Gustaw Herling faced more suffering and depravity in two years than many men encounter in a lifetime. Yet he never lost his fascination for the fine line that separates hope and despair, or for the complex interaction of good and evil that can shape even the most ordinary of lives. “The human organism is an unfathomable machine,” he wrote several years after his release from a Soviet labor camp. Nevertheless, until his death in 2000, Herling sought, with grace, eloquence, and discretion, to plumb the depths of this organism he saw pushed to the extremes of degradation and exaltation.

In 1940, the twenty-year-old Herling, an idealistic student at Warsaw University, tried to cross the border from Soviet-occupied Poland into the area occupied by the Germans in order to fight the Nazis, then Russia’s allies. Caught by the NKVD, Herling was first sent to Vitebsk prison, then sentenced to five years in the Yercevo camp. When Hitler breached his nonaggression pact with Stalin, almost all of the Polish prisoners in the Gulag were granted amnesty so that they could fight alongside the Red Army. Herling and five other Poles in Yercevo, however, were passed over. They remained imprisoned in political limbo for several months until they forced the camp authorities’ hands by staging a hunger strike. The irony of this strike defies the imagination. All around Herling, thousands of men and women were dying of hunger each year, and yet the authorities, perhaps astounded by the Polish prisoners’ audacity, ceded to their demands and eventually released four of them.

The dispassionate tone of A World Apart (1951), Herling’s gripping memoir of his time in the Gulag, underscores the moral authority of his account by conveying the horror he endured and witnessed without sensationalism or sentimentality. At one point Herling describes his observations about his fellow prisoners’ behavior as “so objective and so indifferent even to pain.” But they are not. His outrage, sorrow, and compassion are implicit in every sentence. Yet he is wary of judging even those prisoners whose actions, in any other circumstances, would be considered objectively wrong. “I became convinced,” he explains, “that a man can be human only under human conditions, and I believe that it is fantastic nonsense to judge him by actions which he commits under inhuman conditions.” Herling’s wrath is reserved for those who consign others to the depths of man-made Hells like the Gulag or the Inquisition.

After the War, Herling eventually settled in Naples. He helped found the influential émigré journal Kultura, for which he wrote regular installments of his six-volume literary diary, Journal Written at Night. In Herling’s Journal, reflections on history as well as on current political and cultural events alternate with short stories, “true” and fictionalized autobiography, and literary and art criticism. Yet his many subjects lead to his main concern: the human condition and its uneasy balance between the poles of faith and reason, hope and despair, isolation and community.

Herling’s fiction is similarly oriented. The joys and ravages of solitude are the unifying theme of Herling’s three novellas collected in The Island (1993). The main characters in these novellas—a priest unable to bear the burden of his vocation, a stone mason mutilated in what appears to be a workplace accident, the leper from de Maistre’s Le Lépreux de la cité d’Aoste who is confined alone in a tower for many years, and a young priest tortured for heresy—all suffer protracted ordeals of physical and spiritual isolation. Like so much of the suffering Herling has described elsewhere, theirs is without inherent meaning. Some are purified and made stronger by their trials, others succumb. Forces of evil, whether manifested as crimes among men or as natural catastrophes, relentlessly buffet well- intentioned, but flawed individuals. Yet it is not all slings and arrows. Herling’s accomplishment, aside from the spare beauty of his prose, lies in complex and contradictory depictions of man’s “innate wretchedness, entangled with the eternal, yet eternally unsatisfied, yearning for holiness.”

With the thirteen stories collected in The Noonday Cemetery, Herling’s focus shifts to the seeds of evil that have taken root within his characters and blossom mysteriously with ambiguous results. Henry James and, more particularly, the governess in The Turn of the Screw, are this volume’s guiding spirits. Whether she actually saw “the spirits of Evil, victorious specters from beyond the grave” or suffered hallucinations is irrelevant to the narrator of these stories. Important, rather, is that she possessed the “different gaze of the initiated” who can see into the aura of mystery that envelops human affairs but is invisible to most. And the affairs recounted in this collection are murky indeed.

Herling’s plot lines border on the melodramatic, but the sparseness of his style and his respect for plausibility counterbalance any excesses of circumstance. In the title story, a double suicide—or murder and suicide—fascinates the narrator to the point of obsession but his investigation remains inconclusive. In “The Exorcist’s Brief Confession,” the narrator comes upon the diary of a priest who, overcome with righteous fury or some more lurid passion, appears to have mauled a young girl whose spirit he was to have healed. But a heart attack cuts the priest’s written confession short. In another story, the narrator’s search for a reliquary thought to have once contained Barabbas’s tooth leads to an investigation of heretical theories about the pardoned thief’s fate. Was he Jesus’s Manichean double? And what would have come of Christ’s teachings if Pontius Pilate had not released Barabbas as the crowd demanded, but pardoned Jesus instead?

There is a void at the center of most of these stories: an ancient document crumbles to dust before the narrator can decipher its secret; a confession is heard, but is too terrible to relate; criminal investigations are closed due to lack of evidence. There are also occasional vivid but unreliable dreams or visions that provide important clues. Some are truly horrifying, others slyly ironic, such as the narrator’s glimpse, he believes, of the spirit of a fifteenth-century nobleman stepping out of his portrait and giving a swift kick to an errant descendant.

“The Noonday Cemetery” provides as clear an artistic credo as Herling articulated. Rejecting Proust’s motto to “See clearly but in rapture” as a rationale for indulging in a “brilliantly executed showpiece for the theatrical affectation of the salon,” the narrator proposes instead that we “see clearly … not in rapture, though, but in bewilderment and terror.” Such extremes, however, are not ground for prurience. He demands writers exercise “restraint—artistic discretion, even—in their attempts to peer into the depths of the human soul.” And most importantly, they must resist the attempt to clarify and explain, lest too definite a resolution reduce their tale to a mere “accumulation of bizarre trivialities.” Essential truths are not free of mystery.

The stories in The Noonday Cemetery breathe the same rarified atmosphere as the novels of W. G. Sebald. The earliest story, “The Eyetooth of Barabbas,” was written in 1990, the same year Sebald’s first published novel, Vertigo, appeared in Germany, so it would be presumptuous to speak of either writer influencing the other. Yet Herling is decidedly Sebald’s Eastern double. In Herling’s stories, a melancholy narrator, at the mercy of a fragile constitution, travels far and wide on quests for “seemingly trivial and inconsequential details” from history. The narrator shares the author’s sensibilities, enthusiasms, professional accomplishments, and broad biographical outline, and, with many literary allusions and asides, reconstructs the story of an object or a life that has caught his insatiable curiosity.

These two excavators of the past share many of the same literary and historical touchstones, including Stendhal, Kafka, Conrad, and Casanova. And both are haunted by ghosts. While Sebald is pursued by ghosts of historical catastrophes, Herling is haunted by sinister shades of vaguer origin. And yet, Herling’s greater reticence with historical coincidence and the shorter form of his fiction help him avoid the claustrophobia and occasional longueurs of Sebald’s novels. Deeper penetration into his characters’ psyches and motivations lends Herling’s fiction a warmer, more intimate tone, though his narrative persona is no more self-revealing than the coyly evasive Sebaldian narrator. Still, the depth of Herling’s psychological insight does not clarify so much as it increases the mysteries of the human soul. Such, of course was his intent.

Herling occasionally put his literary ambiguity to very unambiguous ends. Despite his admiration for John Paul II, and his objection to abortion, Herling was appalled by the Pope’s appeal, after the Bosnian war, to the pregnant victims of the Bosnian Serb “rape camps” not to seek abortions, but to bear and love the children. He then wrote “Beata Santa,” the story of Marianna, a young Polish woman captured in one of the Serbian soldiers’s “ethnic dragnets” on a visit to her sister in Bosnia. Obedient to the Church, Marianna prepares to bear the child she now carries. She is unwilling to return to Poland and is taken in by Father Pietro, an Italian priest who spreads word of her serenity and saintly demeanor. The narrator, an exiled Polish journalist living in Naples, befriends her and is asked by the priest to explain Marianna’s occasional fits of delirium in which she raves in her native tongue. Her rantings are full of the horror beneath her placid and gentle demeanor, but her friend refuses to reveal her private torment.

Marianna dies after an agonizing delivery. The story is gruesome enough, not to mention heavy-handed, but Herling’s critique is more pointed. In a coda, Father Pietro claims to have heard sounds issuing from Marianna’s grave, and the Church launches its beatification process with an exhumation. Father Pietro’s dreams of Marianna’s sainthood are dashed when they find her corpse turned on its side, her face “distorted in a grimace of terror.” She had been buried alive, deep in a cataleptic sleep, and therefore her death is not an acceptable one for a martyr.

What makes “Beata Santa” more disturbing than a mere diatribe against the inflexibility and cynical propagandizing of institutionalized religion is the narrator’s confession of his deep fascination for Marianna’s misfortune and for her imperviousness to the aura of orchestrated “saintliness” with which the Church surrounded her.

From the moment when I heard her half-sleeping ravings and saw her altered face, I liked her even more for the tangle of conflicting human emotions in her. I did not want her to be a “pure saint” from a lithograph, I wanted her to be a “real saint”—in other words, one who is profoundly tainted.

The story sparked a controversy in the Polish Church and government on the issue of allowing abortions for victims of rape. Beyond its immediate historical and political circumstances, however, “Beata Santa” is of a piece with Herling’s other fiction in its exploration of the tenuous survival of good in the face of overwhelming hardship and of the seductive powers of evil.

“When it comes down to it, what is hope?” Herling asks. “Impotent rebellion against despair. Whoever says that one can’t live without hope, is simply asserting that one cannot live without constant rebellion.” Herling’s own noble but impotent rebellion over the course of four decades has left us with writing of rare and disturbing beauty.