„A World Apart”, „The Land of the Zeks”, and „The Dead House”

Abstract

In this paper, I try to indicate common ground in the two largest literary works devoted to Soviet camps preceding Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, namely, A Journey to the Land of the Zeks by Julius Margolin and A World Apart by Gustaw Herling-Grudziński. These two books have gained such status in Western literary studies, but in Poland, however, literature researchers have not yet undertaken any important research on Margolin’s work. Both authors and their works have a lot in common: Margolin and Herling were in the same camp complex (Kargopollag); they both undertook a hunger strike in order to obtain their release from the camp and described it in their works, and both treated their works as one of the instruments for fighting against this inhuman system. Finally, they both read Dostoyevsky’s The House of the Dead in the Soviet camp, and this reading significantly shaped their understanding of the fate of the labour camp and its consequences.