Gustaw HerlingEstate
Gustaw Herling-Grudziński was born in Kielce, Poland in 1919. After the outbreak of World War II and the invasion of Poland, Herling, an active member of the resistance, escaped from the Nazi occupied territories intending to reach Romania, but was arrested in 1940 and deported to the Soviet gulag in Yercevo. When, following Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Stalin’s temporary amnesty for political prisoners in 1941 failed to secure his release, Herling went on hunger strike, almost paying with his life. On finally gaining his freedom in January 1942, Herling joined General Władysław Anders and hundreds of thousands of other released deportees and prisoners in Kazakhstan in the newly created division of the Polish Army, the II Corps, with whom he later fought alongside the Allies in central Italy at Monte Cassino and Ancona.
His first prose, articles and reviews appeared from 1943 in the Polish Army in the Middle East’s periodicals: Kurier Polski (‘Polish Courier’, Baghdad), W drodze (‘On the Road’, Jerusalem) and Dziennik żołnierza APW (‘Soldier’s Daily’, Rome). After the war he remained for a time in Rome where he took the post of literary editor of the periodical Orzeł Bialy (‘White Eagle’). At the end of 1946 with Jerzy Giedrojć and Józef Czapski he co-founded the Instytut Literacki (Literary Institute) and the political and cultural periodical, Kultura (‘Culture’), which virtually sustained Polish culture through the decades when Communists ruled Poland and free expression was censored. At the same time he contributed articles, essays and short stories for Wiadomości ([Literary] ‘News’), which was published in London. He moved there in 1948 and then to Munich, where he worked for the Polish Service of Radio Free Europe.
Herling’s memoir of his experiences in the Soviet gulags, A World Apart, which was one of the first and most enduring accounts of life and death in the Soviet network of prisons and labour camps, appeared in 1951 in English translation, with a foreword by Bertrand Russell, whilst the original Polish edition was published by Gryf, in London in 1953. This was followed by editions in the US, Sweden, Germany, Italy, Argentina, Japan, Hong Kong and also an Arabic edition. In Poland it was initially published in the underground press in 1953, with the first official edition appearing in 1989.
In 1955 Gustaw Herling married the daughter of Benedetto Croce, the Italian philosopher and literary critic, and settled in Naples. This saw the start of long term collaboration with the Italian periodicals Il Mondo and Tempo presente (1956-1968) and frequent contributions to Il Corriere della Sera, Elsinore, L’espresso, La Fiera Letteraria, Il Giornale, La Stampa, and Il Mattino. He continued to write for the London Wiadomości until 1969 and Na antenie (‘On the Air’, Munich) until 1967. In 1966 he resumed his collaboration with Kultura in Paris, providing prose, sketches, articles, literary reviews and translations. In 1971 Herling commenced writing his Dziennik pisany nocą (‘Journal Written at Night’), a work spanning three decades and covering fiction, essays, anecdote, memoir and criticism.
Gustaw Herling was awarded many literary prizes, including the Italian Premio Viareggio and Premio Vittorini, the international Prix Gutenberg and the French Pen-Club Award (1986). Polish awards include Kultura in Paris (1958), the Jurzykowski Foundation Prize in New York (1964), the Kościelski Prize (1966) and the Wiadomości award of the London-based journal (1981).
He died on 4 July 2000, in Naples. The drafts of two novellas, one unfinished, were found in his study and published posthumously in Poland in 2006 and 2007 by Wydawnictwo Literackie, who are the publisher for the author’s entire oeuvre.
