With His Eye on the Trap : VOLCANO AND MIRACLE: A Journal Written at Night.<i> By Gustaw Herling (Viking: $24.95, 288 pp.)</i>

It’s easy to recognize those mega-paged novels of prodigious intent and erudition that hang around waiting to be praised, but how do we gauge the kind of greatness that conceals itself in the ordinary process of living--not with spectacle, but empathy?

Most of us prefer the first sort because it forgives our less-than-great lives. The other type is more troubling; it turns us inward, leaving in its wake an air of the eternal.

In 1940, Gustaw Herling was arrested by Soviet authorities on a variety of charges, one of which was that because there is no “H” in the Russian alphabet, his name came out “Gerling,” so he must have been related to the Nazi henchman Hermann Goering. Ultimately, he was imprisoned for attempting to flee the Soviet Union and fight against Germany, which had signed a nonaggression pact with Stalin. In 1942, after Germany invaded Russia, Herling was released to fight against the Nazis, along with other Poles.

His first book, “A World Apart,” was a seminal account of his time in the gulag. His first book of stories, “The Island,” first appeared in English in 1990, although it was written much earlier. Not surprisingly, its topic was individuals who suffer solitary pain.

Herling’s new book, “Volcano and Miracle: A Journal Written at Night,” consists of seven stories and excerpts from the journals he has been publishing over the past 23 years in the emigre Polish magazine Kultura. This combination of journal and stories seems so natural, one wonders why all writers aren’t published this way--amid the process of real life, in a light that dispels the illusion of art’s other-worldliness.

Indeed, one of the themes of “Volcano and Miracle” is that while art and writing are praiseworthy, the artist deserves no special consideration as a human being. The entries cover Herling’s interests, mostly literary and political, and there isn’t much of the personal here. As he says, “. . . a good diary . . . is one in which the author only rarely pokes his antennae out of the shell--and then draws back at once.”

The result is a series of mini-portraits and observations about the famous and the ordinary. Here is Gogol in Rome: “Every afternoon, in the shade of drawn shutters, Pavel Annenkov [his secretary] took Gogol’s dictation and made a clean copy of a new chapter of ‘Dead Souls’ and, when he was unable or unwilling to hide his admiration, he exclaimed: ‘I consider this chapter a work of genius. . . .’ Then Gogol would answer in a soft, barely perceptible little voice: ‘Believe me . . . the others are just as good.’ ”

Here is Flaubert, having at last completed his first draft of “The Temptations of Saint Anthony”: After four eight-hour days of reading it to his friends, he asks, “Tell me sincerely what you think. . . .” His friends reply, “We think you should throw the manuscript in the fire and never mention it again.”

There are the recollections of a professor who hated cats but who was condemned to feeding hundreds of strays because he believed the souls of his dead wife and children had migrated therein. Again and again, Herling asks: What does it mean to live?

The stories included here are short, depending neither on style nor cleverness but on the mystery of pain. And their endings leave this mystery intact. The title, “Volcano and Miracle,” comes from living in Naples while waiting simultaneously for the volcano to erupt and for the blood of a dead saint to liquefy. But what does it mean if the volcano doesn’t erupt and the blood does not liquefy?

The assumption that pain is a part of the human condition is not a fashionable view these days, if it ever has been, and Herling’s book is not for everyone. Certainly it’s not for the person he describes as the “man without pain, without memory, floating in the stream of life from who knows whence to who knows where . . ..” Or, “. . . the mouse totally absorbed in gnawing at the cheese in the trap.”

Indeed, Herling, like Kafka, is a man with his eye on the trap. As preface to his story “The Island,” written over 30 years ago, Herling quotes Kafka: “We are forsaken like children lost in the woods. When you stand before me and look at me, what do you know of my sufferings and what do I know of yours? And if I fell at your feet and cried and told you, would you know any more about me than you know about hell when they say it is hot and sets one shivering. Therefore we men should stand before each other with as much awe, thoughtfulness, and love as before the gates of hell.”

Herling is a writer of rare moral stature, and “Volcano and Miracle” will endure as long as anyone wishes to know the loneliness and the community of those who suffer.