Description
The book A World Apart contains the author's recollections beginning from his time spent incarcerated in the former USSR Gulag labour camp in Yertsevo in Siberia, and a description of the journey he took to join the Polish divisions forming in Persia. Written 10 years before Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, it brought him international acclaim but also criticism from Soviet sympathizers.
The book contains detailed, often drastic depictions from the lives of Gulag prisoners. Much of the book is given to the analysis and interpretation of the attitudes, behaviour and emotions of specific prisoners and also to the internal mechanisms and independent laws of behaviour in the camps.
The book was initially greeted well in England, with a foreword written by Bertrand Russell but had to wait until 1985 for its publication in France. According to Herling, this was due to the reluctance of the left-leaning publishing houses in that country. With greater interest in the Gulag, it has been reprinted in Britain, with the foreword written this time by Anne Applebaum.
As Herling noted in a preface to the Russian edition (1986) of his book, the cultural establishment almost always followed Sartre’s advice: "even if it is true, don’t speak about it". The Russian edition preceded some Western language editions: the French translation of the book was not published until 1995, the Italian one until 1994, both delayed by the unwillingness of local pro-Soviet sympathizers to discuss Soviet crimes. The Polish bibuła underground edition was published in 1980, the normal edition was published only near the fall of communism in Poland, in 1988.
Read more about this topic: A World Apart (book)
Famous quotes containing the word description:
“To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“The great object in life is Sensation—to feel that we exist, even though in pain; it is this “craving void” which drives us to gaming, to battle, to travel, to intemperate but keenly felt pursuits of every description whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“Once a child has demonstrated his capacity for independent functioning in any area, his lapses into dependent behavior, even though temporary, make the mother feel that she is being taken advantage of....What only yesterday was a description of the child’s stage in life has become an indictment, a judgment.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)