The sound of trees falling in the Arctic takes a long time to travel, and thus it may be understandable that one of the greatest of the Soviet prison-camp memoirs, Gustav Herling’s A World Apart,¹ should have been published in the United States only last year, over four decades after the experiences it describes took place. Herling’s book takes its title from a phrase in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes From the House of the Dead (1861-62), a work that was the originator and forerunner of the Russian labor-camp chronicle. And since Herling’s book is in spirit, structure, style, and import the true heir and sequel to Dostoevsky’s, it might be helpful, before considering the former, to have a look at the latter. Fortunately, this task is made easier by the recent publication of The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859, the third volume in Joseph Frank’s masterful biography of Dostoevsky,² which deals with the years in which The House of the Dead was written.

Joseph Frank’s book is an intelligent account of Dostoevsky’s literary and polemical ventures of the 1860’sand of his development as a thinker. Frank is judicious in his treatment of modern Dostoevsky scholarship, whether Freudian, hermeneutic, or formalist. More importantly, Frank uses his wide knowledge of European and American literature and philosophy to place Dostoevsky’s ideas in their proper historical context, clarifying his work and experiences by way of writers as diverse as Eugène Sue and William James. In this manner, Frank demonstrates how The House of the Dead is both a highly innovative work of the artistic imagination and also a powerful dialectical tool in Dostoevsky’s effort to refute some of the prevalent creeds of the day.

At the time of Dostoevsky’s conviction in 1849 for membership in an underground political group and his transport to the Tomsk prison in Western Siberia, he was a young utopian socialist fervently convinced of the necessity of a peasant revolution in Russia, to be led by radical intellectuals like himself. In prison, however, Dostoevsky was confronted for the first time by living representatives of the very class he yearned to liberate. This intimate and prolonged exposure to the Russian peasant, in however pathological a variant, produced in him a profound and far-reaching political and religious conversion (complicated by the emergence of his epilepsy).

The first and most unpleasant revelation was Dostoevsky’s discovery of how total and instinctual was the peasantry’s loathing of gentlemen like him, how ineradicable its sense that there could be no common hopes or destiny between laborers and members of the gentry. From this flowed Dostoevsky’s realization that any genuine, broad-based revolution, insofar as it would have to include the peasantry in its ranks, would be as bloody, as benighted, and as brutish as the peasant way of life itself.

Any honest and intelligent political thinker might have come to such a conclusion. It was Dostoevsky’s peculiar genius, however, the genius of a man who, in one contemporary’s words, “felt thought,” to transport that idea a step further. The theories of revolutionary socialism so popular in Europe and in Russia, Dostoevsky concluded, were not just impracticable, they were also inhuman and therefore detestable. Why? Because such schemes aimed to foist a new social reality upon their beneficiaries against their wills.

In Tomsk prison Dostoevsky acquired as profound an aversion to the force of compulsion as any intellectual has ever come by. What makes prison unbearable, he learned, is not the cold or the hardship, the disease or even the boredom; it is not the separation from one’s loved ones (certainly not Dostoevsky’s loved ones). It is, rather, that grown men are herded there together, each against his choosing. And here was the link between prison and the utopias being imagined by his contemporaries. So prescient and so complete was Dostoevsky’s understanding of where radical ideologies led that he termed the prison camp an experiment in “compulsory Communism.” (Of course, Dostoevsky at times cherished his own, nativist brand of communal millennialism, but the age he looked forward to was to be ushered in by the voluntary spirit of Christian brotherhood.)

This, then, is the lesson Dostoevsky learned in Siberia, and this is The House of the Dead’s most precious message: that liberty—the assertion of individuality and free will, even the will to choose evil—is the dearest and most fundamental of human needs.

As Frank shows, this idea was in large measure a response to the philosophy of rational materialism that was being advanced in Russia by the generation of “new men” led by N.G. Chernyshevsky, the young revolutionary whose ideas were later to influence Lenin and the Bolsheviks. In The Anthropological Principle of Philosophy (1860), a work Frank calls “the philosophical bible of the radical generation of the 1860’s,” Chernyshevsky posited the notion that man is a creature wholly subservient to the laws of nature, and espoused a Benthamite utilitarianism which rejected any appeal to morality in favor of “rational egoism,” the instinctive urge to act in one’s own best interests that would eventually lead man to establish a socialist and communal form of existence. As Frank notes, there was little room in this doctrine for notions either of free will and personal liberty or of the transcendent and supernatural. It was this mechanistic view of a world, with man as (in Dostoevsky’s words) “piano key or organ stop,” that was to rouse the novelist to the resounding profession of faith in God and humanity that is The House of the Dead.

Written five years before Crime and Punishment and almost twenty years before The Brothers Karamazov, The House of the Dead is the first masterpiece of Dostoevsky’s early maturity. (He was forty when it was published.) Highly original in its literary techniques, The House of the Dead had the kind of electrifying effect on contemporary Russian audiences that Dickens’s tales of workhouse orphanages and debtors’ jails are said to have had on the collective conscience of Victorian England. (The czarist censors, ironically enough, had a different view; they feared that the book’s picture of prison conditions was so benign, relatively speaking, that it would induce citizens to crime.)

Tolstoy rated The House of the Dead the best book “in all modern literature” and deemed it one of the very few which could serve as a model of “lofty religious art, inspired by love of God and one’s neighbor.” Turgenev, who was to excoriate Dostoevsky’s later Crime and Punishment as “smelly self-laceration,” compared the crowning scene in this earlier work with Dante’s Inferno, while Alexander Herzen wrote that Dostoevsky “had created out of the description of the customs of a Siberian prison a fresco in the spirit of Michelangelo.”

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What was it about this memoir which called forth such exalted praise, and from writers not usually susceptible to Dostoevsky’s brand of metaphysical transport?

The House of the Dead is a work of semi-fictionalized autobiography, modeled after the then-popular form of the impressionistic “sketch” used by Turgenev in A Sportsman’s Sketches and by Tolstoy in Sevastopol Stories. (Isaac Babel was later to infuse this form with a modernist verve.) In this book Dostoevsky describes in simple language the social structure of the Tomsk prison, from its kingpin racketeers down to its lackeys and pariahs. He details its work routines, its holidays, its theatricals, its public floggings, and, especially, the character and previous histories of its inmates. Here Dostoevsky presents the reader with a poignantly vivid rogues’ gallery of wretches comparable to the underworlds of Balzac or of Victor Hugo: the saintly Old Believer convicted of burning down a church, the Central Asian brigand-innocent who prattles of Mahomet and Jesus, the flibbertigibbet aristocrat (later a model for Dmitri Karamazov) imprisoned for alleged parricide, the polite and inscrutable killer who quizzes the narrator for information about Napoleon and who strikes him as the type of wantonly destructive leader that a genuine peasant revolution might throw up.

Although The House of the Dead is scarified by the author’s undying resentment at being reviled in prison by the very savages he longed to uplift, the book nonetheless manages to achieve a rare and loving sympathy for those same savages’ willful idiosyncrasies, a reverence for their occasional accesses of kindness and humility and for the strength of their religious faith:

It sometimes happened in prison that you knew a man for several years, thought of him as a brute and not a man at all, and despised him. Then suddenly a chance moment would reveal his soul in an involuntary convulsion and you saw in it such wealth, such feeling and heart, so clear an understanding of its own and others’ suffering, that your eyes would be opened and in the first moment you would hardly be able to believe what you yourself had seen and heard.

Dostoevsky’s book is filled with such epiphanies.³

The House of the Dead is a beautifully realized work of art, whose sometimes syncopated, sometimes treacle-slow depiction of time, as Frank points out, remarkably conveys the quality of days and years without freedom. Dostoevsky himself was justifiably proudest of the book’s authentic rendition of the gaudily high-flown and self-mocking cadences of convict argot, mournful and braggart by turns. Altogether, the memoir vindicates the poet Joseph Brodsky’s general judgment of the kind of writer Dostoevsky represents: “Closing his book is like waking up with a changed face.”

In addition to its intrinsic literary virtues, The House of the Dead has also been seen as the prototype of Dostoevsky’s later and greatest novels. For here he may be said to have discovered and explored one of his abiding subjects: crime and the origins of evil in the human soul. Here we see Dostoevsky charting by case-study some of the more paradoxical impulses which assail us: the lust for cruelty toward others and for self-laceration, the desire to degrade what we most revere, the corrosive effects of power on an upright man, all the twists and coilings of the psyche which characterize Dostoevsky’s greatest novels. Indeed, although The House of the Dead has been labeled by many scholars the “least Dostoevskian” of Dostoevsky’s works—a judgment in which Joseph Frank concurs—I would suggest that if we mean by “Dostoevskian” precisely this quality of psychomachia, of a pitched battle for the soul between intensely realized individuals embodying the psychological extremes of a particular idea or philosophical concept, then The House of the Dead is in fact one of the most Dostoevskian of Dostoevsky’s books. It is in large part thanks to Frank’s elucidation of the intellectual origins and context of The House of the Dead that we can now see this more clearly.

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It is no wonder that the insistence on freedom and moral autonomy which lies at the center of Dostoevsky’s prison memoir should have had a very special meaning to those 20th-century inmates of the Soviet Gulag who came upon it. This latter institution has inspired works of art as different as Varlam Shalamov’s subtle and delicately suggestive Kolyma Tales and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, a book as elemental in its energy and grandeur (and ferocious humor) as a waterfall or a volcano. But of all the Soviet labor-camp memoirs, the one which is most intimately a sequel to The House of the Dead is Gustav Herling’s A World Apart.

Herling’s is not an uncommon story. Born in 1919, Herling (whose full name is Gustav Herling-Grudzinski) is a Polish literary critic and—at least at the time of this book’s composition—a socialist, who was arrested in 1940 crossing from Soviet-occupied Poland into Lithuania in order to fight the Germans. To Herling’s misfortune, the Soviet Union then enjoyed a friendship pact with Hitler’s Germany: Herling was charged with espionage and sentenced to five years’ hard labor. He was released in 1942 under an amnesty for Polish prisoners and joined the Polish army in Italy; he now lives in Naples, where he serves on the board of the Paris-based Polish review Kultura. A World Apart, written in 1949-50, is Herling’s account of his eighteen months in the labor-camp complex of Kargopol near Archangel on the White Sea (just south of the Arctic Circle).

The memoir’s fate is an interesting and revealing one. Herling writes as a leftist, bringing the news to other leftists that the paradisiacal Soviet Union is in fact a mammoth slave camp, a state in which “it is possible to cease to believe in man, and in the purpose of the struggle to improve his lot on earth.” His tidings of the Soviet Gulag, in which over twenty million men and women were then being held prisoner and were dying like flies, did in fact come as news to the West, and unwelcome news at that. In 1951, the book was published in England to great acclaim; in a preface, Bertrand Russell scourged fellow-travelers of Soviet Communism but urged universal forgiveness for the crimes in which those fellow-travelers were complicit. (A curious reversal, this, of the dictum that we must love the sinner, not the sin.) The memoir also appeared in Italy in 1958, with a glowing introduction by Ignazio Silone.

In France, the cultural climate was less hospitable. In 1956 Albert Camus, then an editor at the prestigious publishing house Gallimard, accepted A World Apart for publication, declaring it a literary masterpiece; but he was later forced to send Herling a shamefaced note rejecting the book for commercial reasons. In a recent article in the Mexican literary journal Vuelta, Alberto Ruy Sanchez has plausibly suggested that Camus’s fellow editors at Gallimard, Louis Aragon, a member of the Communist party, and Jean-Paul Sartre, a Communist sympathizer, were responsible for this forced turnabout. A World Apart did not appear in France until 1985 (with a preface by the Spanish novelist Jorge Semprun), a good thirty years after its original submission.

Camus declared that Herling’s book “should be published and read in every country as much for what it is as for what it says.” This judgment invites us to consider A World Apart as we do The House of the Dead, both as a work of literary art and as a philosophical credo.

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A World Apart is a powerfully constructed piece of work. As it opens, Herling, having received his five-year sentence, waits in Vitebsk prison for transport to the White Sea camp. In prison he encounters a “dark Jew,” a young Communist architect, who “weeping bitterly announced that France had fallen.” At the book’s close, 260 pages later, a flashback to the opening scene precedes a description of Herling’s meeting the same man five years later in Rome after the end of the war in Europe. There the architect tremblingly reveals to Herling a secret that torments him and that only a fellow graduate of the Soviet Gulag can understand: in the camps he had once, on NKVD orders, denounced four innocent German prisoners rather than die himself. “I would like you to listen, and when you have heard me out, to say just one word, say only, ‘I understand,’” the young man implores.

“In 1945 I already had three years of freedom behind me, three years of military wanderings and battles, of normal feelings, love, friendship, and sympathy,” Herling writes. “The days of our lives are not like the days of our death, and the laws of our life are not the laws of our death. I had come back among people, with human standards and conceptions, and was I now to escape from them, abandon them, voluntarily betray them?” He turns his back on the man, and waits until he hears him leave the room, closing the door gently behind him. End of book.

Within this literary framework, which expresses so trenchantly the chasm between slavery and freedom, is Herling’s own story of the House of the Dead, and of those hopes and habits which alone keep its inmates alive.

His tale of Kargopol is laid out in a simple, modest, and leisurely manner, itself reminiscent of Dostoevsky, a careful pace that represents a kind of slowing of the pulses. One chapter tells about the brotherhood of common criminals which terrorizes the camp and its women prisoners, another about forced labor, another about hunger and its different effects on men and women prisoners. In one chapter Herling describes nightfall in the camp, and the attendant fears of death that it brings; for all the prisoners in Kargopol are dying, and dying quite quickly of starvation and exhaustion, and none knows where he will be buried, or who will live to tell of it. One chapter is devoted to the rare “day of rest” during which prisoners seek to duplicate, in makeshift, their domestic leisure as free men. Another, to my mind one of the most heartrending episodes in modern literature, describes the House of Meetings, where lucky convicts are allowed to spend three days, mostly in silence and weeping, with visitors from the real world.

Another painfully unforgettable chapter tells of the effects of reading in prison a smuggled copy of Dostoevsky’s memoir, with its exact rendering, one hundred years earlier, of Herling’s own experiences; the thought of this continuous and unbroken tradition of slavery and dehumanization in Russian life drives him to inconsolable despair and a fellow inmate to attempt suicide. The last quarter of the book, curiously enough the least interesting, chronicles the hunger strike Herling undertakes in order to obtain the freedom promised for Polish prisoners by a Soviet-Polish agreement of 1941, his eventual victory in this attempt, and his slow journey west to join the Polish army.

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Initially, the reader coming from Dostoevsky may be struck not by the similarities Herling himself perceives, but by shocking differences of degree and intent between Soviet prisons and the penal institutions of an earlier age. Where Dostoevsky’s prisoners pass the time counting off the hours and days until their release, in the Soviet Gulag prisoners are so certain of dying before their sentence is up, or—should they miraculously survive—of being re sentenced indefinitely, that speaking of liberty or liberation is taboo. Where Dostoevsky’s prisoners buy their own food from local vendors, hire their own cooks, and are issued a good ration of meat a day, Herling’s are rapidly starving to death and many are afflicted with the various kinds of dementia and blindness which starvation brings with it. Where Dostoevsky’s prisoners chatter extravagantly, Herling’s either are informers or live in dread of being denounced and shot for a careless word. Where Dostoevsky’s prisoners are with a few exceptions murderers or thieves, Herling’s have been incarcerated for “crimes” as various as having received a postcard from abroad, having a relative who was swept up in a purge, or having been taken prisoner while in the Red Army.

These differences of content aside, Herling has drunk deeply of the literary art of Dostoevsky in The House of the Dead. Indeed, when it comes to depicting with almost surrealistic vividness the psychological manifestations of an idea, he may even be said to go farther than his Russian predecessor. Thus, in a chapter titled “The Icebreaker,” Herling delineates the gradual effects of Soviet Communism on a simple and religious nature. Misha Kostylev, a young naval engineer and the sole support of his widowed mother, is fired by Communist zeal “to the cause of liberating enslaved Europeans in the name not of hatred, but of love for the unknown West.” To this end, he learns French. But his reading of the 19th-century French classics awakens him instead to a magical new world of freedom. “Liberate the West!” he now asks. “From what? From a life of happiness such as we have never known?” As he explains his turn of conscience to the author, “I was like an icebound ship, and it’s no wonder that I tried to escape into warm waters.”

Kostylev is immediately arrested for reading foreign books and subjected to a year of interrogations and hearings. The combination of being beaten to a pulp, kept without sleep for days and nights on end, cross-questioned and accused of fantastic crimes, eventually dissolves this “icebreaker” of a man into submission and even a feeling of gratitude toward his torturers. It is, finally, with relief at the chance to atone for his crimes against the state that the newborn Kostylev goes to the labor camps. Yet still he tries, by what Dostoevsky in his time called a “voluntary and almost artificial martyrdom,” to preserve his sense of pity and to remain linked to the buried past in which he was once a sentient human being. Kostylev eventually boils himself alive, rather than be sent to the Kolyma death camps.

Herling uses Kostylev’s story to formulate in the most precise mechanistic metaphor the manner in which a man’s spirit is broken and reset by the NKVD. Under interrogation,

gaps appear in the logical association of ideas; thoughts and emotions become loosened in their original positions and rattle against each other like the parts of a broken-down machine; the driving belts connecting the past with the present slip off their wheels and fall sloppily to the bottom of the mind; all the weights and levers of mind and will-power become jammed and refuse to function; the indicators of the pressure gauges jump as if possessed from zero to maximum and back again. The machine still runs on larger revolutions, but it does not work as it did—all that had a moment before appeared absurd now becomes probable even though still not true, emotions lose their color, will-power its capacity.

At this point the engineers of the soul begin to retool; working now as surgeons, they transplant a man’s heart to the other side of his body, change the direction of the blood’s circulation, remove infected parts of the brain. The reborn prisoner, weak but grateful, is eager to get to work, worried only by occasional twinges from his past but soon persuaded by the bestiality of the “hungry madmen” with whom he shares a berth and barracks that truly “the iron broom of Soviet justice sweeps only rubbish into its camps.”

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As a work of literary art A World Apart is truly golden, and it has been nobly served by its translator, Joseph Marek. Herling’s prose style, calm, poetic, manly, is guided by an instinct for metaphor and allegory which works curiously enough to render his book more rather than less personal in its effects. Moreover, the imaginative and intimate intensity of the prose in A World Apart serves as a natural vehicle for (to quote Herling himself on one inmate, a former priest) “an understanding, sympathetic, instinctively religious attitude to human suffering.” This all-comprehending sympathy which suffuses A World Apart is the more invigorating for being leavened with an immense personal rigor—Herling takes some pride in having been one of the camp “Stakhanovites,” those Herculean laborers of Stalinist origin who fulfill their production quotas many times over—and also with a certain caustic realism about human potential.

Despite Herling’s avowed socialism, and his periodic aspersions on the Roman Catholic Church, A World Apart is in fact a deeply religious book, a book which frequently gives one the sense, rare in modern literature, of a man talking to God. Thus, the author writes of his stay in a prison hospital ward:

For a man unaccustomed to the violent contrasts of Soviet life, camp hospitals seemed like churches which offer sanctuary from an all-powerful Inquisition. . . . The hospital was the only place, in camp and prison alike, where the light was extinguished at night. And it was there, in the darkness, that I realized for the first time in my life that in man’s whole life only solitude can bring him absolute inward peace and restore his individuality. Only in all-embracing loneliness, in darkness which conceals the outlines of the external world, is it possible to know that one is oneself, to feel that individuality emerging, until one reaches the stage of doubt when one becomes conscious of one’s insignificance in the extent of the universe. . . . If this condition savors of mysticism, if it forces one into the arms of religion, then I certainly discovered religion, and I prayed blasphemously, “O God, give me solitude, for I hate all men.”

It must be said, however, that for all its loving sympathy, A World Apart also mirrors Dostoevsky in another lamentable respect: whenever a Jew appears in Herling’s tale, the narrative turns very grim indeed, taking on a tone of contempt and dislike which chills the reader to the heart. This tone is fleshed out by uncommonly nasty physical descriptions unlike any found elsewhere in the book. In A World Apart, Jewish eyes are either fishlike, inflamed, or peering from flabby faces “like currants pressed into dough.” Jewish hands are invariably “clawlike,” Jewish noses hooked or like “large gherkins.” Jews in Herling’s book do not talk or weep like other men but huff, puff, whine, and wail, and though they are musical, they make themselves repellent by their mannered performances. Similarly, Jewish sorrows, individual or collective, are described with an altogether uncharacteristic coldness.

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Such telltale disfigurements aside, Herling’s is one of the very greatest books to have been written about the totalitarian prison camp, both because of its profound literary distinction and because of the searching intelligence which its author brings to his exploration of the peculiar nature of Soviet evil. It is almost an incidental virtue of this work that the slavery it so electrifyingly depicts is shown to be thoroughly endemic to Soviet Communism, an essential and seemingly permanent element in its equation of power.

The British politician and journalist R.H.S. Crossman, in his introduction to The God That Failed, spoke thus of the unique ability of former Communists to understand and appreciate the values of Western democracy: “The Devil once lived in Heaven, and those who have not met him are unlikely to recognize an angel when they see one.” So too one might say that those who have emerged from Russian prison camps, whether of the czarist variety or their more lethal Soviet successors, often achieve a peculiarly fierce love of liberty and reverence for the individual soul. The works produced by such men, though they themselves are by no means always admirers of the West, are an essential part of Western culture, serving as a continual exhortation to defend, strengthen, and extend those political institutions which best secure what Gustav Herling calls “the blessed irreplaceable” freedom.

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¹ Translated by Joseph Marek, Arbor House, 262 pp., $16.95.

² Princeton University Press, 395 pp., $26.50.

³ The humanity which illuminates this book is extinguished, however, in the case of the moneylender Isay Bumstein, a chicken-necked conglomeration of cowardice and vanity whom Dostoevsky transforms into an observant Jew (his real-life original was Russian Orthodox) in order to burlesque what the author sees as the frantic mumbo-jumbo of Jewish ritual. Joseph Frank, who loves his subject for all the right reasons, is reluctant to give Dostoevsky's hatreds their due; for a more accurate picture of Dostoevsky on this subject, one must consult David Goldstein's Dostoevsky and the Jews.