gustaw Herling-Grudziński (1919–2000) [novelist, essayist, and literary critic; prisoner of a Soviet labor camp; soldier in the 2nd Corps; co-founder of the Paris-based journal *Kultura*].

Publisher: Paris, Literary Institute. Series: “Kultura” Library, vol. 111; Archives of the Revolution.

Year of publication: 1965.

Format: 19 cm.

Number of pages: 254, [1] p.

Binding: Paperback.

“Another World” is one of the most important accounts of the Soviet labor camp system, written ten years before Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago.” In it, Herling-Grudziński described his time in the labor camp in Yerkovo near Arkhangelsk from 1940 to 1942. He wrote the book in Rugby and London from July 1949 to July 1950. The working title was “The Living Dead,” a clear reference to Dostoevsky’s “Memoirs from the House of the Dead.” The first book edition was published in 1951 in English as *A World Apart*, translated by Andrzej Ciołkosz and with a foreword by Bertrand Russell. The first Polish edition was published in 1953 by the London-based “Gryf” publishing house. This 1965 edition from the Paris-based Institut Littéraire was the first to include the subtitle “Soviet Notes,” under which the book remains known to this day. In the People’s Republic of Poland, the work was banned and circulated exclusively on the black market starting in 1980. It was not officially published in the country until 1988–1989. Albert Camus wrote that this book should be published and read all over the world.

Gustaw Herling-Grudziński was born on May 20, 1919, in Kielce. He spent his childhood in Suchedniów. Before the war, he studied Polish language and literature at the University of Warsaw. In 1940, while attempting to escape to the West, he was arrested by the NKVD and sent to a labor camp. Released under the terms of the Sikorski–Majski Agreement, he joined Anders’s Army and fought at Monte Cassino. After the war, he remained in exile, co-founded the Paris-based journal *Kultura*, and lived in Naples from the 1950s onward. There he married Lidia, the daughter of the philosopher Benedetto Croce, and it was there that he wrote most of his *Diary Written at Night* and his short stories. He died in Naples on July 4, 2000. In September 2009, a monument dedicated to him was unveiled in Jercewo, and the Sejm of the Republic of Poland designated 2019 as the Year of Gustaw Herling-Grudziński.

Provenance: no ownership records or stamps. Publications by the Literary Institute were banned from distribution in the People’s Republic of Poland and confiscated at the border, which limits the number of pieces preserved in the country.

This is the Paris edition of a classic of Gulag literature, the first to bear the subtitle “Soviet Notes,” in its original publisher’s cover. A must-have for collectors of publications from the Paris-based “Kultura,” collectors of émigré literature, and researchers studying accounts of the Soviet camp system.

Each piece is clean, with a solid block of pages bound with metal staples, and shows discoloration of the paper typical of this type of publication. The cover is a paperback, made of publishing-grade paper.

Catalog ID: 7908-19-A-X