Welt ohne Erbarmen [Inny świat], transl. Nina Kozlowski, München/Vien: Carl Hanser 2000; Frankfurt am Main: Büchergilde Gutenberg 2001; München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag 2004.
Die Insel [Skrzydła ołtarza], transl. Maryla Reifenberg, München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag 2004
Hungarian:
A második eljövetel. Válogatott esszék és elbeszélések (Drugie przyjście. Wybór esejów i opowiadań), Budapest: Orpheusz, 1998.
A sivatag forró lehelete [Gorący oddech pustyni], transl. Körtvélyessy Klára, Mihályi Zsuzsa, Pálfalvi Lojos, Budapest: Nagy Vilag, 2004.
Más világ [Inny świat], transl. Körtvélyessy Klára, Budapest: Nagyvilag 2004
Italian:
Gli spettri della rivoluzione ed altri saggi, (Widma rewolucji) Firenze: Ponte alle Grazie, 1994.
Le perle di Vermeer (Perly Vermeera), Roma: Fazi Editore, 1998.
La bianca notte dell’amore (Biała noc miłości), Ancora del Mare, 2004.
Macedonian:
Bela nok na ljubovta [Biała noc miłości], trans. Lidija Tanusevska, Skopje: Ili-ili, 2006
Variaciones sobre las tinieblas, Madrid: Metáfora, [2003].
Herling-Grudziński Gustaw
Born in Kielce in 1919, he died on 5 July 2000 in Italy. He made his debut in the inter-war period as a literary critic. During the war, he was arrested and confined in the Gulag in the Arctic, before leaving Russia in General Anders' army and fighting at Monte Cassino. He was a co-founder in 1947 and one of the original editors of Kultura, then published in Rome. When the magazine moved to Paris, he went to London before returning to Italy, where he has lived since 1952. He has won the Kultura (1958), Jurzykowski (1964), Koscielski (1966) and Wiadomosci (1981) prizes, as well as the Italian Premio Viareggio, the international Prix Gutenburg, and the French PEN-Club Award. He is one of the outstanding Polish writers of the twentieth century. His subjects are his own writing as well as the human opposition to various forms of nothingness (totalitarianism, religious doubt, the feeling of existential solitude, and the instrumentalization of life). His work includes literary criticism, prose, essays and original mixed forms. His critical works reflect his interest in Russian literature, the European classics, and painting. The erudition of his sketches on art shows that for Herling, culture is a metaphysical manifestation of human uncertainty, as well as the most capacious of the symbolic languages serving sensual perception. As a writer, Herling was reborn under the force of his Gulag experiences, which he recorded and transformed in Inny swiat (Another World), 1951, one of the first and best works on the subject in world literature. The book is a credible documentary description of living conditions in the Soviet camps, and at the same time a story about the essence of totalitarianism, the borders of humanity, the unfathomable depths to which man can fall, and the human strength through which dignity can overcome any fate. In his stories, Herling traces the "individual fate" that mark each person's private road toward reconciliation with death. The literary specifics of his works, which might be called metaphysical crime stories, are determined by his renewal of the forms of the nineteenth-century tale, as in Poe, Melville and James. "Original traditionalism" also marks his Journal Written at Night, a work initiated in 1971 and continued down to the present day, containing classical journal entries next to essays on art, political commentaries, and works of fiction.
