A World Apart: The Journal of a Gulag Survivor (Polish: Inny świat: zapiski sowieckie)[1] is a memoir written by Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, combining various literary genres: novel, essay, psychological portrait, as well as sociological and political dissertation.

An epigraph to Grudziński's book quotes Dostoyevsky: "Here there is a world apart, unlike everything else, with laws of its own, its own manners and customs, and here in the house of the living dead — life as nowhere else and a people apart".

[3][4] 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 Arkhangelsk Oblast, 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.

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".