A World Apart (book)

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.