Ryszard Kapuściński: Biography of a Writer 9780228015550

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ryszard kapuściŃski

RYSZARD KAPUŚCIŃSKI Biography of a Writer

b e a t a n o wa c k a a n d z yg m u n t z i ąt e k Translated by Lindsay Davidson

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2023 First published in Polish as Ryszard Kapuściński: Biografia pisarza by Znak, 2008. ISB N 978-0-2280-1448-5 (cloth) ISB N 978-0-2280-1555-0 (ePdf ) ISB N 978-0-2280-1556-7 (eP UB ) Legal deposit first quarter 2023 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This publication has been supported by the ©poland Translation Program

Photos reproduced from Maciej Sadowski, Ryszard Kapuściński: Fotobiografia Photobiography (Warsaw: veda Photobiography, 2013).

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Ryszard Kapuściński : biography of a writer / Beata Nowacka and Zygmunt Ziątek ; translated by Lindsay Davidson. Other titles: Ryszard Kapuściński. English Names: Nowacka, Beata, author. | Ziątek, Zygmunt, author. Description: Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220412294 | Canadiana (ebook) 20220412391 | I SBN 9780228014485 (hardcover) | ISB N 9780228015550 (pdf ) | I SBN 9780228015567 (ep u b) Subjects: l c sh : Kapuściński, Ryszard. | l csh : Kapuściński, Ryszard—Criticism and interpretation. | l c sh : Journalists—Poland—Biography. | l c sh : Authors, Polish— Biography. | l c gf t : Biographies. Classification: l c c pn 5355.p 62 k 37613 2022 | dd c 070.92—dc23 This book was typeset in 10.5/13 Minion Pro.

Contents Translator’s Note

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Abbreviations

xi

Introduction

3

1 “We were children of the war …” 2 “A metric of our generation”

24

3 Incidental Polish and African Tales 4 PAP Correspondent or Traveller? 5 On His Own Account

7 50 69

123

6 “I decided not to write like that anymore”

161

7 “Those were the days of constant emotion …”: The Polish Revolution, 1980–1982 190 8 “REE-shard Kah-poosh-CHIN-skee”: Kapuściński in English 9 “High time I started writing the next unwritten book” 10 Return to the Origins?

251

11 “He who created his own world will survive …” Timeline

305

Bibliographical Note Notes

323

325

Index of Names

357

223

278

205

Translator’s Note

Not all the English translations are complete. Where something does not appear in the English translations I have translated from the Polish text. It has not been possible to verify all of the original newspaper quotations in English; quotations from English-language articles that could not be located have been paraphrased in this edition. This concerns a very small number of quotations, but should be noted.

Acknowledgments

Anyone who writes a biography is aware that he incurs an unpayable debt. We too have become indebted to many people. Of course, we owe the most to the hero of our book, who blessed us with his trust that two people so different from him could examine in good faith his biography and work. We have always experienced the same trust and kindness on the part of Alicja Kapuścińska, whom we wish to thank here. However, the list of people to thank is much longer. Over the past four years, we have had the opportunity to talk about Ryszard Kapuściński with many people. Some of those who helped us we never actually met in person; others we met briefly; with a few we became heartfelt friends. Amazingly, a phone call or email contact was often enough for strangers to share generously their unique knowledge of the Master. We are especially grateful to Czesław Apiecionek, Anders Bodegård, Alina Brodzka-Wald, Father Tomasz Jan Chlebowski, Francesco Comina, Bożena Dudko, Silvano De Fanti, Homa Firouzbakhch, Piotr Halbersztat, Magdalena Horodecka, Tapani Kärkkäinen, Elżbieta Lisowska, Jarosław Mikołajewski, Marek Miller, Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand, Chris Niedenthal, Justyna and Robert Nowaccy, Agata Orzeszek, Valerio Pellizzari, Ole Michael Selberg, Maciej Skórczewski, Magdalena Szymków, Vera Verdiani, and Edward Żłobin. Their selfless generosity was valuable proof for us that Kapuściński’s creativity truly liberated positive emotions. Everyone who shared their priceless knowledge with us without hesitation had one thing in mind – to help us provide the most faithful picture of this rich personality. In fact, they succeeded in the most difficult thing for moderns – when they talked about the Other, they completely forgot about themselves.

x

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Richard Ratzlaff of McGill-Queen’s University Press and Bartek Baran of Heraclon Publishing for their interest in this book, and the Book Institute for creating the conditions for it to appear in English. We would also like to thank Maciej Sadowski for providing photographs, Lindsay Davidson for preparing the English translation, and the McGill-Queen’s team – especially Matthew Kudelka for his excellent work editing the book. We thank Marek Kusiba and Diana Kuprel for their consent to publish their translations of Kapuściński’s poems. We express our final special thanks to our loved ones – Krystyna Ziątek and Krzysztof Nowacki. Without the tender care of the first, the invaluable help of the other, and the saintly patience of both, this book could not have been created. Beata Nowacka and Zygmunt Ziątek

Abbreviations

All works by Ryszard Kapuściński. Autoportret reportera, Kraków, 2003 Busz po polsku, Warsaw, 2008 Cesarz, Warsaw 1999; The Emperor, London, 2006 Chrystus z karabinem na ramieniu, Warsaw, 2007 Czarne gwiazdy, Warsaw, 1963 Gdyby cała Afryka, Warsaw, 1969 Heban, Warsaw, 1998; The Shadow of the Sun, London, 2001 Imperium, Warsaw, 1993; Imperium, London, 2019 Jeszcze dzień życia, Warsaw, 2001; Another Day of Life, London, 2001 K Kirgiz schodzi z konia, Warsaw, 2007 L Lapidaria, Warsaw, 1997 L IV Lapidarium IV, Warsaw, 2000 L V Lapidarium V, Warsaw, 2002 L VI Lapidarium VI, Warsaw, 2007 N Notes, in Wrzenie świata, vol. 4, Warsaw, 1990 P Podróże z Herodotem, Kraków 2004; Travels with Herodotus, London, 2008 PN Prawa natury, Kraków, 2006; I Wrote Stone, Windsor, on , 2007 Sz Szachinszach, Warsaw, 2004; Shah of Shahs, London, 2006 TI Ten Inny, Kraków, 2006; The Other, London, 2018 W Wojna futbolowa, Warsaw, 1999; The Soccer War, London, 2007 ZA Z Afryki, Bielsko-Biała, 2000 A B C Ch Cz G H I J

With his mother in Pińsk, 1933.

With his father in Przemyśl, 16 August 1933.

With his mother in Pińsk, 1937.

Sieraków, June 1942.

Ryszard Kapuściński, member of the Union of Polish Youth (zmp) of Warsaw, reading from his work at the Congress of Young Writers of Poland, Warsaw, 1 April 1951.

Alicja Kapuścińska photographed by her husband, 1950s.

On the border of Congo. Second from left is Jarda Bouček, correspondent for the newspaper Rudé Právo, January 1961.

Carlotta. She was killed during the assault on Bolombo, Angola, 1975.

Warsaw, 1978.

On the Polish Radio program Trójka. Warsaw, 1979.

In Ethiopia, fall 1993.

Author event at the Berliner Ensemble: Martin Pollack, Ryszard Kapuścinski, Heiner Müller, Berlin, February 1994.

Chad, 1996. Photo by Ryszard Kapuściński.

Receiving the Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities, Oviedo, Spain, October 2003.

Kapuścinski’s office, Prokuratorska St, Warsaw.

From Ryszard Kapuścinski: Fotobiografia Photobiography by Maciej Sadowski.

ryszard kapuściŃski

Introduction

“a rep orte r c ha n g e s to g et h e r w i t h t h e world” Ryszard Kapuściński died less than three years after the publication of Travels with Herodotus, a book describing how he became a reporter. Its title made reference to the oldest traditions of the genre of reportage, which he rejuvenated. One might think that pointing to the Master from Halicarnassus as the patron of his first journeys was a bold conceit. However, the reactions to his death indicate that this choice was not exaggerated. In Poland and around the world (especially in Italy and the Spanish-speaking countries), even now, readers have yet to come to terms with his death. Kapuściński was not simply well-known. He was also liked, admired, and at times even worshipped and adored – essentially as the person who single-handedly, like the old-time wanderers, exposed himself to mortal danger and gained astonishing knowledge about our times and was able to share that knowledge with learned men, random readers, and attendees at countless meetings. In the flood of obituaries, in posthumous reflections, and in many thousands of condolence entries on a multitude of websites, people of different cultures, beliefs, social environments, and historical experiences came together in admiration for the writer and the deepest grief over his loss. It is astonishing that Ryszard Kapuściński can be remembered in so many different ways. For some people, he was just a journalist, someone who set the standard for other journalists. For others, he was above all else a writer, a poet who, in part from necessity, slipped into the role of a journalist and, thanks to his enormous talent, turned reporting into literature. For his peers, he will always be a witness

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to and proponent of the political and social emancipation of Third World countries – a man who participated in more than thirty revolutions and wars on three continents. For readers who got to know him in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he will always be the author of The Emperor, Shah of Shahs, and Imperium – accounts of the mechanisms of authoritarian power and its breakdown. Young people today read Kapuściński mainly as a guide to the mysteries of exotic cultures (especially African), as the recorder of the dialogue between them and the Other, for whom covering long distances, overcoming hurdles, and crossing borders between worlds was always the most important vocation. One can say that every new generation of readers has created its own image of Kapuściński, which it cherishes and with which it will not part. It seems apparent that every such image since The Shadow of the Sun is at least somewhat legitimate, thus demonstrating that he had an extraordinary ability to change. Polish and foreign commentators on his works have never paid sufficient attention to the fact that almost every book he wrote was very different from the previous one. Kapuściński, with his journalistic sensitivity and historian’s intuition – and by education and passion, he was a historian – was following the course of history, the changes transfiguring the world. He was constantly taking up new challenges, and those challenges transformed his writing art. But all the while, he preserved the continuity of his thoughts, asking the world new questions and reinterpreting it in response to the answers he heard back. The idea of writing this book arose from a desire to understand this continuous development. The bibliography related to Kapuściński’s works abounds in excellent analyses of his individual works and various themes, but no study of him can be called a creative biography, one that follows his development and transformation as a writer. In the last years of his life, there was even a dangerous coagulation of Kapuściński’s image as a writer who was always the same. This may have resulted from the prevalence of publications of an incidental and summative nature connected with awards and honoris causa doctorates. In writing his creative biography, we will not isolate it from his biography strictly speaking. Indeed, we could not do so, for in his journalism and in his travels he was constantly gathering material for his creative undertakings. In any case, one cannot help but be curious about his life, given that his life story is rich and diverse enough to

Introduction

5

fill a very long book on its own. However, it is a challenge to satisfy this curiosity and trace the actual course of his many adventures, and not simply because it would require extensive and comprehensive field studies. The problem is that his professional biography and his private one (for example, concerning his childhood) served as material for all his works, as he himself grew in importance, even in his own eyes, so that he sometimes became the hero of his own texts. Very early on, Kapuściński discovered the need to reveal his own point of view and the circumstances and experiences that accompanied the formation of his vision of the world. He understood that these experiences and circumstances – his own memories, associations, and states of mind – might tell readers something more about the reality observed – indeed, more reliably than a direct commentary. Certainly, this understanding is present in The Soccer War (1978), a book compiled from previously published reports with the help of passages from an “unwritten book.” The Soccer War organized these reports in a biographical manner, giving them the character of a notebook in which the author observed the world’s peculiarities. From that moment, Kapuściński’s writing became more and more biographical; as the author put it in 1994, “my works are my only memoir.” Clearly, the more he broadened and deepened his own exploration of the world, the more profoundly and precisely he paid heed to his own spiritual equipment – travelling the world had become a journey into his inner self. All of this is to say that Kapuściński managed to tell us a lot about himself, directly and indirectly. Given our intentions, this is a great help, provided that we do not forget that we are dealing with a specific kind of knowledge about the writer. Autobiographical information gathered from books, from interviews, and from films about his life – not to mention from his explicitly autobiographical works – belongs to the sphere of his self-reflection. This kind of information documents his self-knowledge and is not a neutral record of facts that would serve as the basis for a “life and works” type of monograph. It is enough to note how the author’s perceptions of some episodes of his biography changed. These changes in turn brought new information to light that was at times inconsistent with previous positions or whole periods (we will pay attention to this in relevant parts of the book). There were times when his most important experiences were, for him, his formative years. There were times when war was his most important experience, when the “unwritten” book of war experiences

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was the most important to him, and those experiences he kept inside, in an “unspeakable book.” The lost world of prewar Pińsk became the most important never-written book of his life, the one that explained all his subsequent choices and preferences. Knowledge directly from the author, even when partly verified in light of other sources and opinions, does not cease to be literary in character and does not lose its quality of self-reflection or auto-creation. That is why we must be cautious in benefiting from such knowledge. One has to separate “hard” biographical information from interpretation, especially in the description of facts the writer repeatedly returned to. We warn readers that for this reason, we need to pay attention not only to what the writer was talking about but also to the way he was talking about it. This may sometimes seem like splitting hairs, but it allows us to show Kapuściński’s impulse to follow historical changes and translate them in such a way as to understand the human situation, including his own. In our reflections on Ryszard Kapuściński’s works, we do not primarily engage in interpretative preciseness. We are interested in capturing the dynamics of the author of The Emperor’s spiritual development – his attempts to reconstruct his own biography. In this, we are seeking consistency between the new image of the world and his own identity in the rhythm of historical changes. In the recording of one of our last conversations with him, we found this sentence: “A reporter changes together with the world. The trajectory of history coincides with the trajectory of the reporter’s life.”

1

“We were children of the war …”

“All memory is present,” states one of the three epigraphs from Travels with Herodotus (from Novalis). Our mere intention to provide some biographical facts about Ryszard Kapuściński’s childhood confirms the truth of that statement. This is because it is so readily grasped that everything we know about his first seven years of life (spent in Pińsk, in Polesie, in today’s Belarus) – so important from the perspective of his creative personality – comes from the memory of a very mature writer and is the answer to a question that has arisen only recently. “The emperor of reportage,” “the king of reporters,” “the journalist of the century,” reaching back to his own beginnings from the perspective of the achievements of many decades, said about himself, “I am a Poleshuk.” Through an interview in Przekrój in 2003,1 biographical films (not much earlier), and declarations of his creative projects, the public learned that he was a “man of the marsh” and would soon be publishing a book about his childhood in Pińsk. Kapuściński elucidated his earliest childhood not as a reporter but as a prose writer who had turned that childhood into the creative material of his tales. The authors of various biographical sketches happily repeat today that his particular interest in the world resulted from his Polish roots, but they seem to attach less importance to when he took up those roots. One cannot help but wonder why he turned so late to examining his own world view, his own creativity, and finally his own identity. After all, he is not Kresovian in the same way and sense as earlier great Polish journalists: Ksawery Pruszyński, Melchior Wańkowicz, Józef Mackiewicz, all of whom were from families that had settled in the Kresy many generations earlier. His father, Józef Kapuściński, came to

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these lands from Kielce as part of the repolonisation of the Polesie after the First World War. Pińsk was at the time a backward town with 32,000 inhabitants of different nationalities. Jews dominated – Kapuściński himself estimated that they were 73 percent of the population, which meant that Pińsk was at the time one of the most Jewish cities in the world. The Polish community (clergy, military, teachers) were a clear minority. The nascent state wanted to send settlers there from central Poland, especially educated ones. Settling in Polesie was something of a missionary endeavour, and for many it was akin to exile. But it also offered a real chance of finding work. So it was for Józef Kapuściński, who, after graduating from the Teachers’ Seminary in Prużany, worked first in Łuniniec, then in Pińsk. Probably, it was also where he met his wife, Maria, who had come to Pińsk from Bochnia.2 The young couple, however, were unlikely to achieve stability and put down permanent roots, as can be seen in their constant changes of residence.3 At first, they rented a modest room with a dark kitchen at Bernardyńska 58 (today Sowietskaja 50) in Włodzimierz Wierbanowicz’s house. When Ryszard was born in March 1932 (in the district hospital on Bernardyńska Street), the hosts’ daughter, Anna Wierbanowicz-Kindler, became his first nanny. Soon after, the family moved to the house of the Obiedziński family on Teodorowska Street (today Gogol Street). By 1933, after the birth of their daughter, the Kapuścińskis were living with the Kołodny family on the first floor of a brick house at Błotna 43 (today Suworowa). Unfortunately, in 1939 they would have to change their address twice more. First, they moved to Kolejowa Street to the house of the Palczewski family. They finally settled in a shabby wooden house on Wesoła Street, where Maria’s sister Anna lived with her husband Sylwester, an army officer. The building was on the edge of town in the poorest district, inhabited mainly by railway families. The war came before they could settle in for good. By the spring of 1939, Józef Kapuściński had been mobilized; he was sent deep into Poland as a reserve officer. His wife, still in her twenties, spent the entire summer with her children at her brother’s home in Pawłów, near Rejowiec in the Lublin region. Ryszard, a child of settlers who were still seeking their own home – probably connected more with places of origin than with short-term settlement – would develop his Pińsk pedigree several decades later. It is still too early to discuss how he actually did so, or why. Notably, though, it emerged after intense work of memory and imagination at a time when he was thinking not only about his past per se but also about

“We were children of the war …”

9

the mechanisms and difficulties of reproducing it. “The remembrance of one’s own past: a gaping abyss. Something is looming on the bottom. Some specks. Points. Vibrations. Here and there. Deformed. Blurred. Illegible.” So we read in Lapidaria from 1997 (L, 419). We know much more about the rest of his childhood, which was cleaved from those first seven years by the outbreak of the war, which immediately uprooted the future author of Imperium from his first homeland. We know more because Kapuściński wanted to tell us more about those years. He could do so because he remembered them totally differently as he entered the twilight of his life, when he stared intently into the well of his own past. In his text Ćwiczenia pamięci (Memory Exercises), written in the second half of the 1980s, in which he most accurately depicted his wartime childhood, he compares recollection to the rewriting of a text already at hand, one that has forever been imprinted on the author’s consciousness. “Now, I copy here a few pages from a book about my war years (a never-written book)” (B, 12). The metaphor of a book that has not been written but is carried within reflects the author’s way of remembering the war with great accuracy. Multiple fragments, splinters, and quotes from that unwritten book are found in various texts by Kapuściński, and we never doubt that they are from the same “book.” Wherever we encounter it – be it in those Memory Exercises (written at the request of Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Böll for an international collective book on the memory of the end of the war),4 or in the first dozen or so pages of Imperium (which tell about the first months of Soviet rule in Pińsk), or in the relevant parts of Lapidaria or numerous interviews – we always come across fragments of the same, larger whole. The completeness of this memory is evidenced by what and how Kapuściński remembers. What the writer remembers forms the story of an endless wartime exile with all its inherent attributes: humiliation, fear, poverty, hunger, cold, danger, the ubiquity of death, the uncertainty of tomorrow … That misery started with the outbreak of the war, which found seven-year-old Ryszard, his mother, and his sister, one year his junior, in Pawłów, about 300 kilometres from Pińsk as the crow flies. They were there with Ryszard’s paralyzed maternal grandfather5 (carried on a cart), among a crowd of refugees. Kapuściński noted in his “memory book” that escape suddenly became a higher necessity, some new form of life, because everyone escapes; all highways, roads, even field paths

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are full of carts and trolleys and bicycles, full of bundles, suitcases, bags, buckets, and full of horrified people wandering helplessly. Some are fleeing east, others to the west, north, south … They fall from exhaustion, they doze off anywhere, but after a moment of rest they gather their remaining strength and begin their chaotic and endless journey anew. (B, 6) The chaos of the escape is compounded by changes in the landscape inflicted by several days of warfare. Kapuściński forever remembers the abandoned villages, razed houses, and bombed railway stations, and the smell of smoke, flames, and decaying horse flesh. For him, those dead horses will remain the most expressive symbol of this landscape of death, a perfect icon of war: The horse – a large defenceless animal – can’t hide during bombing and so stands still, waiting for death. Dead horses at every turn, in the middle of the road, next to it in a ditch, then somewhere further in the field. They are lying with legs raised and threaten the world with their hooves. I don’t see dead people anywhere, because they are quickly buried, only corpses of dead horses, of bay horses, piebald, chestnut, as if it were a war, not between people, but horses, as if they fought among themselves to death and life, as if they were the only victims of these struggles. (B, 7)6 Contrary to most exiles’ fate, the Kapuściński family’s martyrdom did not end with a happy homecoming but with entry into a sinister new world. Their many days on the road had exhausted them, and when they finally glimpsed the familiar church towers, houses, and streets, what sprang up in front of them on the bridge “linking the small town of Pińsk, Poland, with the territories to the south” were marines with red stars on their round caps. “They sailed here several days ago all the way from the Black Sea, sunk our gunboats, killed our sailors, and now they don’t want to let us into town” (I, 4; in fact, the gunboats had been sunk by marines from Pińsk, who were then executed in Mokrany, near Brest). The soldiers point their rifles at the handful of scraggly, exhausted mothers and children who are trying to return to their homes. “Mothers beside themselves with fear plead for mercy”; so remembers the future author of The Emperor. When mercy is not shown, they implore their children to plead with the Soviets. “But what more can we, the children, do? – we have already been

“We were children of the war …”

11

kneeling on the road, sobbing and stretching out our arms, for a long time” (I, 4). This world – living in their own home, going to school, returning to their friends – may be simply a way station in their escape, or their deportation deep into the Soviet Union. The Kapuściński family was doomed to deportation. After all, Maria and Józef had been teachers and held state jobs in bourgeois Poland, and the father was an officer in the Polish Army. Not only that, but he had already become “war booty” of the victors. Józef Kapuściński had been taken prisoner by the Soviets in September during fighting at the front and found himself in a long column of prisoners of war heading east toward Starobielsk, Kozielsk, Ostashkov … While passing through a forest, he managed to escape with a few friends. Disguised as a peasant, he returned to Pińsk, which was already occupied by the Russians, for just for a few hours to see his wife and children. That unforgettable image would be revived in Imperium: A knocking at the window (we live in a little house halfsunk into the ground). Father’s face pressed against the windowpane, flat, melting into the darkness. I see my father entering the room, but I barely recognise him. We had said good-bye in the summer. He was in an officer’s uniform, he had on tall boots, a yellow belt, and leather gloves. I walked down the street with him and listened with great pride to how everything on him creaked and clattered. Now he stands before us in the clothes of a Polish peasant, thin, unshaven. He is wearing a cotton knee-length shirt tied with a burlap string and straw shoes on his feet (I, 8). In the morning, when I get up, father is already gone … the next night . A pounding at the windows, at the door, so insistent, intrusive, so violent, that it seems at any moment the ceiling will cave in … And to Mother: “muż kuda?” (Where’s your husband?) … They want to take mother away. Why, as punishment? They threaten her with their fists and curse terribly. Idi! a young soldier shouts at her, and tries to push her outside into the dark night with the butt of his rifle. But just then my younger sister suddenly throws herself on him and begins pummeling, biting, and kicking him, throws herself at him in some kind of delirium, in fury, in madness. There is so much unexpected, startling determination in this, such a rapacious unyieldingness, doggedness and finality that one of the Red Army men, probably the oldest, probably the commander, hesitates for a moment, then puts on his cap, fastens the holster of his pistol and says to his people – “pashli!” (I, 8–9)

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After the night search, the family always went to bed dressed, an overcoat always near, shoes by their feet. Everyone tried to stay awake, but only the mother succeeded. The most challenging time now began for Maria Kapuścińska and her children. Besides the threat of deportation, two other terrible spectres hung over their lives – starvation and cold. Both came with the winter that had fallen on them by December. From then on, searching for anything that could be eaten became the principal occupation of the inhabitants of Pińsk. Children plundered the gardens of those who had been expelled, adults dug up more valuable items and went to nearby villages to exchange them for essential groceries. However, when it transpired that while the women were out of town, the nkvd would enter their homes and take the children to transport, Ryszard’s mother stopped leaving the apartment: She was capable of not moving for hours at a time. There was still a little bit of kasha and flour in the house … I noticed that she herself would not eat anything, and when we ate, she would turn away so as not to watch, or she went into the other room. When we went outside, she would say, “Bring a little brushwood.” We would walk around the neighbourhood digging up dry stalks and sticks from beneath the snow. (I, 15) It was similar for other families. Bands of impoverished children, among them seven-year-old Ryszard, wandered the area searching for branches for fuel, or food, or even just the smell of food. Sometimes, their noses stuck between the fence rails, the children stared at houses from which the aroma of roast chicken or hunter’s stew wafted out; they had to drag one another away from such fences. Other times, for something to eat, the children would approach Soviet soldiers, who shrugged them off. One mercifully gave them a bit of tobacco and a piece of newspaper and showed them how to roll a cigarette out of the musty mixture to cheat hunger for a moment. But the Kapuściński family was not deported deep into Russia. It is hard to find a rational, credible reason why they were not. Most likely, it was because of the chaos of the times that Maria was able to remain on Wesoła Street with her daughter and son. Or perhaps poverty became their unexpected ally, for it had consigned them to the most impoverished neighbourhood, to where it was difficult to drive a cart after the spring thaws.

“We were children of the war …”

13

In 1940, three transports left Pińsk. Just before the last – in May – Maria Kapuścińska took advantage of this opportunity to leave Pińsk. She sold all her modest possessions and set out with her two children on one of the last trains to Lviv (her father Franciszek died along the way, near Brest). From Lviv, she intended to continue to nearby Przemyśl, from there to Kraków and then toward the capital, hoping to meet her husband, who –she had managed to find out – was teaching in a school near Warsaw. Today, it is hard to imagine how much effort it took for a single mother with two children to cover the route to Przemyśl. They walked a long way; part of the route they covered in a rented wagon, part by rail. The journey from east to west seemed to last forever: the railwaymen stopped the train time and again in the wilderness to charge a fee for further travel. The desperate people gave up everything they had without hesitation: rings, jewels, furs. When they reached Przemyśl, they stayed with Józef ’s family. To enter the General Government (the German zone of Occupation), they had to obtain the appropriate permission, which meant waiting for many days and paying a sufficiently high bribe. Now the money they had raised in Pińsk came in handy. Finally, the family could make their way onto the bridge connecting the Soviet occupation zone to the German one. There was heavy traffic in both directions. From the west came mainly Jews, hoping to escape the Germans in Soviet Russia. From the east came those who were escaping the Soviets. Everyone hoped they would be saved on the other side of the bridge and that their fate would become more bearable. For the Kapuściński family, the new life began with a visit to a makeshift bathhouse, to which the Germans led a column crossing the bridge for bathing and delousing (see L, 121). From Przemyśl, they travelled by train to Kraków. When they left, all they knew about their father was that he was teaching in a village school near Warsaw. It is no longer possible to determine how they managed to find him with so few clues at their disposal. “We found him by accident,” said Ryszard Kapuściński. “Driving through a village called Sieraków, mother at one point shouted to a man walking down the road: ‘Dziudek! It was Father” (B, 9). The day the spouses met on the country road became a family anniversary. The happily reunited family moved into a barren room without light and water in Sieraków. But poverty was still there. The eight-year-old, skilled in getting food, needed to get back to looking for anything that

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could suppress his hunger, such as a crust of bread or a carrot. But the real treasure, difficult to get, was potatoes. When the father told his children that anyone who wanted to come to school had to bring one potato as a tuition fee, half of the students did not come at all, and many brought a half or a quarter of a potato. In the spring, they faced a dilemma: should they eat the potatoes straight away or plant them in order to have something to eat in the autumn? Sieraków provided Kapuściński with even more traumatic experiences, just as sinister as the exile in September and the wait for deportation in Pińsk. Sieraków is in Kampinos Forest, close to Palmiry, a village where the Nazis carried out mass executions. The war could not be forgotten even for a moment: now it was audible as hollow, regular salvos. At first, the nearby shots reverberated at night; later, also during the day. The small, frightened boy would hide in the bushes and watch for hours: They carry convicts in closed, dark green, covered vehicles and the rear of the motorcade is brought up by a truck with the firing squad. Those from the squad always wear long coats, as if a long coat with a belt was an indispensable prop of the murder ritual. Whenever such a motorcade passes, we, a group of village children, watch it, hidden in roadside bushes. In a moment, behind the curtain of trees, something will happen that we are not allowed to watch. I feel an ice-cold shiver running down my spine, I’m trembling. With bated breath, we are waiting for the sound of salvos. Here they are. Then we can hear single shots. After a while, the motorcade heads back to Warsaw. At the end, there is the truck with ss men from the firing squad. They are smoking and talking. (B, 10) Soon the family was left without a father once again – as an ak soldier, he had to hide. The children would hardly see him again until the end of the war. That same autumn, after being warned by the partisans that entire surrounding villages were being transported to concentration camps, they had to leave Sieraków, at night, in the rain, in a hurry, and look for a hiding place in Warsaw designated by the organization that had warned them. It was with the Skupiewski family, in a house on Krochmalna Street, right across from a gate to the ghetto. But this was not the end of the wandering linked by fate to the subsequent circles of the wartime inferno: “I am walking next to the wagon again, and I can hear the sand of the warm field road pouring through

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the wooden spokes” (B, 11). This time, it took Maria Kapuścińska and her children to Świder, a holiday resort near Otwock, on the east bank of the Vistula. In 1944, the Warsaw Uprising broke out. Twelve-yearold Ryszard had just become an altar boy for the field hospital chaplain who accompanied General Berling’s army. Berling’s soldiers were racing to join uprising. Kapuściński saw the cost of it: From the front, which was blasting and smoking nearby, ambulances were arriving in a great hurry … The paramedics, half-alive themselves, took out the wounded and put them on the grass, then took a rubber hose and poured a strong stream of cold water over them. If any of the wounded started to show signs of life, they carried him to the tent where the operating room was located (in front of the tent, directly on the ground there was a fresh pile of amputated hands and legs every day). At the same time, for those did not move anymore, they carried the body to a big grave located at the back of the hospital. It was there, above the endless grave, that I stood for hours alongside the priest, holding the breviary and stoup for him. I repeated the prayer for the dead after him. We told each fallen man – Amen, dozens of times a day – Amen, in a hurry, because somewhere nearby, in the forest, the death machine was working ceaselessly. (B, 12) This was almost the end of the war, but not the end of Kapuściński’s wandering. That journey could only really end with a return home, to his own school and classmates, which of course was utterly impossible. One of the last images the writer retained of his wartime childhood is similar to one of the first, depicting the desperate struggle of Pińsk’s children against hunger. Again, the irresistible smell of food, this time consumed by a locksmith in Otwock in front of his workshop: In 1944 we were wandering around – a group of scruffy children – on the streets of Otwock, which the Germans had already left, but which the Russians had not yet taken … The man put aside his tools, wiped the grease off his hands with a rag, sat by the door of the workshop and put a pot between his knees. He leaned over it and took a breath … We stood on the street, fascinated by this view, far enough away so the man didn’t chase us away, but close enough to smell the meat, bread and raspberries, which intoxicated us like a drug. An animal struggled inside me, it wanted to jump outside, choking at my throat. (L, 460)

16

Ryszard Kapuściński •

Kapuściński’s wartime biography did not consist solely of moments of escape, wandering, and the struggle against death and murder, hunger and cold. Nevertheless, these moments made their way into the writer’s memory as a remarkably coherent series of experiences. Ominously, one may wonder what role the time of writing down the fragments played in constructing this never-written book. It was written by an author who had already seen many wars and upheavals on three continents and many of their victims: those suffering from hunger, poverty, and mass expulsion or fleeing for a safer place. This could have led him to find in his own biography, above all, those experiences that helped him understand others’ suffering and justified his right to write about them. The 1970s and 1980s were also a time when a particular view of the Second World War had become commonplace. That view made the suffering of victims, including victims of the extermination of entire nations, ethnic groups, and cities, a characteristic feature of war as well as a marker of its universality as an experience. This, too, could have led Kapuściński to extract from his own experience the elements that would allow him to feel himself a competent witness to the horrors of war in the twentieth century. These contexts also suggest that the writing down of these episodes of his war biography, rather than others, was not so much spontaneous as a choice grown out of his mature knowledge. But his uprooting from Pińsk and his further wanderings are not the only motifs uniting this never-written book. There is also a place for the deeply personal – perhaps not even fully realized by the author – logic of another uprooting, that is, the systematic loss of his childhood. Growing up – passing through successive stages of development, gaining awareness, learning the world – is filled with historical experiences as well, not only the personal events of childhood. Experiences like those Ryszard encountered deprive children of the possibility of taking root in the world. They become children of war. This is evident in the very way of telling. Kapuściński is not telling us about war trauma so much as he is reconstructing the experience of it as something natural, something into which one grows. Let’s go back to the Pińsk times again (now paying attention not to “what” but to “how” he recounts). His school experience is particularly “capacious” in this respect, inaugurated by the already mentioned return from vacation during the first days of the war:

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All of them are walking, riding, running somewhere, nobody knows where. But my mother knows exactly where we are going. She has taken my sister and me by the hand, and all three of us are heading to Pińsk, to our apartment near Wesoła Street. We were on holiday … when the war surprised us … and so now we have to go back home. Tutti a casa! (I, 3) The most momentous of one’s first school experiences is learning letters, so it is not surprising that Kapuściński also regards it as such. However, since he had already known letters and numbers, he went straight to the second grade. But he started learning an alphabet different from the one he had been taught by his parents: In school, starting in the first grade, we learn the Russian alphabet. We begin with the letter “s.” “What do you mean by ‘s’?” someone asks from the back of the classroom. “It should begin with ‘a’!” “Children,” says the teacher (who is a Pole) in a despondent voice, “look at the cover of our book. What is the first letter on this cover?” Petruś, who is Belarussian, can read the whole title: Stalin, Woprosy leninizma [Studies in Leninism]. It is the only book from which we learn Russian, and our only copy of this book. On the stiff cover wrapped in gray linen, large, gold letters. (I, 4) And this distortion of alphabetical order, the hierarchy of foreign letters, a language imposed by force, immediately signals the absurd nature of the reality for which the children must prepare. They learn fear, silence, to not ask questions. Just as important as the experience of one’s first school days is formation of a group of friends, who develop common passions and interests, for example, the collecting and exchanging of stamps. For Kapuściński, stamps appear just after learning to read. However, these are miniature, metal images of “our leaders,” which are distributed to children together with pioneers’ shirts and headscarves by nkvd soldiers in dazzling uniforms, and they are part of a forced immersion in totalitarianism. Even so, the stamps are attractive. Kapuściński remembers in astonishing detail which stamps he traded with Janek and which with Chaim, how many Andreyev stamps he had to give for a Mikoyan stamp, and how many Mikoyan stamps for a Stalin stamp (a stamp with Stalin, as the author of such a thick book for learning how to read, was three times bigger than the others).

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Ryszard Kapuściński

In Kapuściński’s memories of school, breaks in boring lessons take third place: Sometimes lessons are interrupted by gunfire … If silence follows the detonation, we go back to reading our thick book, but if the crash of iron sheets is heard, the roar of bursting walls and the thud of falling stones, the classroom comes alive. One hears raised voices – “They hit! They hit!” – and barely has the bell rung when we are racing to the square to see what has happened. (I, 16) At the nearby Third of May Square the Russians had fired their only artillery piece (the rest had gone to the front) at the tower of the largest church in Pińsk,7 demonstrating to the inhabitants that they had no fear of God. It was impossible not to talk about the causes, course, and social reception of this act! Much the same with other “boyish” objects of fascination – ships and trains, watched on the way to school or after classes. Memories of these appear right after the most important school experiences. The barges of the famous Pińsk fleet (described, for example, in the novel Kanonierka by Andrzej Stojowski) were clearly visible. The scorching September of 1939 had caused the Pina River to dry up, and the punctured hulls of sunken barges stuck out of the water for a long time. But these were no match for the trains: Walking to school, I have to cross the railroad tracks, right by the train station. I like this place; I like to look at the trains arriving and departing. Most of all I like to look at the locomotive: I would like to be a locomotive engine. Crossing the tracks one morning, I see that the railroad workers are starting to gather freight cars. Dozens and dozens of them … And the place is swarming with Red Army men, with the nkvd . Finally, the motion stops; for several days there is silence. Then, one day I see that wooden wagons full of people and bundles are pulling up to the freight cars. (I, 7–8) At first, this boyhood fascination with trains might seem the most innocent thing in the world, but it quickly turned into a frighteningly sinister one – a portent of one’s own destruction. It is striking that this schoolboyish aspect of experiencing the tragedy of the Polish residents of Pińsk did not disappear when the preparations for deportation were finished. On the contrary, it gradually became more and more

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significant. This indicates clearly that Kapuściński followed the path of his memory very faithfully. What happened at the train station, not to mention the dragging of families from their homes in the night, became increasingly difficult to observe; it required more and more courage, it became a kind of dangerous gamble. The future writer was still too small to participate in it. His mother did not want to talk about the deportations and – like other parents – most likely forbade him to leave the house to watch them. But just being in school or walking home from it could provide new information: In school, during breaks, or when we are returning home in a group, the talk is of deportations. There is now no subject more interesting … In the higher grades there are those who have managed to sneak away from home, conceal themselves in the underbrush, and observe an entire deportation from start to finish. We already have veritable experts on deportation. They discourse on the subject eagerly and with connoisseurship. (I, 10) It was through their eyes and through their reports – reports by “boys who managed to observe deportations,” “boys who were veritable experts on deportation” – that the young boy learned about what was happening and tried unsuccessfully to gauge the threat to his own family. His impulse to spy on the transports came to an end only in winter, when leafless bushes allowed him to look with his own eyes from greater and safer distances: Moans and cries reached us from the direction of the siding. A moment later, they grew very loud, piercing. Wagons were driving from one car to the next, collecting the bodies of those who had died that night from cold and hunger. Four nkvd men walked behind the wagons counting something, writing something … Afterward, they closed the doors to the cars … The men secured each door with wire, then squeezed the wire tight with pliers … The locomotive whistled several times, and the train started to move. (I, 14–15). Showing the experience of deportations through a schoolboy’s eyes turned out to be the easiest way to convey the horror. The keenest observers of the resettlement action were inevitably its victims. The removal of Paweł, Janek, Zbyszek, a teacher (saying goodbye movingly

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from a distant wagon), the loss of half the class – we assume, the Polish half – gave a measure of the progress of the desolation. The school seemed to cease to exist, and eight-year-old Ryszard could not learn anything more there. Leaving Pińsk and wandering for a new refuge did not halt this process of childhood deprivation. As we have seen, if anything was permanently recorded in Kapuściński’s memory, it was precisely the witnessing of new forms of poverty, cruelty, violence, and killing and the strengthening of the awareness that this was part of life. It seems that his role as an altar boy crowned this terrible education The writer would relate his ministry work with an objective meticulousness and restraint, as if the altar service solely involved assisting a priest with a daily burial at mass graves. But it was not just this growing acquaintance with violence, cruelty, and death that deprived him of the world of childhood. No less strongly rooted in the writer’s memory was his search for dreams, his need to find and embrace substitutes for bloody reality. In Kapuściński’s memoirs, two episodes in particular seem strikingly vivid. The first is connected with a child’s hunger for sweets, all the stronger because he felt it during months of great hunger in Pińsk. The children were told that candies would be sold at one of the shops. The queue of cold and starving children stood for a long time, perhaps a whole day. “We stood in line, huddled tightly together, one close upon the other … We dreamed mountains of candies, magnificent chocolate palaces. We dreamed marzipan princesses and gingerbread pages. Our imagination was afire; everything in it sparkled, radiated.” But in the event, there was nothing in the shop but colourful candy tins. “At first we were extremely disappointed and depressed. Orion was crying. But when we began to inspect our loot more closely, we slowly cheered up. On the inside walls of these cans there remained after the candy a sweet deposit, fine, multicolored chips, a thick residue smelling of fruit. Why, our mothers could boil some water in these cans and offer us a sweet, aromatic drink!” (I, 17). The second episode is related to the dream of shoes, cherished by the growing boy throughout the war (when he was either barefoot or wore a felt imitation of shoes made by his father). This dream was partly fulfilled during a temporary stay in Warsaw. “I dream of sturdy, solid, and hobnailed shoes, which make a loud, distinct sound when they hit the pavement … I could stare at nice shoes for hours, I liked the shine of leather, I liked listening to its crunch … A trashy, torn shoe

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was the sign of humiliation, the imprint of a human devoid of dignity and condemned to inhumane existence” (B, 11). It is against the background of this dream that the shoe-buying epic becomes clear, sharp, concise, and cruel, like a fairy tale by Andersen. It was not only about the dreamed-of purchase, but also about the fact that this purchase would most probably be made with his first self-earned money, something a person remembers for the rest of their life. Mr Skupiewski of Krochmalna Street, where the Kapuścińskis were living, was involved in making toilet soap and offered the boy work selling his goods on the streets. The price of the soap was set at one zloty, so it’s easy to count how many bars of soap a ten-year-old boy had to sell, to buy not just the shoes of his dreams, but the most popular footwear during the occupation, clogs (soles of linden wood, tops of tarred tarpaulin), which cost four hundred zlotys. However, in occupied Warsaw, it was not easy to find several hundred eager buyers of Mr Skupiewski’s product. His advice to sell the soap in the vicinity of Otwock electric railway, due to the presence of holidaymakers who would definitely buy soap because they would surely bathe, did not help much either. They did not buy, even though the little boy poured out “half the tears of a lifetime” trying to convince them: In a whole day of walking I would sell none – or maybe a single bar. Once I sold three and returned home bright with happiness. After pressing the buzzer I would start to pray fervently: God, please have them buy something, have them buy at least one! I was actually engaged in a form of begging, trying to arouse pity. I would enter an apartment and say: Please madam, buy a soap from me. It costs only one zloty, winter is coming and I have no shoes. This worked sometimes, but not always, because there were many other children also trying to get over somehow – by stealing something, swindling someone, trafficking in this or that. Cold autumn weather arrived, the cold nipped at the soles of my feet and because of the pain I had to stop selling. I had 300 zloty, but Mr. Skupiewski generously threw in another hundred. I went with my mother to buy the shoes. If one wrapped one’s leg with a piece of flannel and tied newspaper on top of that, one could wear them even in the worst frosts of winter. (P, 34–5) Humiliating begging instead of rewarding work, compassionate help instead of earning money, clogs covered with tarry canvas, “which with

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the help of some ointments I tried unsuccessfully to give a little shine” (B, 11), instead of real shoes. And, with all this, the happiness he felt when he discovered that the empty candy can was not entirely devoid of sweetness. Knowledge of what it means to give up dreams, and resignation to a degraded existence, seem to have been, for Kapuściński, a legacy of his wartime education no less lasting than the experience of horror, cruelty, and death. •

The war had broken Kapuściński’s childhood into two parts that could not be put back together. He remembered one too well for the rest of his life; the other was long-forgotten – as if war were the only reality he’d had the opportunity to experience, out of which his life would flow thereafter: For a long time, I thought it was the only world, that this is how life is … So, when suddenly the roar of the artillery ceased, and the sound of bursting bombs passed, and suddenly there was silence, I was amazed at this silence, I did not know what it meant, what it is. I think that an adult hearing this silence could say: “It is the end of hell. Peace has finally returned.” But I didn’t remember what peace was. I was too small for it: when the war ended, all I knew was hell. (B, 14). By reading fragments of Kapuściński’s never-written book about the war, we better understand the profound truth of this. The war had annihilated his childhood. In the last several years of the writer’s life, we could follow his memory retrieval process. There were reasons to do so attentively, to wait patiently for the final results, which manifested themselves as a book, since those results pointed to a deep spiritual reorientation. Memory, both collective and individual, and including memory of oneself, was immensely important to Kapuściński, and, not surprising to us now, it was peculiarly dramatic: “Let’s ask: when does a human being start? … In my opinion, everything starts from the first memory to which we can go back … so far back that there is nothing else, we cannot remember anything that happened earlier. This is the starting point of my identity, my individual and very private story, my private life.”8 Thus, the fight for memory is undoubtedly the fight for the truth of

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one’s own biography by establishing its true beginning or interpreting its unique pattern. For Kapuściński, it was a fight against the form of memory that had until recently identified the beginning of life with the outbreak of the war and created a foundation of identity related to the war experience. We do not yet know how long this “until recently” lasted, but we can be sure it was of utmost importance to him when the future “journalist of the century” began to enter public life.

2

“A metric of our generation”

In early 1950, in the tenth issue of the weekly Odrodzenie, one of the weightiest periodicals published in the early postwar years, a report on a discussion of contemporary poetry held at Stanisław Staszic Lower Secondary School in Warsaw was published. The students were to compare six poems “written during the last thirty years in varying social conditions” and answer this question: “Could a future literary scholar … assign their authors to specific historical epochs and how?”1 Those poems were “Szklany deszcz” by Jan Brzękowski, “Nie nazwane niejasne” by Józef Czechowicz, Kazimierz Wierzyński’s “Manifest szalony,” “Serwus Madonna” by Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński, a fragment of Mayakovsky’s “Dobrze,” and finally “Różowe jabłka” – one of the first poetic works by a senior student of the junior high school, Ryszard Kapuściński, which had been published in Odrodzenie five issues earlier. The confrontation between the future author of Shadow of the Sun and the best of Polish interwar poetry and the creator of Russian revolutionary poetry did not go well for Kapuściński. This is not because his first efforts were not up to comparison with the excellent poems with which he collided in this surprising discussion. He came out of this poorly because he was still too poetic and because his efforts were too “classical.” This placed him too far from the revolutionary model. During the debate, it was maintained that Kapuściński used poetic imagery and referred to a symbol “which … comes from a completely different era, blurs the simplicity of the poem.” “[Kapuściński] does not strongly accent his political affiliation, as Mayakovsky did.” However, it was acknowledged that the budding poet had made significant progress since his debut in Odrodzenie (as some of his colleagues realized).

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The studentes appreciated the changes forecast by Kapuściński’s “W sprawie zobowiązań,” read during the discussion and published alongside it, and their conclusion was quite optimistic: “Further work by Kapuściński will give us the opportunity to re-examine the matter … Kapuściński is our friend, and we will help him overcome mistakes through critiquing his works.” Outwardly, this deliberation on the aspiring poet’s future was intended to answer the question of the relationship between literature and social background. But in fact, it was one of thousands of similar deliberations conducted at that time to steer poetry toward a vision of the new political system, one that positioned poetry in the same “socialist work effort” as that of production plants that amazingly exceeded the norms, villages that moved briskly toward collectivization, media that fought against the remnants of the old system, cultural and educational facilities that promoted the reading of “progressive” literature … And all that under the watchful eye of the party, be it through a youth organization or some other form of collective, which observed and instructed the individual, encouraged him to engage in self-criticism, and – if necessary as a last resort – stigmatized or excluded him. A fragment of this deliberation is a valuable instrument for documenting the circumstances in which Kapuściński’s writings became the subject of public interest and collided for the first time with other people’s expectations. We know little about the author himself. He was eighteen, and it was his second year as an activist with the Union of Polish Youth, an organization formed from the merger of four independent unions – zwm , om tur “Życie,” zmw rp “Wici” (connected with three trends of the Polish left: communist, socialist, the people), and the Democratic Youth Union – which had subordinated youth to the Polish United Workers’ Party and its apparatus. He lived with his family near the school he attended, in one of the makeshift wooden buildings the Finnish state had donated to the destroyed capital (it still stands, near the National Library). His father worked as a teacher. His mother, who was ill after the war, never returned to her professional career. His sister, who was a year younger, attended the same school. Kapuściński remembers that he was more interested in sports at that time than in learning. In the district of Ochota, young people were not seeking intellectual activities; they preferred to run after a ball. Over time, Ryszard’s backyard games took the form of hard training. It seems he was unable to decide which sport to focus on, since he had

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started with so many. In the end, he trained seriously for two: boxing and football. His boxing adventure began at the Polonia Warsaw club. He rose quickly to runner-up in the Warsaw juniors in the bantamweight division. However, he soon abandoned boxing: football was his true passion. He even trained for some time at Legia Warsaw under the watchful eye of the future coach of the national football team, the legendary Kazimierz Górski. He remembered later that when he became tired of running after the ball, he would sit on the grass and write a few poems. He later sent them to various literary periodicals, and, to his surprise, he soon saw them in print. He did not attach great importance to what he had written. The fate of these poems was followed more attentively by his Polish teacher, who later found them in various literary journals. His official debut as a poet should be dated 14 August 1949, when the Catholic weekly Dziś i Jutro published two of them: “Pisane szybkością” (Written at Speed) and “Uzdrowienie” (Healing). Neither of them would have led one to predict that just half a year later, their author, at his friends’ suggestion, would take the floor to address “the matter of obligations.” The first of these poems is a pleasant impression of a train journey (likely to Olsztyn). The second, by contrast, is an affectionate expression of the belief in rebuilding humanity along with a city, “where smiles were buried by bricks.” The place of publication did not foreshadow it either. Also meaningful, albeit unintentionally, is that on the second page of the weekly, the poems were adjacent to the end of a long article titled “Prawo do twórczej pracy” (The Right to Creative Work) by Tadeusz Mazowiecki, an aspiring Catholic journalist (who would be Poland’s first prime minister after 1989). Clearly, Kapuściński was adopting a Socialist Realist model in these youthful attempts at poetry. They would have had no significance for the author’s future had they not opened a path to journalism for him. He now landed a job at a new magazine: on 1 May 1950, the first issue of Sztandar Młodych (Youth Banner) was published, the “Journal of the Polish Youth Union,” tasked with unifying the young generation. The newspaper declared in its first issue that it would “work on bringing together and mobilising all the young people of our country to implement the Six-Year Plan, to the victorious fight for peace, for happy youth.” It also intended to be a “sincere friend and advisor to young people in their daily lives – at work, learning and rest.” The magazine (in the persons of poets and journalists of the culture department: Wiktor Woroszylski and Andrzej Braun) asked to publish the literary

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writings of the young boxer, student activist, and aspiring “Górski’s eagle.” He delayed accepting this offer until graduation, that is, until he had passed his final exams, which he did on 5 June 1950. The very next day, Ryszard Kapuściński’s writing appeared in the new journal. Today, starting a journalistic career in such a manner would probably be exceptional. This was not the case with Youth Banner in 1950, given that in Stalinist times, any editor who upheld prewar journalistic traditions would have been ousted from his job. The creators of that magazine, which was modelled on Komsomolska Prawda – even its graphics were similar – intended to ensure the purity of its ideological content by choosing several dozen members and associate editorial staff who knew no reality except the postwar years and who had been shaped solely by the new system. There was no shortage of eighteenand twenty-year-olds among this group, and the department managers themselves were only twenty-two or twenty-three. They had been recruited from a pool of aspiring journalists at other official youth publications (Walka Młodych, Pokolenie, Nowa Wieś, Świat Młodych), from zmp activists, and from among the workers and rural correspondents, who had been rushed through a course specifically tailored to them in Warsaw. It must be said that though the founders of Youth Banner maintained a careless attitude toward professional training for journalists, the team they brought together would prove their professional and civil merit just a few years later. Between 1955 and 1957, during the so-called thaw, when it was again possible for the press to fulfill its basic functions, Youth Banner was at the forefront of print venues fighting for truth, democracy, and justice in public life. Almost all of its staff would have preferred to be shut down or fired rather than give up their ideals of freedom. Youth Banner came to serve as a school of accelerated self-learning for a large group of leading Polish editors, journalists, and fledgling reporters, without whom it would be difficult to imagine the Polish press (including weeklies such as Polityka and Kultura) in the 1970s. The employees of Youth Banner included Wojciech Adamiecki, Maksymilian Berezowski, Dariusz Fikus, Jerzy Górski, Krzysztof Kąkolewski, Wojciech Krasucki, Grzegorz Lasota, Zygmunt Szeliga, Marian Turski, Krzysztof Wolicki, and Jerzy Zieleński. Among their co-workers were Stanisław Albinowski, Jerzy Ambroziewicz, Ewa Berberyusz, Andrzej Drawicz, Kazimierz Dziewanowski, Wiesław Górnicki, Edward Hołda, Zygmunt Kałużyński, Stefan Kozicki,

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Andrzej Osęka, Daniel Passent, Mieczysław F. Rakowski, Jan Z. Słojewski, Krzysztof T. Toeplitz, Jerzy Urban, Andrzej K. Wróblewski, and Ryszard Wójcik. Kapuściński found himself part of this superbly talented (as it turned out) journalistic group thanks mainly to his poetic declaration of support for the spirit of the new times. This may seem strange today, but it wasn’t then. It could even be said that Kapuściński was following a well-worn trail. In 1945, as a seventeen-year-old, his promoter and first boss at Youth Banner, Wiktor Woroszylski, had followed the same trail. He was a poet, then also a translator and essayist (author of excellent monographs on Pushkin and Yesenin, among others). “Where do you want to go? To the youth, ub , navy?” he had been asked by the Polish Workers’ Party’s district secretary during the 1945 party admission process. “After a few days, the fourth possibility emerged,” Woroszylski recalled a few years later. “Głos Ludu printed my first rhyming invective, pathetic and irregular, titled ‘Przed Berlinem’ [Before Berlin], after which I was engaged as a city department reporter.”2 Those who set the party’s cultural policy worshipped literature and poetry. They also believed that literature had an extraordinary power to stir up social awareness, so they set out to turn it into a tool for shaping that awareness. They also wanted to put poets to work on forming the “new human,” in the belief that poets had a unique power to win over people’s hearts and minds. Thus, a poetic predisposition and enthusiasm for the new political system were viewed as the best qualifications for a journalist, who was also expected to be an active propagandist. Seventeen- and eighteen-year-old aspiring poets probably found it impossible to turn down an offer of newspaper work. It was undoubtedly an honour to be employed in an editorial office straight out of secondary school (or even before that); it also meant an opportunity to give vent to the youthful desire for action while improving the world with a group of like-minded people. Also a factor was the particular cultural trope of the poet who “steps on the throat of his song” and gives his talent over to the Cause, the Idea, which requires fighting, with words, in a newspaper. Kapuściński must have been honoured and enthralled by an offer to work for Youth Banner. The names of the newspaper’s “head hunters” would already have been known to him, especially Wiktor Woroszylski, whose famous article “Batalia o Majakowskiego” (The Battle for Mayakovsky) had appeared in the fifth issue of Odrodzenie in 1950. That

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was the same edition in which Kapuściński had published “Różowe jabłka” (Pink Apples). Woroszylski’s had been one of the most prominent performances by the Pryszczaci (“spotted,” i.e., acne-ridden) group, the youngest and most radically disposed writers, who viewed their revolutionary masters at the Marxist Kuźnica, not much older than them, as not quite revolutionary enough. Was Kapuściński aware of the role played by the author of “Batalia” in generational and ideological literary disputes? Did he know the names of the other spotted ones? In the next issue of Odrodzenie, he could read the discussion “Biblioteki Przodowników Pracy” penned by Jacek Bocheński, later an accomplished prose writer and essayist. In the tenth issue, the report from the above-mentioned school discussion was printed next to a two-column fragment of the novel Przy budowie (Under Construction) by Tadeusz Konwicki. At the very start of his work in Youth Banner, he met (among others) Andrzej Braun and Witold Zalewski, the author of a then wellknown book of reportage, Traktory zdobędą wiosnę (The Tractors Will Conquer Spring). He joined them on visits to great construction sites and meetings with zmp activists. He met Tadeusz Borowski himself during the period of his most strident journalism – if not in the Youth Circle at the Warsaw branch of the Polish Writers’ Union, which he also frequented, then at the Congress of Young Writers’ Circles in Nieborów at the beginning of April 1951, which was commemorated by a group photograph of the spotted ones.3 Whether he realized it or not, Kapuściński was now embedded in the youngest, most strongly politicized and militant avant-garde in the Polish journalistic and literary environment. In good faith, they wanted to make literature a weapon of revolution and subordinate it to party directives. As an editorial runner, he could visit the most outstanding mature artists, among them Maria Dąbrowska, Zofia Nałkowska, Leopold Staff, and Julian Tuwim. He recalled meeting the author of Medaliony: “Nałkowska handed me a piece of paper with typescript on it. She walked me back to the door, went out to the staircase with me and, after a moment of hesitation, she asked: ‘Do you think they will let us write the way we used to, sir?’ I mumbled something vague and rushed downstairs abashed, stunned” (L, 154). Kapuściński was undoubtedly one of the youngest among the fledgling writers engrossed by the revolutionary spirit of the spotted ones. An account of a discussion of his poems was published in the penultimate issue of Odrodzenie. That weekly, together with Kuźnica, had been striving to win over the Polish intelligentsia to the revolutionary cause

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since 1945. Those two journals were now replaced by Nowa Kultura, which presented Socialist Realism as an established doctrine, with a bureaucracy to back it up. As Woroszylski would later recount: “The ‘spotted ones’ who gathered around Nowa Kultura and Youth Banner between 1950 and 1952 were not revolutionaries anymore.”4 This might be why that spirit did not last. In August 1950, an excerpt from Kapuściński’s narrative poem about Nowa Huta called “Zetempowcy” (The People of the Union of Polish Youth; zmp ) was published in Youth Banner. Two parts of a cycle titled “Droga prowadzi naprzód!” (The Road Leads Forward!) appeared in the paper in September. Both endeavours would be continued in November of the same year in the two leading literary journals. A series of four quite long poems continuing the cycle would appear in the pages of Twórczość,5 the organ of the Związek Literatów Polskich (Polish Writers’ Union), under the editorship of Adam Ważyk – “Droga …” – with a common dedication: “Zetempowskim brygadom traktorowym” (The Union of Polish Youth’s Tractor Brigades). They took up several pages in that issue. They essentially did not deviate from the poetic mass production of the day. Along with the works of other aspiring poets, they were meant to describe the new reality from youth’s perspective. The themes of the poems are not particularly original. Their main characters are “the beautiful fighting” workers from the ranks of the zmp ; their antagonists won’t decorate their “cake-holes swollen with lies” with a smile. The young poet describes a worker’s hard labour and the joy he gets from work on the collective. He also does not forget about the farmer struggling with the land every day, who, however, is happy to be able to plough in cooperative fields and harvest crops with a “combine harvester – those from the Soviet Union.” The programmed optimism of both these heroes of those days cannot be broken by the spectre of sabotage. These poems’ stylistics and phraseology are in line with Socialist Realist patterns dictated from on high. Nowa Kultura’s pages would include fragments of the “Poemat o Nowej Hucie” (Poem about Nowa Huta), which apparently suited the ideological needs of that time. The author writes about “the greatest city on the foundations of youth.” He is delighted with the pace of construction and the power of socialism that manifests thereby. For now, though, this work wrapped up Kapuściński’s adventure with poetry. Later, he would always refer to his first poems as “Mayakovskian productions” and thank God he did not publish anything at that time. However, as is known, the writer would return to

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poetry in the 1980s, at which point he would begin to understand that for his biography and creative work, those first, clumsy attempts at self-expression, quickly suppressed by Socialist Realist poetics, would be of considerable importance to him. In them, he would search for indicators of his efforts to cross poetry with reportage. Conciseness, a tendency to metaphor, a feeling for and knowledge of words – these are just a few of the most important stylistic determinants of the later Kapuściński’s writing, and they had their origins in his earliest poetry. For the recent high school graduate, the end of his adventure with Socialist Realist poetry did not mean the end of his involvement in building “the new human” into a new reality. As an aspiring journalist, entitled only to write lowly press releases (reviews, reports, responses to readers’ letters), he was not offered much space to display his talents. Still, he managed to present himself as a promising, combative, and principled man of letters. What was the future author of The Emperor fighting for? Having discussed several of the mass-printed Arkusze poetyckie (Poetical Sheets), for instance, he demanded that future selections include only poems that were ideologically unambiguous and that combined revolutionary content with the presentation of the birth of “the new human.” Because of their widespread popularity within the organization, this required particular vigilance when it came to selecting them. “The members of the zmp will read it!”6 sounded like a call to maintain the strictest criteria of moral and ideological purity with regard to what young people would be reading. There is much other evidence pointing to Kapuściński’s sense of responsibility for the quality of cultural content provided to young people’s organizations and to his belief that those organizations demanded revolutionary novelty more than anything else. Teatr Młodego Widza (the Young Viewer’s Theatre) in Wrocław was excoriated in his report for not breaking completely from its middle-class repertoire and, what’s more, for not providing proper conditions for group discussions after performances.7 How threatening were his warnings of a “bourgeois filth,” of a “dirty and overt cosmopolitism” hiding in the fading remnants of private publishing, and his calls to “cleanse” the nation of it! And how committed he was to encouraging Polish publishers – based on his review in Komsomolska Prawda (Komsomol Truth) – to translate Yuri Trifonov’s Studenci (The Students), a novel that would be guiding his generation through life! It seems that Kapuściński could thank God not just because he had failed to publish a volume of poems. As a budding publicist, he wielded

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a firm hand, using clear arguments, making his case with steely logic, and demanding urgent practical action. Fortunately, he was too young to actually influence anyone, let alone harm them or himself. But the fact that he might have done so and did not should be viewed as a happy twist of fate, as is evidenced by many mature artists’ later memories of zmp ’s youth; they often rued what could have happened had their passionate support of the “spirit of history” turned into actual participation.8 Kapuściński himself probably survived mainly because after a few months’ apprenticeship in Youth Banner, he decided to continue to develop his knowledge. This meant a nearly four-year break in his journalistic writing (at the worst possible moment!), for his study schedule prevented him from continuing with newspaper work. The editorial suite kept office hours; meanwhile, students had to attend lectures diligently because there were no books, which meant that lectures were the main, if not the only, source of knowledge. Combining one with the other was all the more impossible because Kapuściński was active in the zmp (at the time, a member of the pzpr and secretary of the faculty party organization). Thus he was obliged to excel in his studies while devoting long hours to his zmp activities, such as trips to mines, construction projects, and agricultural works. For a time, during the academic year 1950–51, while beginning Polish studies at Warsaw University, he attempted to juggle his studies with his job at Youth Banner. After a year, though, he asked for a sabbatical from the editorial office and began his studies again, history this time. History and philosophy would be Kapuściński’s lifelong passions. This can easily be seen in Travels with Herodotus and Lapidaria. His fascination would find expression as he was selecting and shaping the manuscript for Imperium. However, history did not absorb him enough to turn him into an academic, though he did not lack ways and means. Perhaps it was a close thing that today we are not looking for him among distinguished historians or philosophers. Among others, he studied alongside fellow students Henryk Samsonowicz, Bronisław Geremek, Janusz Tazbir, and Antoni Mączak. While still a student, he taught third-year philosophy, participating in classes in Leszek Kołakowski’s department, where Krzysztof Pomian was among his students.9 However, he did not take up the assistantship that was offered to him. After defending his master’s thesis, prepared under Professor Henryk Jabłoński, concerning the shaping of the Polish intelligentsia at the end of the nineteenth century, he returned full-time to Youth Banner.

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Today, we say that this momentous decision reflected his choice to participate in “living history,” as opposed to archival history. Such participation is usually understood as current affairs journalism. But Kapuściński was not yet a reporter witnessing the birth of independent Africa. He had left Youth Banner in the autumn of 1951 as a fledgling journalist, and now, in mid-1955, he was returning to it, still as a journalist. At the time, his participation in “living history” amounted to an engagement in shaping the future, in fighting for a future that would reflect deeply engrained ideals of justice and the good. One might even say that it was only now that he found real possibilities to act on his passions. Youth Banner was no longer the same paper. By the time Kapuściński returned, the editorial board had changed twice. This made it possible for the team to break with the Stalinist and post-Stalinist propaganda press. Thanks to the personal connections of the new editor-in-chief, Irena Tarłowska, who was said to be beautiful, educated, and worldly, and to Jerzy Morawski, one of the so-called “young secretaries,” who was striving to de-Stalinize the party and the political system in Poland, Youth Banner was evolving into one of the leading journals in the fight for democratic reforms and a clear-headed world view. The better-known student weekly Po prostu played a very similar role in influencing public opinion. It didn’t become as famous as Youth Banner, perhaps because it wasn’t shut down with a bang in the autumn of 1957 (when, after Władysław Gomułka strengthened his grip on power, a “free press” was no longer needed). Instead, it was pacified by party commissioners, who persuaded nearly the entire team to leave. During these years, Youth Banner grew in significance while expanding its circulation among all social strata. It prophesied the coming of “the new” not only through the contents of its articles but also by taking up a new form of journalism that liberated readers from propaganda. Everything mattered here, including the gradual abandonment of the red colour palette (toward green and blue) and the shift to shorter articles. It ran more and more pictures as well as more articles on culture (critical film reviews by Agnieszka Osiecka, Krzysztof Kąkolewski’s articles on jazz), sports, lifestyle, and fashion. This effort to reflect readers’ actual interests was connected with the evolution of Youth Banner’s status and its gradual achievement of autonomy from the zmp , whose organ it had started out being. This all happened in the months between the dissolution of the zmp in the autumn of 1956 and the brutal subordination of the journal to

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the state’s tightened information policy in autumn 1957. An analogy to the independence it acquired during those months is the free years of the 1980–81 “Solidarity.” For a time, it had been possible to say that the journal was independent. It provided information about its circulation and maintained actual contact with readers. In autumn 1956, the team appointed an editorial committee by democratic vote and announced its composition to the general public. Youth Banner’s loosening of its ties with the youth organization was accompanied by a search for ways to free itself for the ruthless dominance of youth-related issues. Weekly supplements focused on social/cultural matters were one result of that search; these enabled journalists and writers to approach more “normal” or “adult” issues in considerably more ambitious literary forms. One of these supplements, published irregularly, was Przedpole (almost all of the co-authors of Współczesność magazine, who were soon to be given the literary name “Generation 1956,” debuted on its modest pages). This was followed by the permanent supplement Niedziela, whose launch constituted a symbolic and actual crowning of what was effectively a new magazine. Symbolic, in that it imitated Western press solutions (in practice, that meant imitating the supplement of the newspaper of the French Communist Party, L’Humanité Dimanche) while absorbing attributes of Komsomolska Prawda. Actual, because the supplement allowed the creative talents of Youth Banner’s journalists and contributors to develop. Among other things, along with Po prostu, it became the most important outlet for “young reportage.” Almost immediately after returning from his studies, Kapuściński became part of this accelerated change. It was, we should remember, the hot summer of 1955. Over the first two weeks of August, Warsaw, decorated like never before (in defiance of Socialist Realism), hosted the World Festival of Youth and Students, which was rich with discussions and theatrical, literary, musical, and visual presentations. Thirty thousand participants from 114 countries attended. This was a clear signal that an Iron Curtain country was ending its postwar isolation. Youth Banner covered the event as the official press organ. Kapuściński, like other journalists at the paper, was right in the thick of it. He made his first international acquaintances as he accompanied foreign participants to numerous events on-site and on their trip to Oświęcim (in German, Auschwitz). He ensured that Polish delegates from the provinces would be able to participate in as many important discussions as possible with guests from abroad. He accompanied them in meetings

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with the zmp youth; he wanted to use their interest in the festival to make them aware of their participation in world affairs and encourage them to revive their local organizations.10 He wrote his first fictional text, in which he naively expressed the universal desire for peaceful coexistence in a rapture of ecstasy from the experience of international brotherhood.11 For Kapuściński, participation in the World Festival of Youth and Students was a profound experience: “At the Festival, we saw a big chunk of the world,” he wrote, “and this world turned out to be big and interesting, worth knowing, deserving of permanent interest.”12 He immediately started to think about the next international meeting – in Moscow – and about making the rhythm of the festival meetings of young people from all continents a new way of measuring the course of accelerated change throughout the world. “Historians should not oppose this,” he playfully added. However, the yearning to experience great historical events came to Kapuściński differently. The festival events (such as the Young Art Exhibition at the Arsenal) had not yet ended when an unprecedented controversy that would last for weeks began to roil the most important political groups and all press titles. The spark was Adam Ważyk’s “Poemat dla dorosłych” (Poem for Adults), published in Nowa Kultura in August 1955. In that article, a watershed in the break with Socialist Realist literature, the writer liberated himself from self-imposed rules and ferociously unmasked Socialist Realist symbols, including Nowa Huta – the symbol of social advancement for the peasant masses and of Poland’s great industrialization: “Distrustful soul, torn out of the village soil, half-awakened and already half-mad / … / pushed suddenly out of medieval darkness: un-human Poland.”13 Kapuściński, who once celebrated the construction of Nowa Huta in a poem, was now given the task of repairing the blackened image of Nowa Huta’s reality and saving the flagship symbol of socialism. In the article “To też jest prawda o Nowej Hucie” (This Is Also True about Nowa Huta), he argued with Adam Ważyk only about the human dignity of work and the notion that he was unmasking reality. He defended people whom he knew well against harsh descriptions and against the use of their images for an end other than a better life: “None of the citizens of Nowa Huta is a legendary hero, they are all common, often inconspicuous … But they are not a ‘mob,’ a ‘half-mad soul,’ ‘un-human Poland,’ they surely aren’t ‘oat groats.’ These terms, taken from Ważyk’s narrative poem, are unfair towards them, offensive, untrue …

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The poem didn’t appeal to them, they got it in that they are redundant, or even unnoticed. The stanzas didn’t sound to them like a call to arms – they only deepened the resentment.”14 A poem should express the feelings, needs, and ideals of the community. Criticism should inspire everyone to fight and act, to help repair reality. Kapuściński uncovered the same facts to which the poem referred: homelessness, endemic prostitution, inhumane working and living conditions, and the lack of anything to do during leisure time, which was filled with vodka, boredom, and hooliganism. He talked about “harm, badness, soullessness, hypocrisy,” mismanagement, waste. Yet despite this clear-eyed description of Nowa Huta’s ills, he did not doubt that the ideals of the new system could be achieved. His article ended with a call for a special commission to expose the full truth, win the trust of the inhabitants, and with them take up the “fight for a better life in Nowa Huta.” At the time, demonstrating faith in the party’s ability to right its wrongs – expressed in appeals for commissions, councils, controls – was a ritualistic means to criticize contemporary reality in a palatable way, However, Kapuściński’s call stood out from similar ones with its tone of moral gravity (also visible in his polemical defence of workers’ dignity), expressed in simple words flowing from a strong sense of ethics: “Nowa Huta is waiting for justice. It can’t wait long.” Other authors’ texts often ended similarly – for example, the clarion reportage of Jerzy Ambroziewicz and Ryszard Wiśniowski, which appeared in Po prostu a month later, from the cotton works in Zambrów: “Zambrów is waiting for socialism.”15 The publication of Ważyk’s poem was associated with a sudden reversal of fortunes at Nowa Kultura. It led to the immediate dismissal of the editor-in-chief. Despite the obvious dissimilarity of its message, Kapuściński’s article encountered similar difficulties and had comparable repercussions. To publish it, the editors waited until a friendly censor was on duty, Mieczysław Adamczyk, who was also a close friend of the author. However, it was probably not expected that printing the text would cause quite such a storm. The magazine’s editor-in-chief, Irena Tarłowska, was immediately dismissed, as was the responsible Warsaw censor. On the advice of his supporters at Youth Banner, Kapuściński, who was threatened with interrogation and dismissal, took refuge for three days among the workers of Nowa Huta. The first thing he saw there was a clipping from the newspaper with his text on the wall.16

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Only actions from the top brought about a radical change in the situation. The censor and editor-in-chief were brought back to work. A party/governmental commission was appointed. Its work resulted in the dismissal of the entire management of the Nowa Huta conglomerate and a special investment fund for the town. After a few months of this “renewal,” Kapuściński – at the age of twenty-three! – was awarded a Golden Cross of Merit. A few months later, exactly on the eve of June ’56, he was allowed to make his first foreign journey. Besides being a reward for his service for “renewal,” it suggested to the promising young reporter that the world’s wickedness could be tracked to other places. The publication of the report on Nowa Huta at the end of September 1955 was a turning point in Youth Banner’s history. It marked the beginning of the newspaper’s “thaw.” We would be wrong, however, to think that Kapuściński would be writing only exposés from now on. His would be “fighting” texts, which would run more and more often on the paper’s first and second pages. Today, the importance of them is not as obvious as it was then. Much of Kapuściński’s fighting journalism amounted to efforts to save the Union of Polish Youth (zmp ). After he returned to the editorial office, he was assigned to the Youth Department, where at first he focussed on the zmp ’s organizational problems; this probably reflected his own past activity there. In the words of those times (some of which were meant to justify the party’s postulates), he was fighting to rekindle the spirit of engagement, agency, and selfless social activism among the country’s youth. He did not lose faith in young people’s historical mission – nor did he rein in his own pomposity. He tried to attend all of the organization’s meetings and visit all of its workplaces. He fought against all that obstructed or foiled it: the indolence of the union apparatus, the stiff language of its “restorative” training programs, the capturing of individual activism by party patronage. He fought for the zmp ’s restoration because in the coming historical hour, he couldn’t imagine that young people’s potential could be put to good use without it. Thus, in February 1956 he wrote: “zmp is the only youth organisation. It sculpts the shape of the generation … Reportedly some wise men say that you can raise, demolish, and build without the zmp . God be with you! … One can speak of generations and discuss them, but no generation of revolutionaries has lived without organisation, and it was organisation that has shaped the face of a generation.”17 His effort in 1956 to save the zmp – as a venue for “achieving goals” (and self-realization!) of the young “generation of revolutionaries” – may

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surprise us today, for that organization was established not to foment revolution but to unite young people and subordinate them to the authorities. It would be dissolved soon after because it was unable to reform itself and could no longer serve its intended function. However, given that Kapuściński was as far as a person could be from supporting the authorities, this only meant that he had not yet quite “reviewed everything” and was reluctant to bow to social pressure. His journalism was laced with criticisms of the “embarrassing crust of bureaucratism” and similar sentiments. Such phrases, quite unambiguous at that time, were early examples of what would later be his diatribes against “the desk” as a symbol and attribute of authority. Proof of the “pre-October” revolutionary nature of Kapuściński’s journalism is that it was rooted in the problems of large workplaces. At that time, the attitude of the staff at such workplaces had a decisive impact on political events. Society’s battle to steer government policy was turning into a fight for the introduction of workers’ councils, which would offer roughly the same guarantee of democratic victories as independent trade unions after September 1980. Much of the hope Kapuściński placed in the zmp was undoubtedly associated with the role that young, organized workers could play in that transformation; in his “youth” journalism, he called for young people to influence factory management. After completing his campaign for reform of the zmp , he took up the battle for the workers’ councils – and, later, for their preservation. He waged that battle in his articles for Youth Banner, such as his two-part treatise “O demokracji robotniczej” (On Workers’ Democracy; September 1956) and “Barometr demokracji” (The Barometer of Democracy; April 1957). Kapuściński and his creative biography were essentially forged through combative journalism. It is well possible that without these beginnings, he would not have become one of the twentieth century’s great journalists. It is not by chance that the great reportage journalists – John Reed, Egon Erwin Kirsch, and the Poles Melchior Wańkowicz and Ksawery Pruszyński – were feature writers. Bear in mind that the most outstanding reportage journalists tend to harbour doubts about “authoritative” journalism’s validity and purpose. To know the world, to describe and explain it, one must start with a passionate determination to repair and shape it. However expressive Kapuściński’s journalism was at the time, it is no simple task to identify what fed his passion. In the first postwar years, his journalism was shaped by the fight for a new political system.

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Kapuściński was often asked later how his articles in this vein were approved for publication. The answer is complicated. Not knowing that his father had concealed from him both his escape from Russian captivity and his membership in the ak underground, people wondered how the son of an ak soldier (and by miracle a survivor of the transports to Katyń), a man who as a child got to know the true face of the Soviets, became a member of zmp in 1948 and the pzpr in 1953. Given all that, how could he have been influenced by communist propaganda? Note well here that the author of The Emperor, who often asked himself the same question in an effort to understand his choices at the time, always returned to his experience of war. In Lapidaria, he would write that his generation’s radar may have been suppressed by Hitler’s deceit in proclaiming “the fight against Bolshevism”: For us, as we were still children, the reasoning was simple: since Hitler fought bolshevism, it has to be a good thing, worth supporting. This is how we came to identify ourselves with bolshevism, something that someone born later might not grasp, the same way as they won’t understand that one of the fundamental aspects of a totalitarian situation is blocking information at an individual level: one is silent, he sees and knows, but remains silent. A father is afraid to tell his son, a husband – his wife. This silence is either imposed or chosen by oneself as a strategy for survival. (L, 121) In conversation with Marek Miller, he drew attention to the presence of a kind of messianism after the trauma of the war: We believed, very romantically, in the slogans of socialism and regarded them simply as the slogans of prosperity. There was some religious element in all that, a test of some faith, an attempt at searching for something and digging oneself out of the nightmare of the occupation. It is impossible to understand this without experiencing the war. Anything which allowed you to escape this experience, which gave you any hope, was good. Today, I can see how naive and trusting I was. But everything I did, I did with deep conviction.18 And in an interview with the British daily The Independent, Kapuściński spoke about postwar poverty, felt particularly severely by children, and about the fact that when you are a teenager, you think less about ideology and more about more basic needs: “We don’t have

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shirts,” he explained, “and whoever was giving shirts, they were good.”19 Whenever he recalled his high school and student years, he always framed them in terms of postwar material and spiritual destruction, without which they would be incomprehensible: We were children of war. High schools were closed during the war years and although in the larger cities clandestine classes were occasionally convened, here, in this lecture hall, sat mostly girls and boys from remote villages and small towns, ill read, undereducated. It was 1951. University admissions were granted without entrance examinations, family provenance mattering most – in the communist state the children of workers and peasants had the best chances of getting in. (P, 4) Everyone who thought it necessary to explain their involvement at the time on the side of the “new order” brought up the war as the cause of their later political decisions and ideological choices. Yet not everyone thought about this in the same way. When Kapuściński spoke about escaping the nightmare of war, about searching for hope (sometimes desperately) for rebuilding a world free from the evil he had experienced, about a sense of mission and even religious faith, he felt especially close to those who, like him, could describe themselves as “children of war.” Among those literary people who addressed the past were Tadeusz Konwicki, a refugee from the Vilnius region (“Alone, without family, without acquaintances, in guerrilla shoes and in guerrilla guise I got off a freight wagon in Warsaw”)20 and Wiktor Woroszylski, who stepped down from the repatriation “heated wagons” at the station in Kutno (“We saw rape and death – we were afraid of death as adults – as adults we had to fight for existence – we didn’t go to schools, but we got to know life from the side from which we should never have known it”).21 Almost all of the aspiring writers and intellectuals whom Kapuściński encountered in the zmp , at university, and at Youth Banner had similar experiences to share. Without looking hard, we can easily find accounts of the state of mind known to us from his confessions. Years later, Konwicki would write with sarcastic irony: It may sound unbelievable, but we, the sixteen-, eighteen-year-olds, wading with foolhardy stubbornness through this global disaster, we were thinking that the real world will begin with us, real mankind, with us the age of divinity on earth will begin. We were

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looking at the past with disdainful wonder through the flames and smoke … It all seemed to us like a chain of nonsensical blunders … and we couldn’t wait until we ourselves would take the responsibility into our own hands.22 Woroszylski concurred: We hated the world order in which we experienced this awful period between childhood and youth. We despised the older generation which had not managed to prevent this world, and we longed for a big compensation, a new world built from the ruins, a world which would be not only good and just, but also strong, merciless and capable of attacking and quashing evil. We craved a great division in which we could choose the right side.23 Yet a passion to fix the world, a will to confront its evil, eagerly taken to heart as a generational mission, and enthusiasm for creating new history – none of these could be explained in terms of submission to communist propaganda. Rather, they were outgrowths of the personal experience of survival (felt most painfully by the “children of war”), that is, survival of the multidimensional catastrophe inflicted on the world order by the war. People of the postwar, of course, framed and harnessed this passion in their own different ways. In particular, they took advantage of the war’s lesson in hatred, which Kapuściński himself would name years later as perhaps the most enduring legacy of war: But, above all, the war was raging within us because for five years it had been influencing the formation of our characters, our psyche, our mentality. That it was trying to deform and destroy them by giving us the worst examples, forcing us to commit unworthy acts, setting free our condemned feelings … Yes, to leave the war meant to cleanse oneself from within, essentially to cleanse oneself from hatred. But how many … managed to do it? (B, 15–16) The wartime pedigree of Kapuściński’s biography and creative life explains not just his early journalism; it is also essential for understanding the transformation of this early journalism into reportage. We already know that the future author of Travels with Herodotus had an excess of a great reporter’s basic predisposition: he was hungry for a great story, he wanted to participate in events that would create a

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new reality, and he had already tasted such participation. However, we also know that in terms of the principal qualities of reportage (which include a quest to depict reality as objectively as possible and the personal presence of the author as someone who researches, orders, and prioritizes facts and then certifies their authenticity), a journalist’s power has its own parameters. As an engaged journalist who had embraced a particular ideology, he wanted not so much to explain reality as to shape it. Moreover, he did not write on his own behalf but on behalf of an idea, an ideological project, a historical principle or necessity. When he did speak for himself, it was not so much as a specific individual but rather as a representative of a young “generation of revolutionists” called to extraordinary historical tasks. After Youth Banner was pacified and its journalists were subjected to various repressions, Kapuściński was deprived of work and faced a year-long publication ban. Perhaps it was precisely then, in 1959, while he was looking for a new job or during his anonymous work receiving and editing dispatches to the Polish Press Agency (Polska Agencja Prasowa) (a task so bleak that to escape it, he volunteered for several months of military training), he came to doubt whether it was possible to shape Polish reality. It is telling, anyway, that in his first text published after the 1959 hiatus, he began to distance himself from the dangers of embellishment and ideological schematization. He self-deprecatingly recalled: In ’52, I used to write reports for zmp meetings. “Colleague Józef Kuna is an exemplary student. He passed his exams with a good score, helps his weaker colleagues, and, despite his unsound health condition, he goes to the country to agitate.” Kuna would be contrasted against Jerzy Polizna, who didn’t pass the exams with a good score, didn’t help the weaker ones, and, despite being brawny, by no means wanted to go agitating the rural areas … Life was beautiful! … One can’t do that nowadays … So I switch from the “internal monologue” channel to the “talk reports” channel and, until the audition is over, I won’t turn the knob back.24 A judgmental tone can also be heard in his report on the construction of the Brown Coal Mine in Konin, which reads something like a “poem for adults”: “It is the same field. The same torn earth. The same smell of lime. Wheels stuck in the mud. A queue of quilted jackets for beer and sausage. Don’t sleep, man, because they will rob you! …

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I am nine years younger: I am in Nowa Huta!’”25 Kapuściński’s sharp journalist’s eye has noticed that national advancement cannot really succeed because workers from the countryside have difficulty learning the ropes of the new industrial age and “management” has no intention of helping them do so. During the struggles of 1956–57, Kapuściński experienced his own impotence in the face of reality, when he felt helpless and, instead of theorizing, tried to understand and describe. This happens, for example, in “Rada Bogów” (The Council of Gods). The report, famous at the time, was on the textile plant in Krosnowice. In this piece, instead of a statement of belief in the healing power of some higher authority, we have an analysis of the cliquish mechanisms of a planned economy, which actually harm workers, and of the various drawbacks to an all-powerful administration. At times his feelings of helplessness when confronted with bureaucracy make Kapuściński take a step unusual for a journalist (though characteristic of today’s reportage): he reveals himself. He exposes his own fragility to emphasize the hopelessness of life – a brave act, for a modest introvert like himself: “I am a very shy man. I couldn’t shout, be at anyone’s throat, rave, buzz or scold … I can’t deliver speeches … I feel wildly anxious about hearing my own voice in places where the number of people exceeds a dozen. Right after uttering the first word, I lose track of all my thoughts, as if someone suddenly stole them all from me.”26 In this confession we can hear Kapuściński’s desire to shed the costume of a militant publicist. Perhaps supporting this observation is his interest in social circles utterly different from those in which he usually travels, for example, young people who oppose the zmp , and, broadly speaking, all anti-organizational youth. He even tries to enter their lives for a taste. To write the reportage “Musisz to wiedzieć, Nowy” (You Have to Know This, New),27 he has to adjust to the rules of the new reportage, as a “new” participant in a group of friends who have no official interests – who do not act, and do not criticize or moralize, and are governed by their own values and social and intellectual pleasures. Of course, encouraging this passive resistance is not his intention. Still, he does not fight it – he instead describes it with compassionate forbearance, for these young lives have been deprived of the fire of enthusiasm. Kapuściński’s first, shockingly exotic (for him) journalistic journeys were a kind of culmination of his confrontation with the spiritual world of the “other.” He travelled to India in 1956 (and unexpectedly,

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Afghanistan) and to China in 1957 (with Tokyo along the way). Readers of Travels with Herodotus know how Kapuściński remembered these important experiences nearly half a century later: the excitement of leaving behind his established existence, and the awakening hunger for eye-opening journeys, but at the same time the paralysis he felt when faced with the inaccessibility of foreign cultures. Most likely, however, the significance of that experience consisted of something else – he could now contrast the propagandistic egalitarianism and utopian notions of international solidarity (as found, for example, in the Warsaw Student Festival report) with reality. Forty years later, Kapuściński wrote: I was brought up in the conviction that freedom, equality and brotherhood are the highest values. And even that equality is in the first place, that freedom and brotherhood are to be subordinated to its victory. This is why travelling to India was such a shock to me. I found myself in a world where inequality was not just a universal state, but – what struck me the most – it was desired, and precisely by those who, according to my naive beliefs, should have fought against this injustice. (L, 446) When Kapuściński travelled to India, that country was wrapped in a newly woven legend of breaking free from colonial dependence, with Jawaharlal Nehru as the “warrior” fighting for matters of great importance for humanity: for the peaceful coexistence of nations, for cooperation, for friendship.”28 The streets jammed with rickshaws and the hordes of beggars reconciled to their caste did not match his image of a “progressive” country or one that was beginning to fight for social justice. So these deeply jarring experiences were not reflected at all in a series of reports he wrote on his return from India.29 Similarly, he was shocked by his stay at the palace of the Rajah of Hyderabad during his visit to the south, where his host greeted him with the attention appropriate for a European sahib. So we learn from Travels with Herodotus. And if such experiences did not influence his on-site reports, it must be because the overwhelming exoticism of Indian culture was obscured by a shock of a different kind: the clash between his experience and his ideological vision of the world made it difficult for him to share his impressions sincerely. It is no coincidence that Kapuściński’s best reportage from India is “Stacja donikąd” (Station to Nowhere) – an image, still shocking today, of the multitudes of refugees at the Calcutta

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train station (standing in for the millions of people then crossing the Indo-Pakistani border), in which the author put on display the evils of colonialism: Britain should have taken responsibility for the division of the former colonial territory; now those two countries were in conflict with each other. Such conformity between the facts and his ideological attitude was quite unique. Perhaps that is why his first truly foreign reports were largely impersonal, close to traditional patterns of travel writing, represented – as far as India is concerned – by prewar books by Ferdynand Goetel and Aleksander Janta-Połczyński, which were probably unknown to him. There is a place for light-hearted, adventurous travelogues, for tales of innocents abroad who come face to face with dangerous tigers and sacred cows and ritual bathing in the Ganges, written with grotesque exaggeration and thinly veiled loathing. The author himself sensed that he was missing out on the significant human experience of the subcontinent’s inhabitants and saw the reasons for that in the superficial image of Indian culture that had been popularized in Europe by the British colonialists, who had concealed the truth about their policy toward Indians. In the conclusion of his series of reports, he wrote that “the colonialists would let the mirage of exoticism through, holding the truth about facts and people back; this is why we don’t know anything, don’t understand anything, we can’t tell it.”30 In this way he was announcing that he hoped one day to confront the colonial cultural stereotypes, which at the time seemed less urgent than cracking down on colonialism itself. For all that, Kapuściński’s reports enthralled his readers. In an ongoing survey concerning the newspaper’s best material, readers placed them at the top. Perhaps that is why, a few months later, in late September of 1957 (when Po prostu was being dissolved and Youth Banner was being pacified), their author was sent to China to establish a working relationship with the youth press of the communist superpower, which had just declared the One Hundred Flowers Campaign, that is, China’s opening to the world. Until recently, all that was known about this mission was that it ended with a three-week return journey by the Trans-Siberian Railway, an experience that came in useful to him thirty years later, when he was writing Imperium. Kapuściński did not return from China with any texts. By the time he arrived in Beijing (via Tokyo and Hong Kong), Mao Zedong had launched a new policy – the Great Leap Forward – and cooperation between the editorial office of Czungkuo and the Warsaw newspaper was moot. Also

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by then, Youth Banner was running onto trouble and being threatened with liquidation, which the Chinese were surely aware of through their embassy. As a consequence, the reporter found himself in a situation that – as we know today from Travels with Herodotus – allowed him to experience not an international brotherhood of youth but rather a heightened form of communist totalitarianism, one that combined Chinese mystery with a hermetic new system in which everyone was equal. We cannot know whether he was fêted, imprisoned, informed on, or under surveillance. In the end, at his own expense, he returned to his editorial friends, who were waiting for his arrival – and as it turned out, for his decision to leave the newspaper, which he did, at the end of March. The journey to China did, however, leave written traces. After Kapuściński broke with Youth Banner, in five issues between April and May 1958,31 the paper published a series of articles by him about Japan, some elements of which related to Tokyo, where he had stopped for a few days. Both the city and the country surprised him no less than India or China. As a newcomer, he had no time to accustom himself to the gigantic city’s commotion, which made it so utterly different from European cities. This was partly due to its confusing single-storey architecture, which made it impossible for foreigners to navigate. As a journalist, he naturally felt solidarity with the victims of the atomic bombs, and he had expected to encounter pacifist, anti-American or anti-imperialist attitudes. However, he mostly saw the trauma of defeat, the impossibility of coming to terms with a lost war. He was most interested, as always, in youth issues, and it pained him to see the war’s “end-products,” the young turning away from social and political questions, the result of various disappointments. It meant he was unable to find ideologically engaged youth. Quite by accident, he found himself stopping briefly in Afghanistan. Because of the Suez Crisis, on his way home he had to change planes in Kabul. There he found a country ruled by the mullahs and deeply immersed in its feudal past. To progress, it would be enough for the Afghans to give up the passivity imposed by their religion, which promised happiness in the seventh heaven. He saw that country as a historical task still to be carried out, as a place where it would be possible to repair a piece of the world, “if the desert was irrigated, if land was given to people, if more factories were built, if more tea was drunk, if we ate more shish kebabs, cakes and rice.”32 This belief in the need for social and civilizational revolution offered him the key to the exotic

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world, allowing him to see the energy of the inhabitants, which at the time manifested itself in a heroic struggle against nature for a scrap of arable land. Afghans were crushed by miserable living conditions and inhibited by religion, yet they also displayed a forward-looking potency with which it was possible to identify. Kapuściński’s first foreign reports indicate that when confronted with otherness, he was interested less in differences than in the possibility of finding a place for his own involvement, identifying with someone else’s cause. These things he was no longer able to do in Poland now that his own cause – the “generation of young revolutionaries” – had failed. His final articles for Youth Banner tell almost exclusively about a shipwrecked generation. First and foremost, about former zmp activists who could not find a new situation for themselves (“Powroty,” “Czasy wolnych kozaków”), but also about former opponents – “final opponents” – whose perverse lifestyles had lost any higher reason for existence. Yet Kapuściński had no intention of abandoning what he had deeply assimilated as a distinguishing feature of his own generation: passion, commitment, a willingness to participate and to fight. For him, these qualities were markers of identity or integrity, without which he could not be himself or know who he was. There was nothing truly special about this. He identified strongly with his generation and found his own identity within it, which seems to have been something that the “war children” held in common, in that the war had uprooted them all from their homes, often deprived them of their families, and stolen their adolescence. A generation, or the myth of a generation, with its own organization, newspaper, actions, and friendships, its sense of creating a new history and purpose, had become something like a home to him, almost an inner homeland. “These difficulties diminish,” wrote Wiktor Woroszylski about his problems reconstructing his self from the past, “when I write ‘we,’ because I certainly am somewhere among ‘us,’ for after all these years, I still feel that I am ‘one of us,’ a member of a generation who experienced something together, whereas when it comes to the individual ‘me’ that has been singled out, I have doubts whether I really was like that.”33 In 1957, in the reality characterized by a breakdown of the political utopia, lost dreams, and dashed hopes for rebirth, it was not easy to rescue one’s involvement in, and belief in, creating history. Such a rescue would require reflection, as well as defence. It is not known how such defence would have looked in Kapuściński’s case had it not been for his foreign travels. In the article “Metryka naszego pokolenia”

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(A Metric of Our Generation), a polemic about Krzysztof Kąkolewski’s manifesto of sovereign privacy, he wrote: The twentieth century has accelerated earth’s rotation and shaken the continents. Asia, inhabited by more than half of humanity, Asia trampled and belittled, decimated with famine and plague, for the first time in centuries begins to eat three times per day, wear shoes and learn to read. What epoch brought forth an equally humanistic work? What about the complete liberation of humans from the wooden plough, mud hut, oil lamp and bast shoes? … The twentieth century is the world’s century, and to measure it with the experience of one country (always exploited throughout history) is to try and drain the sea with a spoon … The work of liberating the world should be undertaken over and over, even if it fails dozens of times underway and despite everything, good always seems so far away.34 As he was leaving Youth Banner, Kapuściński seemed to have embraced a dual attitude toward reality: he was free of journalistic engagement when it came to Poland itself, but he also yearned to participate in the world and the affairs of humanity. He soon faced a choice: would he continue to “measure the twentieth century” by examining the experience of his own country, in which history seemed to have frozen, or would he try to accompany history in places where it was happening most intensely, where “the work of world liberation” was being undertaken “further and afresh”? One doesn’t have to read Kapuściński’s books to know that he unhesitatingly chose the latter option. Yet it is difficult today to remember what drove him to this choice. It is difficult even to guess (after The Shadow of the Sun and Travels with Herodotus) that he was driven – perhaps more than by anything else – by a desire to prolong his active participation in the world’s transformation. Yet that motivation is important to understanding the byways of his biography and his creative development – for example, his quite lengthy departure from revolutionary ideals and the illusions of youth. Unlike most of his writer peers, he tried hard to witness and sometimes participate in the world’s revolutions and jarring transformations. He would travel in Africa for five years at a time when most of today’s independent countries were just gaining their independence, and for another five years in South America during the stormy years of emancipation movements directed against US dominance in the region. In 1975, he would participate in Angola’s liberation, which marked the end of colonialism in Africa.

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Each of these experiences would end in serious disappointment, but each would also reawaken Kapuściński’s revolutionary spirit and prolong his desire for active involvement on one side of the conflict. When did this end? Most likely, it was in the mid-1970s, at some point during the years of the revolution in Ethiopia (1974), the end of the guerrilla war in Angola (1975), the writing of The Emperor (1978), and the Islamic Revolution in Iran (1979). The result would be a distanced, unbiased analysis of the structure of revolution and the collapse of power in The Emperor and in Shah of Shahs. Until then, we will deal with the process – utterly unique, filled with departures and returns, largely detached from the transformation of the country’s political situation – whereby Kapuściński parted with the myth of the revolution as it was put to the test on three continents. Especially since his death, critics and commentators have tended to simplify the process whereby Kapuściński stepped away from the ideological fascinations of his youth, to see that process only in terms of a general, leftist sensitivity to injustices and fate of the excluded. Yet naive or excessive hopes would never be foreign to him. His knowledge of history and humanity’s entanglement in it encouraged him to reflect on historical processes, and those reflections turned him more and more into a careful observer and historian. Had he followed another path, would he have understood so deeply the anatomy of revolution as he presents it in Shah of Shahs? In 1957, while many of his peers were proclaiming their freedom from ideological utopias once and for all, Kapuściński experienced a rekindled faith in the project of fighting for a new world. His final texts in Youth Banner were correspondences from the second World Festival of Youth and Students – this one held in Moscow. The most important of these were about the hundred or so representatives of young Africa, whom he saw as “the persecuted and the fighting, watching over the awakening of the Black Continent.”35 As he wrote in “Meldunki z Afryki” (Reports from Africa): “The strings loosened long ago on that continent are now vibrating.”

3

Incidental Polish and African Tales

Ryszard Kapuściński referred to his national reportage as “historie przygodne” (incidental tales). These were published by Czytelnik in 1962 in his very first book, Busz po polsku (The Polish Bush). What does that intriguing title mean? To answer that, it is best to look at an example. In one tale, instead of writing about the Aleksandra-Maria coal mine, as had been planned, he joined a group of five miners as they escorted a coffin containing the body of Stefan Kanik, a victim of a mining accident, to Masuria. Their dilapidated truck broke down 15 kilometres from their destination. They did not try to repair it or look for another means of transport; instead, they decided to carry the coffin on their shoulders. It must have been hard, for they changed shoulders every 100 metres. After 3 kilometres (by which time it was dark and they had entered a forest), they decided to rest and dry their sweaty shirts by a bonfire before moving on. Then from the forest, there emerged eight girls who were returning from a trip, and the stopover turned into a night-time picnic, with the victim’s body tucked away in the bushes. Is it possible to enjoy life when you are so close to death? Would the boys from the bunkhouse, who longed for women, continue to carry the burden of their mission, which they had begun so recklessly, or would they “chase a skirt”?1 The dead man was no longer just Stefan Kanik, whom they had barely known. “This stiff came to us unknown, and for that reason we can easily identify him with every boy in the world we ever happened to meet.”2 The decision to march was not just about looking for a way out of a difficult situation: “It would be better to go, better to lug him! Take some sort of action, move, talk, vanquish the silence … prove to the world and to ourselves, and above all to ourselves, that we belong to the realm of the living.”3

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It also constituted a “tribute of renunciation, submission, and voluntary consent to such an oddly formed destiny.”4 Indeed, is this journey described in “The Stiff,” first published in mid-1959 in Polityka, not perhaps a metaphor for life in general? “In the end we went on. The dawn met us. The sun warmed us. We kept walking. Our legs buckled, our shoulders went numb, our hands swelled, but we managed to carry it to the cemetery – to the grave – our last harbour on earth.”5 What can we glean from Kapuściński’s incidental tales? First of all, that he probably did not want to write reports about large workplaces, preceded by methodical collection of material. As we can see, he preferred to take the first opportunity to veer off into the unknown, to open himself to surprises, to write what he was somehow meant to write – a story about a chance event, indeed, an adventure. A few other stories from The Polish Bush have similar characteristics. In “Lamus,” the author turns back on the road to Augustów when a hitchhiker tells him that a history teacher, a friend from his studies, has met with an accident. In “Partery,” he encounters itinerant unskilled workers on the road from Bielawa to Nowa Ruda. His tales of a scoutmaster social worker from Małdyty (“Słoneczny brzeg jeziora”), a rafter from the Masurian lakes (“Ocalony na tratwie”), and a settler from Grunwald (“Piątek pod Grunwaldem”) are all records of accidental encounters related to weekend or holiday trips to Masuria, which by the mid-1950s had become a vacationers’ hotspot. Masuria, especially its northeastern corner (known as Garbate), and the Suwałki region are strongly present in Kapuściński’s writing. This injects his tales about even the most serious issues with a taste of exotic adventure, if only because of the unique natural beauty of the borderlands, which in places can be difficult to reach. The area also has cultural interest (the remnants of German and Belarusian districts). At various times during one visit, he had to travel by train, bus, wagon, on foot … often hitchhiking. We find a taste of this in “Wymarsz piątej kolumny,” in which two German women flee from an old people’s home and return to Olecko, because they have dreamed about a new war; in “Daleko,” or “Reklama pasty do zębów” (An Advertisement for Toothpaste), in which he presents humorously dramatic aspects of the arrival of the “new” into Pratki and Cisówka; in “Danka,” a study of small-town mentality; and, finally, in “Drzewa przeciw nam,” a reminiscence about a military camp in the Masurian Forest. Kapuściński’s lack of enthusiasm for describing large industrial works should not surprise us. It was not simply an aversion on his part

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to so-called production issues; he had shown little interest in them in the past, except for what they could tell him about matters that meant the most to him: history, his own generation, the new system’s ideals. Since his change in attitude, he probably viewed stories about large economic projects as unavoidable drudgery. For several months now he had been a journalist for the weekly magazine Polityka, which had been founded six months before the dissolution of Po prostu as a counterweight to the rebellious, informal band of young intelligentsia and then had replaced it in the autumn of 1957. Eventually, through a combination of stubbornness and pragmatism, Polityka succeeded in pushing the boundaries of what could be said and providing an environment where journalists could say it. By 1959, Polityka had survived from the boycott launched by both journalists and disappointed readers of Po prostu. This is due, among other things, to a systematic expansion of the editorial staff, which now included former staff of Youth Banner. One of them, Dariusz Fikus, later the editorial secretary and an important figure in the Polish Journalists’ Association, persuaded Kapuściński to take a job in the reporting section of Polityka, thus saving him from further misery as a dispatch editor for the Polish Press Agency (pap ). Kapuściński’s writing was a fair reflection of his situation at that time. He wrote about huge construction sites, mines, and problems of party work in Żory (texts that would not go into his first book), but whenever he could, he steered away from “central” themes, down side roads, toward the periphery. He typically spent three weeks in the field for every one week at the editorial office. He was not alone in this: the provincial and metropolitan outskirts were by then the focus of a great revival in reportage. It is in those places that he searched for the “true” reality and sought to liberate himself from Socialist Realist tropes. His stories from that time have their own world view, one that is still recognizable today. Perhaps they are all “incidental tales” – all of them place their characters or the author himself in circumstances in which some unexpected event happens to an individual rather than a collective. They speak to individual fates rather than to social or historical processes. Put another way, they focus on attitudes, on situations (sometimes extremely challenging), on tests (as in “The Stiff ”), and on values. The author is interested mainly in the possibility of preserving values such as an active, creative attitude, interpersonal solidarity, and the preservation of human dignity and sovereignty. “Wydma” is a bravura story in this vein. It tells of five living wrecks who have never succeeded

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at anything in their lives and who, coming across one another in the ruins of a state farm in the forest behind Ełk, “can save themselves by saving a piece of land.” “What could they have wanted before? To try anew. To have a chance. And a chance was given to them” (B, 59). This is how the writer summed up this story, and those same words characterize the other ones. For they are not about the easy praise of activity. Instead, they are about challenging moments and opportunities too easily missed. Most of these stories are about people who, wittingly or not, have missed their chance. Some of these people are university assistants who elevate and fetishize their own confusion (“Ocalony na tratwie”). Others are unskilled workers (as in “Partery”) who care nothing about anything and have chosen to live permanently on the margins, as if to say, “We, dear sir, do not push ourselves upwards. We are just down here on the ground floor” (B, 62). Among these people (in “Lamus”) is a former member of the zmp , who at one time drove himself relentlessly, hurling himself into activities; now, in more stable times, when life has become simpler, he feels lost, like the survivor of some distant epoch. People have gradually become observers rather than participants in real life. They no longer take risks, be it in sports (“Wielki rzut”), in professional life (“Spokojna głowa gapy”), or in art and literature (“Bez adresu”). Kapuściński’s interest in individual attitudes (in particular, the possibility of preserving one’s creativity, as well as one’s faith in values), combined with his attraction to elements of adventure, risk, challenge, seemed to be a natural consequence of his loss of faith in the collective creation of history. What remained – it could be asked – for humans whose faith had been abused but who had not lost their will or their passion to act? Such as person would have to be responsible for their own challenges and bear all the risk of their activities. In this regard, it is impossible to forget that the disasters and disappointments of the war years and the early postwar years had brought about a literary climate in Poland characterized by a near-fanatical catching up with delayed translations. In the late 1950s, Polish readers were starving for translations of outstanding world literature of the 1930s and 1940s – the literature of “human valour,” “the human condition,” and “existential adventure” that had grown out of the collapse of the world order (two world wars, the economic collapse of the 1930s). That literature now provided inspiration for Polish writers at a time when utopian hopes were giving way to a search for newer values. The influences on Polish literature were both psychological and philosophical

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(Mauriac, Bernanos, Saint-Exupéry, Malraux, Camus, Sartre), as well as behavioural (Hemingway). This had a widely recognized impact on the country’s prose in the late 1950s, on the best and most experienced writers (Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s Wzlot) as well as on beginners (with Marek Hłasko at the forefront). For a time, difficult ethical issues – choice, responsibility toward others and oneself in times of disorder and instability – became a binding standard, a marker of ambition and modernity. For, as Henryk Bereza wrote at that time on the margins of Marek Hłasko’s short stories, “life requires that every human being should at all times settle matters in a manner as general as possible, to live in order to defend the meaning of life, how to protect oneself from its cruelty, how to find in oneself the possibility of agreeing with the inevitability of his passage.”6 Kapuściński’s incidental tales were far from indifferent to the intellectual zeitgeist. He had turned his reportage into a kind of philosophy of parables. In some, such as the “The Stiff,” we see him trying to inscribe universal meanings on an minor event. He seemed to have missed some developmental stage: from journalism, he was leaping directly toward fiction. It is significant that in the critical reception of his first book, more attention was devoted to his literary ambitions and values than to the cognitive impact of his writing. “Kapuściński,” wrote Bereza in Rocznik Literacki, “uses various narrative and stylistic tricks from artistic prose in his reportage. With great thematic diversity … he does not forget that each of his reportage pieces is a short story in the ‘American style’ … He eagerly eavesdrops on spoken language.”7 Kapuściński’s entry onto the field of Polish literature was so momentous that it generated the first postwar discussion about the place of reportage in literature. This was inaugurated by what was unquestionably a scandal. In November 1960, several months after the publication of “The Stiff ” in Polityka, the theatre magazine Dialog presented a play by Bohdan Drozdowski (a prominent author of the rising generation) titled Kondukt, which blatantly followed the idea behind Kapuściński’s story, which – despite its obvious literary ambitions – had been received as journeyman newspaper material. Kapuściński protested informally at first, and Drozdowski initially acknowledged the legitimacy of his protest and offered him co-authorship when the play was staged.8 However, the announcement of the play’s premiere at the Zielona Góra theatre a year later only mentioned one author; Drozdowski, it seems, had breached his gentleman’s agreement with Kapuściński, who now had no alternative

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but to publicly defend his rights by accusing Drozdowski of plagiarism.9 A row broke out in which Drozdowski, who was also deputy editor-in-chief of Współczesność, mobilized all available forces in his defence. Other magazines involved themselves in the case, and long letters and commentaries “for” and “against” were published in Polityka, Współczesność, Kierunki, Nowa Kultura, Prasa Polska, and Szpilki.10 Literary authorities now took the floor: Julian Przyboś, Antoni Słonimski, Wilhelm Mach, Jerzy Putrament. The board of the Polish Writers Union appointed a special commission, and, guided by its opinion, issued its own verdict: Drozdowski was not guilty of plagiarism; it was a simple matter of a “coincidence of ideas.”11 The clamour that arose around “The Stiff ” lasted until the publication of The Polish Bush and perhaps is what inspired most reviewers to discuss a new place for reportage. Włodzimierz Maciąg saw in that genre the abandonment of topics related to “objective reality” – by which he meant construction sites, factories, and so on – and a turning toward humans, their uniqueness, “a certain kind of exoticism happening around us.”12 Stanisław Dan observed that “reportage more and more blends into literature, thus becoming more and more inseparable,”13 and that this was due to the abandonment of criteria of journalistic validity and a new focus on the interpretation of problems on the horizon of literary values. Polemics over plagiarism would factor greatly in reportage’s struggle to gain an authorial and literary rank equal to that of literary fiction. Kapuściński’s biographical legend has it that he was the first to have the courage to disagree strongly that journalistic work should be anonymous. At the time, literary opinion was completely unprepared for the beginning (or perhaps return, after a Socialist Realist hiatus?) of the blurring of lines between genres. The writing community was at the time guided by quite rigid and long-held criteria of “literariness,” and thus its members judged Drozdowski’s work to be free of the stain of plagiarism because his literary artistry was what truly counted; the similarity of the situations of the two works was completely secondary. Journalists, for their part, now claimed the right to be treated equally. “The Stiff ” did not belong to pure journalism at all; if anything, Kapuściński wasn’t quite sure what his work was. This is reflected, perhaps, in the inconsistent way in which he justified his accusation of plagiarism. On the one hand, he defended his rights as a “modest journalist from the field”; yet on the other, he asserted that “the whole situational idea of the story was born in my imagination.”14 It seems that no language was available to describe the effort of creative

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imagination and philosophical reflection in the description of an event in which he had, in fact, participated, and which really did come from real life. However it was, with his “incidental tales” Kapuściński had situated himself on the border between reportage and fiction. He probably wasn’t certain which of those writing worlds he belonged to (and at the time they were radically separate). The only thing he was sure of was that whatever he wrote about, he had to have experienced it personally. In his satirical tale about young writers (one of them “got off a journalist”) under the metaphorical though situationally fair title “Bez adresu” (Without Address), a more general reflection on writing is to be found. We read a bitter verbal attack (from the mouth of someone who actually did survive an extreme situation) on the supporters of the literary community: “There is no life in you, no desire, no passion … Have you seen anything? … What do you know about the world? … Have you seen death? Do you know what love is? Have you died of desire? Has ambition eaten you up? Has jealousy choked you? Have you cried from joy? Have you bitten your fingers in pain? … You want to write books? Make films? Just tell me, what about” (B, 68–70). While Kapuściński was writing his incidental tales, a new aspect of his interest in reality was forming: the need to experience and get to know his subject the hard way, at his own risk and on his own responsibility. Preferably, this meant challenging fate and accepting unexpected trials. Clearly, by now he was driven by the need to involve himself in a great cause and by a desire to identify with those were changing the world. This need was no longer being met for him in Poland, so he had begun to direct his gaze toward those regions of the globe that were just beginning their new history – especially Africa. Just as clearly, this yearning was joined by a hunger for intense experiences and great adventures. Combine all this with the literary spirit in Poland at the time, where the works of Saint-Exupéry, Malraux, and Conrad had gained popularity. Needless to say, this hunger could not easily be satisfied in Poland. The period of what would soon be referred to as the “little stabilization” was then beginning, accompanied by the phenomenon of “little realism” in literature, and reportage was now turning toward issues of social customs, through which authors could satisfy their literary ambitions. Kapuściński knew what he was up to. In his debut book, we find a report about a meandering walk through a new block of flats (built in 1960) in the Wierzbno district of Warsaw (“Dom”), inhabited

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by people and families from very different backgrounds and with very different pasts. And what? Nothing. “What am I looking for here?,” the reporter asked himself. “These are the things I have in my notebook. Triflings, little realism, sardines.”15 He was not hiding his weariness, his discouragement, his disappointment at the results of the hours he spent there. It would have been surprising if he hadn’t taken the first opportunity to taste the secrets of Africa, where the first independent state south of the Sahara was struggling to give birth to itself. So he took up the chance when it was offered: at the end of 1959, he agreed to travel to Ghana. His colleagues preferred Washington or the capitals of Western Europe and so offered little competition for the assignment. In Ghana, Kapuściński immediately felt at home – more at home anyway than in India, China, or other places he had visited so far. Initially, this resulted not so much from the friendly nature of Ghanaians – and Africans in general; it was more that Africa allowed him to maintain a certain literary aura, the one he had nurtured in his “incidental tales.” He was able to carry that aura with him to Africa, and he managed to make a home for himself there. In his story “Hotel Metropole,” we read: I had had enough vagrancy. I was returning from the bush, from the savannah, from the desert. I was blackened, skinny, knackered. I climbed the stairs to reach the hotel’s first floor – with great relief. On my way, I felt the smell of home, special and undefined … I slept in hundreds of hotels across twenty countries, but only this one I accepted as a home, and so I went in with joy.16 This “home,” saturated with symbolic meanings, was suspended in space like a floating raft, “not tied to any barge.” It belonged neither to the black community nor to the white community and was inhabited by a handful of survivors struggling alone against their shattered fates and seeking solace in drinking together, which Kapuściński did not avoid: “In the tropics drinking is a must. There, a guy feels broken like an old slipper. He is extinguished, toothless, baggy. He is tormented by indefinite longings, ineffable nostalgia, dark pessimism … And he drinks against the night, against shame, against the dirt in the toilet of his fate. This is all he can afford to struggle with” (“Hotel Metropole”). The story’s narrator, a mysterious vagabond from another world (they call him Red), stands out in this international community of

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castaways because he seeks real challenges during his lonely expeditions inland. He returns from them with beautiful and extraordinary stories, which he shares with his beer-and-whisky companions as if they were family (the most important characters are Papa and Uncle Wally). As we know from his writings from his first African journey, Kapuściński also went on more abbreviated wanderings around Accra. Those wanderings brought him a sense of community less sophisticated in literary terms but equally familiar because they offered something like the generational and ideological bonds he had once known, which until recently had connected him with his peers from zmp . “He reminds me of someone, and I envy him something” (Cz, 83) is how Kapuściński summarized his meeting with Ded, a young party activist, who had been seconded to work in trade unions and for whom the legendary creator of independence, Kwame Nkrumah, was not revolutionary enough. Not wanting to become infected with “bourgeoisness,” Ded and his friends were secretly studying History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks): Short Course. He had turned down a Ford Scholarship that would have taken him to the US (he dreamed instead of learning “true” socialism somewhere in the East). He wanted to seek happiness with his fiancée in a collective struggle, not in an intimate relationship. Other young politicians and activists that Kapuściński met reminded him of zmp people or Russian Komsomolists – for example, a certain Shardow, chairman of the Nkrumah youth organization and creator of “Builders’ Brigades” (reminiscent of the “Services to Poland” brigades); and Kofi Baako, the thirty-two-year-old minister of education and information, a young fashion buff whose lively friendship helped the author become acquainted with important people, the city, and the country as a whole. Despite the feelings of appreciation and friendship triggered by the African “revolutionary generation,” who were passionate about a socialist future, Kapuściński could not identify with them unconditionally. Although younger, the writer seemed more experienced than his thirty-something new friends. He already knew what revolutionary sentiments could lead to and how they could end. From the corner of his eye, he observed phenomena that could presage plain totalitarianism. Trade unions, youth organizations, and the ruling party itself were all prey to manipulators, and possibilities to oppose the authorities were restricted. Kapuściński participated in two rallies taking opposing views and noted that both had been staged by the authorities. These insights, however, did not lead to any unmasking.

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As a journalist maintaining his objectivity, he found the political scene in Ghana mildly grotesque, though it provided material for metaphors. For example, when he first tells us about Ded’s revolutionary intentions, they are building sandcastles on the beach. The African’s castle is stronger than the author’s, which is constantly crumbling. In the end, they are just sandcastles. Kapuściński did not overestimate the threat of totalitarianism, given that he was aware of the primordial nature of state power. In Africa, such power was being formed at the interface of imported European models and traditional clan/tribal structures. This led to some humorous situations, which Kapuściński happily described. The education minister was unable to uphold the gravity of his office in the eyes of young people, who treated him in a overly familiar manner. At one point, Prime Minister Nkrumah himself was approached with a complaint about a husband. The friendly familiarity shown to him by Africans, relative to the hermetic cultures of India and China, was perhaps vital to Kapuściński’s sense that he had found a home in Africa, or would have done so except for his white skin. For the local people this marked him as a colonialist, as someone who beat them, stole from them, and humiliated and discriminated against them. So he had to convince his friends and passing acquaintances that there was in Europe a strange country that did not possess colonies and that indeed had itself experienced “the worst of colonialism” – partitions and occupations, war, prison camps, executions, and daily discrimination – and that, as a result of that dark history, had only recently taken up the same tasks as now faced Africans. “We built cities, light came to the village. Those who couldn’t read before learned how” (B, 129). So we read in his story “Busz po polsku.” Minister Baako found his argument persuasive and provided him with a glowing recommendation: “I know him. He is an African. This is the highest compliment a European can receive. They open the door for him everywhere then” (B, 126). Kapuściński also persuaded a village chief of his brotherhood: “Nana stood and shook my hand. Now we were friends, druzja, amigos” (B, 129). But this still wasn’t enough for him. The tale just quoted perfectly mirrors the adventurous atmosphere of “The Stiff ”: “We are stuck in a random place … It was already dark when the tire popped” (B, 125). And it ends, under the guise of falling asleep, with something like a literary stream of consciousness, articulating a thesis on the impossibility of freeing oneself from one’s own experience when confronted with a different cultural reality. He already wants something more than social-historical brotherhood and

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ideological experiences, because all those things can convey “is nothing, nothing of that, which we know and carry within ourselves, not even thinking about our pride and despair, are our lives, our breath and death” (B, 129). The contents of his external experience are here irrevocably intertwined with his internal life, deeply cyphered, and the key to that cypher lies in our pockets. “We always bring it with us to foreign countries … We know its shape but not the way to make others understand it” (B, 130). When he first arrived in Africa, Kapuściński already knew that common experiences and parallel histories do not ensure that the barriers raised by cultural separateness will be overcome. If anything, the opposite. However, this discovery did not seem to matter to his writing at that time. The sense that one’s own experience was non-transferable, and that one’s own surfaces were impervious to others, was not yet accompanied by great curiosity about otherness or by a longing to delve deeply into other cultures so as to identify with their participants. Perhaps this was because he was still in thrall to existentialism (which emphatically rejected to possibility of stepping outside one’s own subjectivity), or perhaps it was because political events at the time were too fraught for him to continue his anthropological reflections on a deeper level. When he returned to Poland, he would make one more discovery, that there was a huge hunger in Poland for knowledge about Africa and its politics: “How do the Africans rule in independent countries? Are they building? What do schools look like?”17 Needless to say, this interest, which he encountered in meeting after meeting, filled him with deep joy, for it indicated that society’s education in international affairs was bearing fruit and that someone like him, whose writing ground had been yanked from under his feet in his home country, could count on readers who were interested in the continent that so fascinated him. “Ultimately, it’s not a matter of having a roof over our heads, our salaries or discounts for clothes … In an unexpected and unorganised way, the African question, one of the biggest problems of the contemporary world, had entered our field of vision and become the subject of our passion.”18 It is likely that Kapuściński’s new pact with his readers began to take shape during a series of meetings after his first African journey. Those gatherings convinced him that Poles wanted to participate in world affairs, through his mediation (and that they wouldn’t criticize him for leaving Polish affairs to other people). Grateful to his readers for

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offering him sanction for what he most wanted to do, he swore that he would spare no effort to satisfy their curiosity in a responsible way. Kapuściński’s second African journey, less than a year after the first, was his first attempt to fulfil that unspoken agreement. He recalled years later: Somewhere, maybe in Olecko or Orneta, I read that there was a great storm raging in Congo, almost a global one. It was the first days of July 1960. Congo, the most isolated, obscure and inaccessible country in Africa, gained independence, but now there was an army rebellion, a flight of the colonials, Belgian paratroopers intervening, anarchy, hysteria and slaughter. The papers describe all this inconceivable mixture on the front page. I bought a ticket and came back to Warsaw … I asked Rakowski to send me to Congo. It already had me, I was fervent. (W, 30) Kapuściński had not waited for someone to propose a trip – he knew where his passions overlapped with his readers’ expectations. He felt that he was their special envoy, and he would do everything he could to reach the roiling centre of contemporary African history and tell them how it really was there. And he had to do a lot from the very beginning. After he had obtained permission to travel, he learned that the new Congolese authorities were expelling visitors from the Soviet Bloc and that a Polish passport would not allow him into the country by air. He could, though, enter Nigeria. “But why Nigeria, there’s nothing at all happening in Nigeria” (W, 30), he recalled thinking at that time. When he learned that Jarda Bouček, a Czech journalist residing in Egypt, was planning to travel to Congo via Sudan (by plane) and the Congolese jungle (by car), he exchanged his ticket and flew almost in secret to Cairo instead of Lagos. He managed to convince the regular correspondent of Rudé Právo that he must get to Stanleyville, the capital of Congo’s eastern province, where Lumumba’s government had taken refuge after being overthrown (Lumumba himself had been arrested). After claiming that he was on the orders of the Polish government, Bouček admitted him as a member of the expedition, which would increase by two more Czechs and, in the final phase, by a Russian.19 But he would have to leave his last will and testimony at the embassy. When he was planning his second African journey, Kapuściński probably was no longer thinking about gathering experiences to use as new incidental tales, although he did not exclude those that might

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arise through his work as a war correspondent, a special envoy, perhaps – someone who sympathizes ideologically with the inhabitants of a country that is the victim of recent oppressors. Polityka published the author’s private letter to his editorial colleagues, written on the eve of what turned out to be the most difficult stage of the journey “through the densest jungles of Africa … through areas inhabited by completely primitive tribes, who only understood that white is a Belgian colonialist.” This letter indicates that the writer was completely ready, and brave enough, for the adventure in front of him: You know, I’m going to drive for 900 kilometres through thick jungle, knowing that at any time, they could fire a round into the car from the bush. This journey really interests me … What I find the most intriguing is that you just go in blind. You know nothing, how to get there, where to live, how to pay, whom to talk to. nothing . The situation being as it is, you can immediately fall into the hands of Mobutu, and then it’s over. In Congo, there are too many fronts to figure it out. Loose groups from both sides move around the country and it depends solely on a stroke of luck which group takes me under their wing … Cross your fingers for me. I’ll try not to disappoint you.20 Kapuściński found himself under the wing of the Lumumbists, but it turned out that his ideological sympathies and engagement meant nothing to them; the real barrier was his skin colour: I thought of going and explaining: I’m from Poland. At the age of sixteen, I joined a youth organisation. On the banners of that organisation were written slogans about the brotherhood of the races and the common struggle against colonialism … I’m with you and I’ll prove it with deeds. (W, 63) With his Czech friends, he tried to join the offensive against Mobutu’s supporters. This did not end tragically, but only because Jarda was able to identify himself with a driver’s licence written in Arabic and valid in Egypt – the country of Nasser, whose name was then holy in all of Africa. Disappointingly, the war itself turned out to be a less spectacular than might have been expected. This was difficult to understand for someone who, like Kapuściński, harboured memories of the most terrible of wars. With his companions, he was stopped by patrols of both

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feuding parties, and in each case, having the right gift to offer was more important than the affiliation of those who stopped them. The troops launching an offensive on Luluabourg, the capital of the province of Kasai, which was half the size of Poland, fit into just five trucks, yet they took the city without a battle (Congolese soldiers don’t like to shoot at each other), only to switch sides to Mobutu after a week in exchange for food. History in Africa – conspiracies, coups, assassinations – happened quietly, behind the scenes, and was not easy to glean, and once Kapuściński rubbed against it, he found himself unable to write about it. Soon after the journalists arrived in Stanleyville, the imprisoned Lumumba was murdered in a cruel and humiliating way. This incited those Congolese who loved him to retaliate blindly against all white people, especially those found in hotels by the enraged paramilitaries and the soldiers of the dissolved army. Kapuściński and his companions were saved by the fact that their rooms could not be entered from the corridor, which meant they weren’t found right away. (From the window they could see what they had missed: being tortured on the street and thrown into a truck). Then, by incredible luck, the commander of the militiamen who had put guns to their heads turned out to be a Lumumbist whom the Czech Jarda had interviewed in Cairo. However, this miracle turned out to be of little use. Stanleyville by then was running out of everything and seemed on its way to either slow starvation or massacre at the hands of the savage army (against which helpless commanders warned the people). Besides all that, it was impossible to get out. Finally, they were saved by members of the un monitoring mission, who were extremely reluctant to help them (because it could lead to them being accused of a breach of neutrality). And the help they did receive put them in an even worse situation. They were placed on a transport that, as it turned out, belonged to peacekeeping forces, who drove them to Usumbura, a city on Belgian territory – more precisely, to its airport, which was controlled by Belgian paratroopers, who had been recruited from the “predatory, brutal and primitive” Congolese colonizers. Obviously, they were not going to believe that the only citizens of the Soviet Bloc who were in Stanleyville at that time were really journalists. But once again, the gracious hand of providence saved Kapuściński from execution – this time in the person of black stewards who warned him of the danger and brought help: soldiers from the un Ethiopian contingent, who had reason not to like Belgians. The dramatic Congolese ordeal was undoubtedly a key episode in the writer’s biography. So it is striking that almost none of its events penetrated the reports he wrote just after his return. Only in the mid-1970s

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did Kapuściński begin to allude in interviews to what happened to him in Congo. He wrote about it for the first time in The Soccer War (1978) as he looked back on his time there. Again we find an apparent split between the actual experience and his written account, this time perhaps more so than in the case of India. For if we are to believe what he wrote about the impact of his brush with death, then after the Congolese journey, he was already a different person, though perhaps he failed to realize it at the time. He recalled years later: The hours of torture began. The steward had tossed a crumb of hope into our cell and it jolted us out of our state of paralysis and overpowering depression, a kind of self-deafening that I now see was a kind of defence against insanity … It takes only one flash of light in the darkness, one lucky break, and suddenly you rise up again and return to the living. What you leave behind, however, is an empty territory that you cannot even describe: it has no points of reference or shape or signposts, and its existence – like the sound barrier – is something you feel only once you have approached it. One step out of that emptiness and it disappears. No one, however, who has entered this emptiness can ever be the same person he was before. Something remains, a psychological scar, hardened, gangrened flesh. (W, 80) The Congo journey had changed Kapuściński profoundly, but his readers did not learn of this right away. In terms of creative development, this raises a question well worth asking: why did he delay? It is probable that he did not know straight away what he should do with that experience, which was different from the encounter with death presented in “The Stiff.” The experience had been so extreme that he could not describe it in the same style as his previous incidental tales, and he was not yet ready to examine it from some other perspective. In his “Congo Up Close” series, he did not completely erase his adventures, but he limited his account to what had actually happened (as expressed in the quoted letter to friends from Polityka) – that is, to the awakening of fear and excitement, and to what could be told according to the conventions of a dashingly humorous tale: If we get there, it will be a blast. Nobody has covered this road before … We crossed a beautiful bridge over the Uele river, there was a fork and an enormous tree after it, probably a baobab (I won’t swear).

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Under the tree there were deckchairs, with militaries lying on them. When they saw us, they grabbed their machine guns and started walking towards us … As they were walking, with impossibly scary faces, great wrath was showing in their eyes. Well, that’s a bummer – I said to myself. (Cz, 87–95) Language of this sort cannot be used to tell about an encounter with death; a journey described in such a way cannot end with an extreme experience. Years later, when Kapuściński had reached the point where he could to speak about his Congolese trauma, he could tell the story in the manner it needed to be told, as a journey into the “heart of darkness”: Everything starts to look enjoyable and idyllic until, a dozen or so kilometres on, in the village of Aba, we are stopped by a patrol of Congolese gendarmes … Their grim, closed faces, half-hidden in the depth of their helmets, are unfriendly. They order us to return to the Sudan. Go back, they say, because beyond here it’s dangerous and the further you go the worse it gets. As if they were the sentries of a hell that began behind them … I do not know what made us want to keep going along that road (on which it was so easy to die) … I feel that with each kilometre another barrier has come down behind us, another gate has been slammed shut, and turning back becomes more and more impossible. (W, 41–3) So describing encounters with death would have to wait, possibly also because their circumstances were in such stark contrast to the author’s contemporary vision of Africa, as well as to his expectations of himself. We must remember that Kapuściński went to Congo in the hope of observing the heroic birth of the largest of the countries gaining independence at the time, a birth that would certainly be dramatic, perhaps even tragic, but that would not destroy faith in the great matter of the anti-colonial emancipation of the continent and in the ability of Africans to fight for and defend their independence. Had he described his most important experiences, it might have constituted an admission that the recent heroes of history are completely helpless in the face of its hidden mechanisms, and that he himself was participating in purely chance events that depended entirely on the whims, good or ill, of others. All of this would have been inconsistent with what was then the official Polish stance toward events in the Congo and would probably not have been published. Kapuściński collided with that official

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view as soon as he returned, when he wrote something in the nature of an expert opinion for pap , in which he correctly predicted what the Polish political camp viewed as an unfavourable turn of events: the defeat of Prime Minister Gizenga, Lumumba’s successor, and the victory of Mobutu and Tshombe – politicians representing the interests of the recent colonialists. In the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he was told that if he did not toe the official line, he would not be allowed to travel any more (see W, 64). For all these reasons, and others besides, Kapuściński not only omitted the personal experiences that immediately followed Lumumba’s death but actually obscured them with a story about Stanleyville’s surprisingly different reaction to the same event: “I was listening to the sounds from the city. If they’d be shooting. If there’d be shooting back. But Stan was dark, dead and mute. Nobody was setting up pyres. Nobody was taking out knives” (Cz, 112). The silence of the city was disturbed only by Lumumba’s speech, played from tape by a friendly Congolese, who most likely was expressing his faith in victory with this perhaps tragically solitary gesture: “The windows are open and the words spread out to the streets. But the streets are empty, the gates are shut. Patrice is speaking to empty streets, cannot see it, does not know it, there is only his voice” (Cz, 113). This is one of the last literary metaphors we come across in Kapuściński’s tales written between 1958 and 1961. It does not crown the already quoted text (“Jeden z czwórki” [One of the Four]); rather, it introduces the biography and political account of an extraordinary African leader. This is somehow significant for the transformation of Kapuściński’s writing after his Congolese travels. For a long time, he abandoned any literary approach in his contemporary reports. Recall that this was born from his inclination to experience the world for himself and from the literary philosophy and existential adventure that were behind this inclination. These features are characteristic of Polish prose written at the turn of the 1960s. However, since he was unable to find the language and place in his literary output to describe the most real and the most dangerous adventure of his life, he decided to abandon altogether this deeply personal experience. That choice, which perhaps was not fully conscious, also encompassed experiences from the first part of his second African journey, such as when an officer of the Egyptian secret police took away his money under the threat of imminent death, or the daredevil drug adventure in the capital of Sudan (see P, 117–19), which he had initially intended to use in

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his writing: “Those 14 days that separated me from my departure from Poland,” Kapuściński informed his colleagues at the editorial office in the above-mentioned letter from Khartoum, “were really nervous, scary and filled with horrible hassle. I’ve never experienced anything like that. The world is harsh, after all. But I will have something to write about later. My notebook is already bursting.”21 A description of the adventures on this part of the journey would not appear until Travels with Herodotus (2004). It was easy for Kapuściński to rationalize renouncing a deep layer of personal experience (or, as we now know, postponing it until later). In conformity with his own beliefs – and here I cite those who participated in subsequent meet-the-author sessions22 – he could claim that the Polish reader wanted to get to know new countries in Africa and understand African political processes rather than read “reports from Congo as he saw it.” Accordingly, he filled his reports with portraits of Congolese leaders (as due to the lack of national institutions, great leaders were of the utmost importance at that time), a recounting of their private and political careers, and potted histories of political parties and their policies. The reality he saw and experienced was merely a starting point for making general knowledge about Africa more accessible. From the twelve episodes of the series “Kongo z bliska” (Congo Up Close) that were published in Polityka in 1961, only two (about a journey through the jungle, and the offensive) are reportage accounts in the strict sense. In the others, Kapuściński turns to explanatory writing rather than reportage. But it cannot be said that he made the wrong choice. The readers of Polityka chose him as Author of the Year. The self-blurring of this groundbreaking journey to Congo was further entrenched in Czarne Gwiazdy (Black Stars, 1962), a book in which he attempted to bring together the materials from both his African journeys, positioning his findings vaguely in relation to his simultaneously published collection of Polish incidental tales. In Black Stars, Kapuściński uses the names of the leaders (Kwame and Patrice) for the titles of reports from Ghana and Congo respectively, although only one of the pieces, from Ghana, is devoted to the leader himself. The most literary of these stories, about the Metropol hotel, lacks any elements of adventure and is coupled with a mocking depiction of Belgian colonialists (“Bon ton w gorącym klimacie” [Bon ton in a hot climate]). The prologue, titled “Kolon” (Colonist), is a malicious description of an international community of white African castaways.

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Another important literary story, titled “Busz po polsku” (The Polish Bush), recounts an evening in Ghana spent beside a village chief ’s fire. It highlights the problem of the clash of cultures, emphasizing that when a visitor from Poland describes African exoticism, he cannot free himself from the burden of personal and national experiences; thus he presents the African bush from a Polish point of view. Why was this story given a prominent place at the end of a book of Polish journalistic reports? Could it be that he was presenting the same tangle of complicated issues, happening in a wild, inaccessible landscape similar to Africa, but in a Polish version? Perhaps running this piece in a book about Poland was Kapuściński’s way of bidding farewell to those Polish readers who expected him to keep showing interest in national affairs, for The Polish Bush would in the end be his only book about Poland. “I already am an African,” states the author in this story. “This is what I was called by Kofi, my friend from Accra. The elders and Nana, the village chief, who welcomed me by the fire, agreed with him.” In 1962, the writer began a five-year stay in Africa as the permanent correspondent of the Polish Press Agency. He did not hesitate for a moment when he was offered the difficult task of organizing pap ’s first and only permanent office on the continent. His searing experiences in Congo had not weakened his sense of being at home in Africa, as demonstrated immediately after the first trip, when he realized that he could no longer be happy in Europe. Years later he would recall his return from the Congo: “In the great glass box of Fumicino airport, we watched the splendid – to us, at that moment – exotic world of contented, calm, satiated Europeans on parade … and as the members of this unimaginable world passed by us … I suddenly felt – the thought horrified me – that sad truth or grotesque paradox that it might be, I had been more at home back there in Stanleyville or in Usumbura, than here now” (W, 82–3).

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PAP Correspondent or Traveller?

We are entering perhaps the most prominent period of Ryszard Kapuściński’s life: the decade abroad in pap offices, divided equally between Africa (1962–66) and South America (1967–72). However, we do not know whether the glories and responsibilities that went with being a one-person press service for an entire continent were the most important part of his experience. Kapuściński recalled a significant episode from 1966 that preceded his final departure from Africa: Some time after sending the “Burning Roadblocks” piece to Warsaw, I received a telegram from my boss Michał Hofman, then the managing editor of the Polish Press Agency. “I kindly request,” I read, “that once and for all you put an end to these exploits that could end in tragedy.” The once and for all referred to previous predicaments that I really might not have been able to get out of. My boss treated me with patience and understanding. He tolerated my adventures and my pathological lack of discipline. At my most irresponsible I would suddenly break contact with Warsaw without having told them my plans and would disappear without a trace: throw myself into the jungle, float down the Niger in a dugout, wander through the Sahara with Moorish nomads. The main office, not knowing what had happened or how to look for me, would, as a last resort, send telegrams to various embassies. Once, when I showed up in Bamako, our embassy there showed me a telegramme: “Should Kapuściński happen to show up in your territory, please inform pap through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” (W, 141)

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Clearly, Kapuściński’s approach to reporting while in Africa was little changed from his time in Poland: he wandered and he wrote, as exemplified in “The Stiff.” As we have seen, he avoided routine methods of “content gathering,” relying instead on chance, on his traveller’s impulse, and on leaving the road to get lost. In Africa, however, the dangers that ensued were greater than the mere inconveniences he encountered on Polish terrain, especially given the climate, which was so hostile to white travellers. What’s more, in addition to tropical diseases, and insect bites or infestations, there were the dangers of guerrilla wars, uprisings, and coups d’état. In “Płonące bariery” (The Burning Roadblocks), which so disturbed Kapuściński’s employers, he describes a rather unnecessary journey to western Nigeria to learn how the civil war there had changed since the coup of January 1966. From Lagos, where he was reporting this upheaval from day to day, he had to follow a road that was known to be flanked by the forces of one of the warring parties and that was strewn with corpses and burned-out vehicles. Why did Kapuściński not only not avoid various dangers but actually seem to turn deliberately toward them? “I was driving along a road where they say no white man can come back alive,” he once wrote. “I was driving to see if a white man could, because I had to experience everything for myself ” (W, 130). This hints at why mountaineers do not turn back from a summit, why Arctic explorers refuse to abandon their polar journeys, and why researchers don’t give up on solving problems,. Kapuściński was, evidently, guided by an insatiable intellectual passion, one that transformed his journalistic expeditions into quests for hidden or difficult truths that required courage, sacrifice, or suffering. Overcoming hurdles, especially those raised by armed conflicts, promised him a worthwhile experience. One might compare his experience with that of Nicolas Bouvier, a Swiss three years older than Kapuściński and a renowned European travel writer of the second half of the twentieth century. When asked at the end of his life about the explorations he had undertaken, he pointed to the irreplaceable value of dangerous situations, including brushes with death: It [a dangerous journey] renders us barren, but it also provides us with experiences so intense that once we’re out of it alive, we feel satisfaction without a trace of vanity, of rodomontade. We have the impression that we are fully fledged inhabitants of this planet … I experienced such awfully difficult moments that force one to

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face himself, like a dagger suddenly turning on the one wielding it. We then notice that we are nothing. That ego is nothing, that what we took our pride in is gone somewhere: there’s nothing anymore. Experiencing this emptiness is absolutely necessary on the journey of life. One has to cross it at least once. Otherwise, we put on airs and graces like a dandy to his tombstone.1 Kapuściński’s ways of travelling, and his later reflections, fully confirm that he was one of that same group of the deeply committed travellers, who would pay any price to see the world first-hand, through their own eyes. If opening oneself to reality means walking toward a brush with death, then Kapuściński was a deeply open man – first involuntarily, during his stay in Congo, and later quite deliberately. He must surely have come to feel that he was a fully engaged dweller on this planet – that he was no stranger to even the most perilous experiences. Fortunately, subjecting himself to the dangers of travel taught him how to approach threats and disarm them with a look or a gesture. Above all, doing so equipped him with an instinct for recognizing threats. As Bouvier once stated: “We shouldn’t underestimate what instinct tells us. I am sure that we make use of only one-tenth of our mind’s properties and that travel works in a beneficial way, forcing us to use all the chances we get, and to use them wisely.”2 Kapuściński understood the same thing. It would have been clear by now to those who looked twice that Kapuściński had both a talent and a passion for travel; his journeys around Poland and his incidental tales would have indicated as much. So do his writings from Ghana, though these were long delayed, and only came out after he had spent a long time in Africa. Till then, he had to subordinate such writings to his duties as a news agency correspondent. Yet even at the time, his gifts as a travelling correspondent were obvious enough to place him among a distinguished international group. British journalist Neal Ascherson, who was the same age as Kapuściński, recalls: The group of African correspondents – mostly American-British – quickly adopted him, considering Rysiek [sic] one of them, busy, funny, brave, foolhardy. And nobody gave much thought about his employers’ policy. Long before I met him, I’d been hearing tales of admiration about a crazy, daredevil, Polish intellectual. They were told by his British friends, fascinated by that extraordinary man.3

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As a foreign correspondent, Kapuściński was passionate and talented, as would become evident to readers less than five years later, when they read a report about an expedition to the southern republics of the Soviet Union titled Kirgiz schodzi z konia (The Kirghiz Dismounts), written at lightning speed during a hiatus between his stays in Africa and Latin America. This report followed the classic patterns of sophisticated travel writing, neatly adapted to contemporary issues, perhaps in rebellion against the superficial mediocrity of propaganda reports about industrial complexes and collective farms. However, this report was a special case: his journey was free from journalistic obligations, thus allowing his deeper interests to reveal themselves. How could Kapuściński reconcile his passion for travel with his onerous duties as a correspondent? And how did those duties shape his creativity, which his duties so often repressed? Kapuściński’s ten years abroad were dominated by the most impersonal sort of newspaper coverage: dispatches, explainers, the sort of journalism the writer himself quickly stopped valuing. Ten years of avid and systematic learning about the world, ten years of actively collecting experiences, almost failed to produce an output he considered worth saving. In The Soccer War, there are five texts written during his five years in Africa (and four others from two previous brief trips), and one text written in South America in 1967–72. Of course, this legacy can be traced in everything he wrote later – a little or a lot later, sometimes many years later. Almost everything we know about Kapuściński’s experiences of Africa and South America between 1962 and 1972 comes from texts he wrote much later – texts with a chronology that is sometimes blurred, deliberately or not. For example, his most famous text about Latin America, The Soccer War, which presents a reporter on the front of the 1969 war between Honduras and El Salvador (at the time, he reported it live via telegram for pap ), was probably written five years after the event itself: it was first published in a Warsaw weekly magazine, Kultura, in the last issue of 1974 and the first of 1975. It was not even included in the volume Christ With a Rifle on His Shoulder (1975), which includes five other texts on South America, most of which were also written after the author’s return to Poland. In the first edition of The Soccer War, from 1978, it is not dated, but in the amended 1986 edition, it is dated 1969, which of course can also be understood as alluding to the time of the events. Needless to say, a text written five years after the event in which the reporter participated shows who he was at the time of writing rather

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than at the time of the event. All the more so because – as can be seen, for example, in his attempts at “my book of journalistic adventures” or “the plan for the never-written book” – during those five years, a radical subjectification of his contact with the world would have taken place, conducive to drawing out a thorough reflection on his previous journalistic experience. Compared to texts written “live,” this activity intensified the element of literary creation, present both in preparing individual episodes of a biography and giving it some meaningful order. In the excerpt from The Soccer War (1978) quoted in the introduction, he mentions the consequences of sending the report “The Burning Roadblocks” to Warsaw in 1966. But there is no hard evidence that this report (the style and subject matter of which are rather typical of Kapuściński’s writing from the mid-1970s) was created in this form ten years earlier, as it was not published then. We do not find it in Polityka, in which the writer printed all other reports from Nigeria, nor is it noted in the Bibliography of Journal Contents. The days of lethal adventure described in the report “Nigeria w dniach zamachu” (Nigeria in the days of revolution)4 did not, however, contain detailed information about this subject. Obviously, these observations do not question the writer’s right to describe his own adventures in accordance with the needs of his creative imagination and the laws of memory. But it is important not to treat the resulting texts as a source of biographical information. Someone who would want to treat “The Burning Roadblocks” in this way must first compare this text with the facts told by Kapuściński to Stefan Skrobiszewski5 just after his return from Africa and somehow align incompatible details regarding the size of the burning barriers, the number of stops, and the bribes negotiated for the opportunity to travel further. We do not know, and will now never know, the full dimensions of Kapuściński’s African and South American travel experiences. We know as much as he wanted to reveal to us in interviews or in conversation with his readers, when he crafted himself as the hero of his autobiographical texts. Yet we need to ask ourselves what he did not reveal, for this allows a better understanding of the selective nature of the image of Africa or South America that he transmitted in real time in his dispatches, messages, studies, and reports. Asking the question points us toward what he left out and why. Most important, however, it reminds us that the writer began to tap this whole area of personal experience shortly after he left behind the role of correspondent. This

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allows us to immediately determine the place and meaning of the writer’s stay on both continents from the point of view of the development of his biography and creative work. To refer to this area is, after all, to return to the attitude manifested in his debut incidental tales and thereby overcome everything that led him away from this attitude. He was dissuaded from further writing quests and pursuits not so much by new duties – that is, a return to journalism and publicist forms of writing – but more by the elusive hope of regaining a sense of participation in the postwar, revolutionary reconstruction of the world, which was to be the essence of the second half of the twentieth century. After 1956, there was no longer a place for that hope in Poland. Yet it was still there in the Third World countries, the new, postcolonial history of which was only starting to be written. A journey to the pap office in Africa was like a journey to the front line of the African revolution; a trip to South America, to the front of the South American revolution. At the same time, a stay on these “fronts,” which were to be extensions of the “forces of progress” as exemplified by the former ideas of zwm , was to become a period of confrontation between dreams and reality, as well as a verification of all his youthful hopes.

i f a ll a fri c a … Today, there is no better way to get to know Ryszard Kapuściński from the years 1962 to 1966 than through a careful reading of his third book – Gdyby cała Afryka… (If All Africa …, 1969), a selection of texts written around that time (when he wasn’t thinking of a book), while if possible paying attention to what is known to have happened to him, which for some reason has not been written about or made public. The content of If All Africa … is quite exceptional in the writer’s output. His earlier and later reports, or collections of reports, were created after his journalistic travels, written from a distance, and carefully considered, no matter how hurried. It is very possible that this time it was the same. According to Stefan Skrobiszewski,6 Kapuściński signed contracts for two Africa books in 1967: Pięć przewrotów – about military-political coups between 1964 and 1966, and Rezerwaty – about the apartheid system in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia. The yield of his African expedition (if it is possible to see a five-year stay, with short breaks, as one expedition) most likely had two historical dominants, related to the continent’s present state and future mission.

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The unexpected posting to South America, preceded by a few months’ travels in the Caucasian and Trans-Caucasian republics of the Soviet Union to gather material for The Kirghiz Dismounts (1967), thwarted the plans for these two books and replaced them with the publication of one book, this one composed of more extended correspondence sent to pap . Some of these pieces were written without any thought that they would be printed, and most often also without knowing how they would be used. The materials sent to the agency did not go directly to the press but rather to pap bulletins, and in accordance with management’s decisions, they were distributed to various recipients. Most of them went to the “National Bulletin” (bk ), and from there to the national press. On the other hand, texts that were found to include any sensitive content were reserved for the “Special Bulletin” (bs ), which had a “not for print” clause, and were available only to a narrow circle of privileged persons.7 It was these materials that became the content of If All Africa … In accordance with the author’s wishes, they were arranged in chronological order, which made it a kind of chronicle of Kapuściński’s stay in Africa – of the events he observed and commented on, and of personal transformations as well, showing – as the author himself said – “how a visitor from another world enters Africa” (G, 6). This is, of course, a partial chronicle, restricted by rules regarding the choice of texts, so we cannot be certain whether any message he had actually got through. If we are to believe Daniel Passent, the editorial staff (thanks to the political position of Mieczysław Rakowski) were able to use materials from the “Special Bulletin.” Given that they were not intended for print at all, before they were used they would have been subjected to some kind of treatment. “They were prepared from the Special Bulletin from the perspective of censorship,”8 recalled Passent. Even with all these caveats, however, it is possible to take advantage of the book’s “chronological” character and treat the texts it contains as a source of knowledge about the author – especially if we also look for references to those generally undisclosed circumstances of his stay in Africa that were important for the creation of those texts. The title itself is quite a good piece of information about the manner of his involvement in the Black Land revolution at the time. It refers to the idea of African unity – the idea, that is, of uniting the independent states as part of their effort to free themselves from the colonial powers, with the stronger supporting the weaker. At that time, unity was the great hope of Africans and a clarion call of the international left.

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The goal was to give Africa an independent place in world politics and to revitalize the idea of Third World solidarity, as present in political hopes dating back to the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung in 1955. “Eight years after Bandung – Addis Ababa” (G, 35) – so begins Kapuściński’s book version of the correspondence cycle from the first African Summit, held in Ethiopia in May 1963, sent to pap , and printed immediately in Polityka.9 But by the time Kapuściński travelled to the Addis Ababa conference, which was certainly his most important professional experience of this period, he was well aware of the revolutionary solidarity of those who were fighting for the new Africa, and he had experienced the unpredictable fate of a lonely correspondent first-hand. For his first posting, he went to Dar es Salaam, the capital of what was then Tanganyika, the first free country in East Africa, which represented the resolutely leftist option. At that time, it was the gathering place for the continent’s most active leaders, as well as an informal site of ambassadorial diplomacy and, most likely, a clearing house for the superpowers’ spies. It was not hard to contact politically engaged Africans there. These were the people who would eventually become presidents, prime ministers, or members of governments. They were still young, quite ordinary, and poor, and most of them were staying in a “great, ruined, and impoverished” hotel called the Arusha on the main street of the city – Independence Avenue – and meeting in the twenty-four-hour Uhuru bar on the seventh, top floor of the building. “Dar es Salaam was then full of revolutionaries from all over Africa,” wrote Kapuściński fifteen years later. “We wandered together. Whoever had money, paid for things. Sometimes me, sometimes them … In some African countries, when I go there, I am not that Ryszard Kapuściński, correspondent from Poland, just simply Ricardo … They sort a lot of matters for me and say a lot of things. Not as a journalist. As a buddy from youth, when in poverty we even shared food.”10 We will be encountering all of those friends, reminiscent of a group of college buddies or zmp activist teams, right up until the last years of the author’s life. Back then, the most important of them were probably those who made it possible for him to become familiar with the realities of African liberation movements. Not much of this made it into If All Africa … Quite remarkably, in his text about the split in the Zimbabwe national liberation movement’s leadership (“Rodezja, Nkomo i Sithole”), we learn that the writer chatted freely with the future president of that country, Robert Mugabe, when he was still a “young,

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very intelligent and arrogant boy.” Kapuściński also visited Mugabe’s then and future main competitor, Joshua Nkomo, in his hotel room for beer and chitchat. Another acquaintance was Eduard Mondlane, founder of the Mozambique Liberation Front (frelimo ), who would have become president of that country had he not been murdered. Through him, Kapuściński observed the beginnings of frelimo and even visited its partisan training camp near Dar es Salaam. He got to know these soldiers; two years later, one of them gave him an account of the first armed clashes in Mozambique.11 The reader wouldn’t learn anything about the trip to Rwanda, just north of Tanganyika, which declared independence in July 1962 (the writer would mainly remember staying in the maternity ward of the hospital run by Belgian nuns because he could find no hotel in the capital city of Kigali; see H, 178). Nor would he learn anything about the illness he caught that October while he was attending Uganda’s declaration of independence (with the participation of President Milton Obote, another acquaintance from the Uhuru bar). That journalistic journey turned into one of his most difficult experiences, one that taught him about the precarity of life in Africa and highlighted his perseverance and willingness to make sacrifices to achieve his mission. He had decided to go to Kampala, the capital of Uganda, with an off-road Land Rover (acquired by chance from a departing Englishman and in total secrecy from Warsaw). Weakened by more than 1,000 kilometres of driving, many of them through wilderness (lacking a British visa, he could not drive through Kenya, which was not yet independent, so he went along Lake Victoria), he fell victim to cerebral malaria, lost consciousness, and instead of being admitted to the ceremony, found himself in a newly opened hospital as one of its first patients. There he met Idi Amin (then commander of the Ugandan Armed Forces, and in the future one of most bloodthirsty of African dictators), who was making a show visit to the state-of-the-art facility. So he did not acquire the journalistic material that would have justified a long journey. According to the then attaché at the Polish embassy in Tanganyika, Jerzy Nowak, and his wife Izabella, he was transported back to Dar Es Salaam barely alive,12 and only there did he receive the first few dispatches about the situation in Uganda in the first weeks of independence. His travails continued. Untreated malaria caused the reporter to contract tuberculosis, which in the hot, wet climate very quickly began to threaten his life. Certain that headquarters would call him back to the country rather than finance appropriate treatment and

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that he would lose forever his African post, which he saw as the greatest opportunity of his life, he decided to hide the disease and resort to the local public health services, even though the quality of care they provided was scandalous by European standards.13 He was the only European in a crowd of poverty-stricken African patients, but just as sick as them. This was how he crossed the colour barrier between himself and the local Africans. Illness made his work difficult. The regime of daily injections had anchored him to a small and rather boring town. The only political activities he could observe were the quarterly sessions of the new Parliament. He reported these with ironic solemnity (“Prezydent sonduje przyszłość,” “Ptaki o jednej nodze,” “Parlament Tanganiki w sprawie alimentów”), believing rightly that a faithful record of each speech would illustrate most clearly the grotesque clash between tradition and political modernity. However, he could not possibly afford to miss the first conference of African countries. He discontinued his treatment without consulting his doctor and went to Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, where that gathering was being held. His report from there extended to six issues of Polityka. It was there, on 25 May 1963, that the attendees signed the Charter of Africa and established the Organisation of African Unity – a historical date for certain. This report was not much shorter than his relatively recent cycle of reports from Congo in 1961. His readers would likely have read the events in Addis Ababa as a kind of continuation of the Black Continent’s exotic politics. Plainly, Kapuściński was using the same method as before to present contemporary Africa to Polish readers, but he had adapted it to the requirements of the new reality characterized by the existence of more than thirty independent states. This method consisted of presenting outstanding leaders and visionaries of Africa’s future, and then through them the stances, options, problems, and situations of particular countries. The convention of faithfully reporting the conference, day by day, and speech after speech, allowed Kapuściński to present twenty-eight of the thirty-two African leaders of that time on several dozen pages along with their backgrounds, their political views, and their positions within power structures and interstate African relations, as well as some individual traits. Sometimes he described their characters, making it possible for readers to remember these leaders and keep them straight. Of course, his reports presented most thoroughly those who seemed at the time to be shaping Africa as a whole. The Emperor of Ethiopia,

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Haile Selassie I (the key figure in The Emperor) was distinguished for his pan-African ambitions and his stubbornness in getting the conference convened. He was also described as an extraordinarily hospitable host, “extremely amicable, optimistic and captivating,” who “is undoubtedly the greatest political mind of this country … [and] rules not only due to his title but also due to his great personal virtue” (G, 38). Gamal Abdel Nasser, president of Egypt, was a living legend on the continent, a leader without whom the pan-African initiative could not succeed, and the presenter of the most rousing anti-colonial speeches. He was also the only person for whom Ethiopian security checked the contents of the thermos placed on the table before each meeting. Kwame Nkrumah, president of Ghana (Kapuściński had met him five years earlier), was the creator of the “Nkrumah Plan,” which envisioned a great political utopia; he was also the person who made the longest speech; he arrived in the uniform of a Chinese party activist (the same one Chairman Mao always wore), with the most recent issue of African Communist under his arm. More figures were introduced in a similar way: Sékou Touré, the revolutionary president of Guinea, who “made a career on demonstrative independence policy” (G, 41); Tunisian president Habib Bourguiba, who stood out in that he would leave the daily sessions at the time of their formal closing, despite them going on for hours longer; Senegalese president Léopold Sédar Senghor, “one of the most outstanding African intellectuals,” who perceived African unity in terms of a cultural commonwealth; Congolese president Joseph KasaVubu; Julius Nyerere, president of Tanganyika; Algerian president Ahmed Ben Bella, who delivered the shortest speech (four minutes); a future important minister in the Kenyan government, the socialist Jaramoji Oginga Odinga (Kapuściński knew him from the Uhuru bar), who interrupted the chairperson with a combative liberation appeal accompanied by patriotic yelling, stirring up the house; Milton Obote, prime minister of Uganda; Sudanese president Ibrahim Abboud; and Nigerian prime minister Tafawa Balewa. Kapuściński’s interest in the personalities and peculiarities of the leaders of the major African countries would have had various causes, but clearly the most important was that he believed these were people who were working to emancipate not just their own countries but the entire continent. The place of Africa in world politics, and perhaps in the entire Third World, depended on them. Such a faith was characteristic of the initial stage of the “African revolution,” in the wake of which,

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however, it turned out that it would not be enough to have outstanding leaders, often educated in the West and familiar with the world, for Africa to play a role in international politics and address its domestic problems. Kapuściński wanted to maintain an optimistic hope, despite the signs of a looming crisis. He closely followed all attempts at regional integration, seeking proof that this spirit had not disappeared but had only changed its location – from East Africa to West and back again – and shape – from the “Casablanca” and “Monrovia” groups to the oau , and then to various tendencies toward unification or community within her womb. The reference in his Addis Ababa reporting to the conference in Bandung eight years earlier seems to be significant. It alluded to the first rather than the most recent African Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Conference, which had taken place months earlier, in February 1963, in Moshi: The proceedings of all the commissions had a tense and nervous atmosphere to them, while a number of important resolutions were not accepted in the name of saving the conference’s unity. There was a prevalent opinion in Moshi that those were the last proceedings of that organisation that needed to make changes, which would take the processes taking place in the national liberation movement into account. So reported the writer in one of three dispatches on this subject preserved in Special Bulletin no. 412 (11 February 1963). For Kapuściński, the great test of African unity, the strongest challenge to it, and at the same time the call to build and implement it in practice, was the very existence of the Portuguese colonies and the plight of the black population in overtly racist countries like the Republic of South Africa and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). That was the source of his special interest in them, especially South Africa. He devoted many analytical studies, comprising eighty pages of his book Będziemy pławić konie we krwi, to their history, their brutal laws, and their racist societies. Kapuściński had time to ponder these things because immediately after returning to Dar es Salaam, he resumed his anti-tuberculosis therapy, this time promising the doctor he would not travel anywhere. He needed help. The Nowaks took care of him, and his wife Alicja came from Poland to help for a while. The care they provided and the treatment he received finally brought results: six months later, in December

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1963, he was able to visit neighbouring Kenya for a week and send daily dispatches from there. These were mainly about the Mau Mau insurgents, who had agreed to disarm after living in the forests for ten years, and about the negotiations preceding the solemn declaration of independence and the hoisting of Kenya’s new flag. Then, at the turn of 1963–64, with a group of several dozen correspondents, he set out for Rwanda, where fierce fighting between Tutsi and Hutu had just broken out again. However, the authorities closed the border, and they had to settle for collecting accounts from refugees on the border between Rwanda and Tanganyika – mostly women and children (compare H, 181). Kapuściński’s great desire at that time (frustrated by a doctor who refused to agree to him travelling by ship or by plane) was to return to Congo. In July 1963, an armed uprising broke out there led by Lumumba’s supporters (who were extremely close to the reporter because he had been among them less than three years earlier). Christophe Gbenye was forming an insurgent government, and the country’s struggle for independence, which had been interrupted by external interventions, seemed to have begun again – there would be no negotiated declaration of independence. So Congo was impossible. But then, in January 1964, a revolution broke out on the island of Zanzibar, this one perhaps more “real” than the one in Congo because it was anti-feudal and intended to overthrow the Sultanate and inaugurate the People’s Republic of Zanzibar (which, after merging soon after with Tanganyika, would become part of today’s Tanzania). Kapuściński’s journey to Zanzibar did not last long enough for him to generate a long-form story, even though it was certainly a key moment of his African experience. The writer started to mention it in his early interviews,14 and in The Shadow of the Sun, published in 1998, he would devote a whole chapter to it. Before that, however, some of his observations found their way into the dispatches that resulted in a short report in Trybuna Ludu in January 1964: I was the first journalist from the Soviet Bloc who reached Zanzibar five days after the beginning of an armed revolution which toppled the neo-colonial Arab bourgeoisie government … I got the approval of my arrival on Wednesday in a phone call I made from Dar es Salaam with the president of the new republic Abeide Karume … On Thursday, I landed at Zanzibar airport in a small tourist plane, the airport only allowed planes approved for landing by the revolution’s field marshal’s staff.15

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An international phone call with the new president, permission for landing obtained at the field marshal’s headquarters, a flight in a private tourist plane. To this, one could add an attempt to cross the 40-kilometre-wide strait separating the island from the mainland in a motorboat purchased by five journalists. One might think that Kapuściński had by then become the kind of journalist who always had enough material for writing long articles. On this occasion, he was not. Kapuściński owed his daring achievement of reaching Zanzibar to his courage, perceptiveness, trust in African politicians and activists he already knew, especially left-wing activists, the respect of his Western colleagues, and plain luck. Suspecting that important events were brewing, he shared what he knew with Agence France Presse’s East Africa correspondent, who had an office, a network of informants “from Mozambique to Sudan, from Congo to Madagascar,” telephone and teletype communications, and – Kapuściński’s greatest envy – a radio receiver. His colleague quickly determined what was happening and could rent or buy a boat or a plane. Even so, neither he nor any of the several dozen Western journalists already gathered in Dar es Salaam were able to land on the island, which was preparing to defend itself against a possible British or American landing. Kapuściński obtained consent to enter Zanzibar and protection while there because he knew the new president well from their days at the Arusha Hotel. That is how he arranged a seat in a three-seater plane and became one of the very first journalists to broadcast dispatches to the world from the centre of the city in revolt – albeit they were brief and pre-approved messages, for he was subject to the revolutionaries’ strict censorship. His report could not deeply analyze or develop the events because at the time, East Africa was engulfed in a series of upheavals. More journalists were by then arriving, but they could not do so legally. Communications were still absent, and the “revolution” wanted to hold them hostage – thus the boat, which almost left them adrift on the Indian Ocean. Fortunately, this time, the authorities decided to expel the journalists, and Kapuściński, taking advantage of the Frenchman’s plane, landed at the airport in Dar es Salaam. From there he was evacuated in Jerzy Nowak’s car, as the army was already everywhere. He could not even summarize his impressions from Zanzibar –he had to report on the restoration of order in Tanganyika, Kenya, and Uganda. And then he found himself in the Ogaden Desert – where he was stranded for a week in the deserted town of Hargeisa – after which he drove for five days through the burning desert to Mogadishu in a column of twenty

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military trucks (see W, 233). By then, it was February 1964 and an armed conflict had broken out between Ethiopia and Somalia over a disputed border province inhabited by 400,000 Somalis. Clearly, If All Africa … – and the correspondence on which it was based – was not written at a desk. Why did he not write a serious text about Zanzibar till much later? Perhaps he just ran out of time and lacked the conditions for writing. While in Zanzibar (much as had happened in Congo), he had found himself caught in international entanglements, which included the expectations of the Polish authorities. Jerzy Nowak called the events in Zanzibar a massacre and claimed that Kapuściński was “one of the few journalists in the world to witness this slaughter.”16 He added that when he himself arrived there three weeks later, “the dead still lay on the streets.” Quite by chance, while there Nowak met the then famous companion of Fidel Castro, Ernest Che Guevara, who precisely at that time, in Africa, was launching his own international revolution,17 and who “talked with him half the night.” Meanwhile, Kapuściński was writing his censored dispatches: “Western press was trying to sow rumours that it was Cuban officers leading the revolution or even that there are some Spanish-speaking soldiers in the capital of Zanzibar. Those are fabricated nonsense … The damages are not vast, and the numbers of dead and wounded disclosed by the Western press are exaggerated.”18 Regarding both sensitive issues, it is significant that Kapuściński took the same line as the Western press. We can assume that in his reportage from Zanzibar, had he written it, he would have supported, with unassailable logic, the need for a revolution in Zanzibar. The island’s inhabitants had always suffered under the colonizers and then their proxies and their successors, helpless against the manipulations of powerful political and business forces and, for that matter, the naivety or ill will of Western journalists. It was a fight, and Kapuściński could not and would not step back from it. An article he wrote about Congo written less than a year later was laced with bitter and passionate anger over the international intervention there in November 196419 (American planes using a British base to transport Belgian troops!). The pretext for that was the release of five hundred white hostages, whom the insurgents intended to kill in the event of bombing or interventions (a certain number were, in fact, killed). Kapuściński took great pains to convince readers that the West’s actions were cold-bloodedly criminal and part and parcel of the incomparably greater crime of Western imperialism.

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Linking the two revolutions, apart from the deaths they brought, was the question of Cubans’ presence in Africa. Kapuściński mocked the presumptions of the Western press on the subject, but Che Guevara, who would later be legendary for organizing guerrillas in Bolivia, had by then toured several African countries, including Tanzania, seeking consent for military involvement in Congo. By the end of April 1965, he had formed a guerrilla band of forty.20 Within a few months, his efforts had come to nothing; his adventure ended in failure, and he was evacuated to South America. Three years later, Kapuściński would literally follow in his footsteps. His intense experiences in Zanzibar and Congo remained somehow peripheral and did not leave a trace in If All Africa … However, they would still have some relevance in terms of how he understood the revolution in South America. By then, in Africa, the revolutions were coming to an end. However hard he tried to maintain his faith in the spirit of the African revolution, he did not close his eyes to the facts, and these were less and less favourable to that spirit of “progressive” anti-colonial unity. The years when it was enough to gain state independence were coming to an end (no matter what the path). For Africa to be written into the book of revolutions would now require the whole of society to benefit from the fruits of independence, and those fruits now being appropriated largely by a narrow elite of postcolonial leaders. Colonial exploitation was being replaced by a home-grown version. And it was unimaginably difficult! Kapuściński believed that “socialist hope” would help Africa “stand on its own feet,” but he also saw that at least for now, the capital that could help build independent economies was flowing to Africa only from the West. The “revolutions” in already independent countries that Kapuściński would soon witness would generally take the form of palace or military coups (or both), sometimes extremely bloody, and could be called social revolutions only with the greatest difficulty. Initially, in 1964, Kapuściński tried to frame them as such – at least in dispatches for pap , often written in the journalistic jargon in force at the time. For example: The real background of East African events is the growing social discontent with the conciliatory, neo-colonialist policies of the governments … that peaked recently in the people’s revolution in Zanzibar, which turned out to be successful. This revolution directly sparked the unrest in Tanganyika, Uganda, and

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Kenya. In none of these three countries did the military act single-handedly … The army’s rebellion was accompanied by local people’s demonstrations … workers’ strikes. (bs , no. 511 [30 January 1964]) In Africa, the military was typically the only organized force strong enough to topple a government. Beyond that, the greatest obstacle to revolution was the tribal and sometimes racial character of the opposition forces. The new nations were beset with feuds between tribes and outbursts of vengeance. At the same time, the artificial borders of the new states both divided earlier tribal societies and squashed different societies together in one country. All of this ruled out the idea of pan-African revolution. Such a revolution would cause individual states to disintegrate along tribal lines even while pitting them against one another, and this would only encourage the West to interfere again. “The matter of the south, properly directed by neocolonialists, could become the seed of a great conflict that will divide all of Africa” (G, 206), Kapuściński declared in 1965, at the end of a sketch about a fresh conflict in Sudan between the Arab North and the black South. Perhaps the worst of all signs was a rise in internal upheavals in 1965 and 1966 in countries that had been independent for at most a few years. During his final two years in Africa, Kapuściński barely had time to deal with anything else. For example, he barely had time to bite into Algeria’s complicated internal problems – to understand why the young president Ben Bella, so popular in the country and around the world, had suddenly been overthrown by an even younger army commander, Houari Boumédiène (“Algieria zakrywa twarz”); and he already had to deepen or update his knowledge about Guinea (the attempt on the life of Sékou Touré), Congo (General Mobutu arrested President Kasa-Vubu), Dahomey (General Soglo removed two presidents: one “self-proclaimed” and the other “chosen by the nation”), Nigeria (the war in western Nigeria flared up ahead of the January 1966 coup that would remove President Balewa), the Central African Republic (Colonel Jean Bokassa removed President Dacko), Ghana (the removal of President Nkrumah, “Africa’s Messiah”), Uganda (the coup by Milton Obote), Togo, and Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso). Somewhere amid this months-long chain of unexpected events, Kapuściński concluded: I travelled through five countries in a month. In four of them, a state of emergency was instituted. In one – the president had just

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been removed, in the second, he only saved himself by chance, in the third – the head of the government was afraid to leave his residence, surrounded by the military. Two parliaments had been dissolved. Two governments were removed. Tens of activists under arrest. Tens of people killed in political infighting. Across 520 kilometres, I passed through twenty-one controls and four strip-searches. There’s a tense atmosphere everywhere, everywhere the smell of gunpowder. (G, 261–2) It seems that the metaphorical front of the African revolution had suddenly turned into a real war front. Along that front, hopes for a bright African future that could teach the world something had disappeared. The hurriedly built structures of the modern state and social life were collapsing in Africa at an alarming rate, burying those great men who had been expected to usher Africa into the theatre of world affairs … and brought in instead, at best, un peacekeepers. Efforts at modernization had so far given nothing to African societies and indeed had awakened the destructive forces of the tribal past. The new history of Africa would be shockingly dark, bloody, and unpredictable. In this vein, in January 1966 Kapuściński summarized his Nigerian experience: Tribal hatred – that monstrous, demonic obsession of Africa – was armed with automatic firearms and death’s scythe reached to one officer’s throat after another. Each of them went to sleep uncertain whether they would see the dawn. One who wants to understand Africa should read Shakespeare. In Shakespeare’s political drama all the characters die, thrones are soaked with blood, the people look silent and bewildered with death’s grand spectacle. It’s the same here. (G, 331–2) Kapuściński had by then moved his one-person pap office from East Africa, where calm had temporarily broken out in Sudan after the revolution of October 1964, to West Africa, where most of the coups of 1965–66 were taking place. From there, he would be closer to those Central African countries where something was always going on. That is probably when he began to develop a reputation for intuiting when and where violence would soon break out, after which he could always find a way to be where it was happening. Why else did

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he leave Dar es Salaam (more precisely, Nairobi,21 which had a climate more favourable to his lungs) for Lagos, Nigeria’s capital at the time? Lagos, is it turned out, is where he would end his African sojourn by observing a transformational coup and the beginning of the long war. Lagos was indeed closer to the burning conflicts of that time. Accra, the capital of Ghana and not far away, was by then well-known to him. He drove a car to many of these places, a “company Peugeot 403” adapted to difficult terrain22 (we assume that he left the worn-out green Land Rover on the east coast). It was in this car that he experienced one of his most dangerous journalistic adventures – the one with the “burning roadblocks.” Kapuściński’s move from East to West Africa was intertwined with a fateful, several-week stay in Poland – his first trip home. He was supposed to vacation in Poland more or less in the middle of 1963, but a deadly disease – and, even more, fear that his African adventure would be truncated, though he was ready to risk his health and life to continue it – prevented him from travelling. And his return to Poland actually could have ended his African stay, though not in the way he feared. While back in Poland, Kapuściński was anticipating a clash with the First Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (i.e., the Intelligence Department), which already had plans for him. Every Polish journalist going to a foreign post at the time, especially one who was considered exceptionally talented, faced being recruited as a spy. As revealed by the “Kapuściński file”23 (ipn bu 001043/255), the officers of “One” had been “working on” the writer from the moment he became famous. The first information note – from February 1962 – concerned the judgment of the court appointed by the Main Board of the Polish Writers Union (zlp ) to resolve the plagiarism dispute between Kapuściński and Drozdowski over “The Stiff.” By April of that year, the officers already knew, albeit not precisely, about his studies, his professional work, his literary debut (which is probably why he was given his later “source” pseudonym – “Poet”), his membership in the organization, his father’s and mother’s biographies, and the current activities of his wife and sister. Understandably, the department’s interest had been piqued by his foreign travels as a novice reporter; all of those travels, even to the Netherlands and Sweden, had been meticulously recorded. pap has record of a note from May 1963 that expressed great appreciation of his first African correspondence; another, from August of the same year, talks about the importance of the information he had managed to obtain.

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All of this set up a meeting with “the candidate,” scheduled for August 1963. It was most likely his decision not to return to Poland at the time that delayed this meeting by one and a half years. And that meeting was preceded, as one might imagine, by the formulation of a “test”: an intelligence task. A note from November 1964 talks about preparations for a conversation with Kapuściński about the spy threat faced by the Polish embassy in Nairobi (emanating from the local police and the British); there is also a laconic record from the end of February 1965 about handing over some unnoticed report on this subject to the head of another department. There is also a trace of an attempt to frame the writer for a criminal offence. A check with the police at the turn of March and April 1965 gives a negative result: Kapuściński could not have taken part in a certain robbery (codenamed P-64), because he did not resemble the perpetrator, and besides, he was still in Africa. Had Kapuściński refused to contact intelligence officers, it most likely would have interrupted his career as a foreign correspondent. It seems he made no such unequivocal refusal, given that his file indicates four meetings with the writer at the turn of March and April 1965, during which the expectations placed on him were specified and possible ways to contact the representative of Head Office were agreed upon. Kapuściński did not establish formal cooperation with the intelligence service, but this did not prevent them from opening a file on him less than three weeks after his departure (the decision on this matter is dated 26 April 1965). So did he decide to play the game? And what would this game have been? Mostly, it seems to have been about not doing (or writing) any differently than before. Kapuściński had to be perfectly aware that some of the analyses and studies he wrote for pap – which, by the way, showed great interest in the activities of foreign intelligence services in Africa – landed not only in the Special Bulletin but also on a variety of important desks. He recalled how after his first trip to Congo, “he prepared a note about what he saw,” and that as a result he was called in for an interview with “a certain comrade from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs” (W, 83). Perhaps he was told that these general reports had caught the attention of intelligence specialists, and perhaps he hoped this kind of analysis would be their main interest. Finally, in the application for a file dated 21 April 1965, it is stated that the reports and studies he made for the Foreign Department of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party made “Poet” a specialist in “Third World Countries.” A problem for the authorities was Kapuściński’s known tendency to change his place of residence unexpectedly, to get lost in the wilderness

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as he followed events. This would have made it difficult to formulate concrete expectations of him. It would probably be an exaggeration to suggest that his sudden move from East to West Africa was intended to spoil plans that had been made for him in Nairobi; that said, it is puzzling how he informed his new guardians about the move. He told the Interior Ministry officer about his intention to move to Accra (or Lagos!) at a meeting on the last day of March. This was almost on the eve of his departure. It was noted at the time that he treated these cities as starting points for his travels in several Central and East African countries; at the same time, he could not say which countries he would be visiting because it depended on his getting visas for them and on whether the events in them merited his presence. In other words: look for the wind in the field … The materials collected in files at the First Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs tell us that Kapuściński disappeared for a good two years, lost in the rush of the accelerated changes in Africa. Before those changes began to accelerate, starting with the Algerian coup d’état in June 1965, Kapuściński was able to make at least one fascinating trip from his new base, one that did not involve hard news of Africa but would turn out to be no less dangerous. In April he set out for Dakar, the capital of Senegal, to attend the First World Festival of African Art, an attempt to illustrate and popularize the doctrine of négritude – a philosophy of return to native sources of culture, as advanced by Senegal’s first president, the poet Léopold Sédar Senghor. He then extended the holiday character of this journey with a trip to neighbouring Mauritania, where, with a trans-Saharan truck, he reached the remote settlement of Atar. There he hiked for ten days with a nomad caravan. He slept on the sand, drank camel milk, and did not bathe, for there was no water to bathe with. And that is when the real African school of survival began, an unexpected game of life. First, he was stranded at the oasis for a week, and then he spent two days in the desert under a broken truck, almost without water. Delirious, he arrived in the country’s capital, Nouakchott, and slept and drank for a full day, barely recovering.24 It is significant that both his encounter with the art and philosophy of négritude, and his beautiful though ominous encounter with the desert, were not recorded in any way in his texts. In the hierarchy of Kapuściński’s affairs, they were somewhere near the bottom, or they were obscured by an increasingly terrifying turn of political events. Of course, Kapuściński would not have been himself had he succumbed to disappointment and horror at these events or contented himself with finding an effective – Shakespearean – literary reference for

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them. Rather, it seems that he humbly accepted the defeat of naive optimism and began in earnest to learn exotic reality in order to understand it, and, by understanding it, to find his own hope for a future for Africa. His frequent references to African literature (mainly, it seems, in English) and the local press (also published in English) indicate that he must have wandered through these revolutionary countries with a suitcase full of books and magazines. He seemed to understand more and more clearly that the pursuit of momentous events, one after another, was not helping him understand the reality he observed; for that, he would have to unearth its mechanisms and reach for its distant causes, embracing a vast stretch of time and historical processes with his imagination. Almost half a century later, it is difficult to assess the accuracy of Kapuściński’s diagnosis of those times. From the point of view of his creative biography, it is key to such an effort that he accepted that the spirit of revolution, which he believed in those days was the most important of the twentieth-century spirits of history, had abandoned Africa. He wrote about the “period of chaos,” about the end of one historical epoch and the beginning of another as yet unknown, about a transitional “historical vacuum.” This suggests, perhaps, that he was open to finding that spirit elsewhere. As for Africa itself, Kapuściński advised patience – that the world wait for what would emerge on its own. He hoped that in all the chaos, all the turmoil of civil wars and upheavals, Africa would get to know itself as it was – or as could it be – without great leaders educated in the West, and without the remnants of colonialism and the imported replicas of institutions or ideas. He advised that we not look at Africa from the point of view of one world interest or another, but see it instead “as a phenomenon in itself, as a separate creation, having its own life, its problems and independent African forces, ambitions and dreams” (G, 411). More important, certainly, than the accuracy of his diagnosis was the permanence of certain attitudes toward writing he had developed along the way. The first of these could be described as an analytical attitude toward the mechanisms of phenomena such as subversion, revolution, and coups d’état – their specific logistics and dynamics, the reasons for their success or failure. A particular fascination with the mechanisms of these phenomena can be seen in a text about Nigeria in which he reconstructs in close detail, almost hour-by-hour, the course of a perfectly organized assassination attempt carried out simultaneously in three of the country’s regional capitals. He must have been pleased with this text because it is the only one in the entire volume

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to appear in fragments in The Shadow of the Sun, under the title “The Anatomy of a Coup d’Etat.” In fact, that text has some of the innate literary qualities characteristic of the genre that has since become known as political fiction, so well represented by Frederick Forsyth. Indeed, the author of The Day of the Jackal began his own career by reporting on the same Nigerian war, The Biafra Story (1969), known in Polish translation as Słowo białego człowieka. That book, too, begins with a reconstruction of the January coup. However, one ought to avoid the temptation of comparisons, for Kapuściński was unable to observe and describe the continuation of the upheaval that would serve as the main content of Forsyth’s book – the Biafran War. He fell ill with a severe tropical fever and, after a long and unsuccessful treatment in a Lagos hospital, requested repatriation from Africa. By this time, Kapuściński was starting to play the role of expert on Africa, or at least on one African country, Congo. Now, after five years of sending in more and more detailed studies (landing on who knows which desks), he was coming to be seen as a definitive authority, appreciated not only in journalistic circles. For example, he appeared in this capacity in a discussion in the editorial office of the magazine Sprawy Międzynarodowe.25 Over time, he would also become an expert on the problems of South America, the Middle East, and Russia, and on the problems of globalization and the challenges of twenty-first-century civilization. This reputation as an expert posed an obvious threat to Kapuściński’s reportage. He had developed that reputation gradually with his densely factual reports from Africa (and, of course, his employer preferred such reports). This is highlighted by the book’s eighty-page final essay (“O rewolucji afrykańskiej” [On the African Revolution]), which as a whole is something of a political-historical treatise. Elements of such a treatise were already present in the aforementioned reports from Sudan and Algiers, in which the dramatic and dynamically presented upheavals were merely a starting point for extensive historicaleconomic-political investigations and interpretations. Kapuściński conformed to the requirements of applied journalistic writing with humility and gratitude for the opportunity to be in Africa, even though those requirements clashed hard with his ambitions to take a different path in his writing. But there is also evidence in the book that on his return he staged a “break-out” toward metaphor, generalization, and literature. This is especially evidenced in the way he said goodbye to hope for African unity in the essay “W dużej

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babuszce – mniejsza babuszka” (A Small Babushka inside a Large Babushka), probably written a few months after the third African Summit, held in Accra in October 1965. Half of that essay consists of a journalistic description of all the symptoms and causes of the disintegration of this union, and half of a description of the edifice of the State House erected solely for the conference at a cost of $20 million. It is problematic even to say that the conference was in fact held, given that it gathered only one third of the leaders of the oau countries and ended with half the agenda still unaddressed. Kapuściński drew attention in particular to the building’s sixty ten-room apartments (one for each head of state and foreign minister), each of which was an isolated fortress protected by triple walls and winding corridors, with bunkers close at hand like those built during the Cold War in the event of nuclear war. This is perhaps one of Kapuściński’s first great metaphors – those that he extracted from reality in order to convey an essential truth. So, he was saying, this is how preparations would be made for a summit beset with distrust, hostility, and mutual suspicion – not unity. The new African present also affected his memories of the recent past, when he had still been full of hope. Looking at the State House, Kapuściński remembered a scene from a ceremonial reception in the palace of Emperor Haile Selassie, which was also a ready-made metaphor – this time, for the Addis Ababa conference in 1963: I left the Great Hall through the side door … From this door, there was a gentle slope, and a hundred metres away stood a poorly lit barrack without walls. From the side door, through which I went out to the barrack, there was a row of waiters standing and passing themselves platters with leftovers from the feast table. On the platters, a stream of bones, gherkins, salads, fish heads and meat scraps flowed towards the barracks … There was a crowd of people there, standing in the thicket of the night, in the mud and in the rain. The dishwashers were throwing the leftovers from the platters into this mob. I was looking at the crowd, which was eating leftovers, bones and fish heads, laboriously and with great concentration … I got wet, so I returned to the Great Hall, to the Imperial Party. I looked at the silver and the gold, the velvet and the purple … I breathed the scent of incense and roses … I snatched a pack of cigarettes from the table, bowed to the emperor and went home. (G, 267–8)

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In the merciless confrontation of two feasts (this memorable scene would one day make it into The Emperor), we can probably see Kapuściński’s final farewell to the idea of African unity, which he had promoted with so much enthusiasm in his first longer report. It is significant that this happened through literature and that the writer had returned to literary means of expression, tapping his fuller, private experience. Sadly, we would only ever learn about this unofficial side of his African experience – represented here modestly by going out at night “due to a call of nature” and “snatching”’ a pack of cigarettes from the imperial table – later on, from books written from a completely different perspective.

a short tri p to t h e e ast Kapuściński’s ten years of travels in Africa and Latin America are evenly divided by an event, perhaps the most extraordinary one in our hero’s entire professional life. In the spring of 1967, he set out on a somewhat touristic journey. Of course, this trip had nothing to do with mass tourism, but it was, in a way, recreational in nature, especially if viewed through the prism of two murderous trips undertaken before and after on behalf of pap . How else could this several-week stay in exotic places be described, given that he passed his time in cordial meetings, visiting monuments and admiring great building projects? Having survived the slaughter in Nigeria, and having fortunately recovered from a life-threatening tropical disease, Kapuściński returned to work in 1967: Actually I didn’t know what I would do next. The 50th anniversary of the October Revolution was approaching, and my employer, that is the Polish Press Agency, not knowing what to do with me, decided to send me to the ussr to write a series of reports related to the revolution. I didn’t want to write these reports, but I didn’t miss a chance to travel. You left very rarely then … so if such an opportunity appeared, it is natural to want to take it. And then the head of the foreign department of Polityka, Henryk Zdanowski, advised me: “Listen, go. You know the other side of Asia and Pakistan and Afghanistan and Iran and India. Write how everything relates to that part of Asia that is part of the Soviet Union, etc.” I liked this idea.26

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This “occasional” journalistic assignment that had landed unexpectedly on Kapuściński’s lap was linked to an ideological celebration. The fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution was an occasion for broad, multifaceted analyses: for scientific dissertations on that event, and for biographies of its leaders published en masse, along with memoirs by their family members and the diaries of their most trusted associates.27 In Poland, much of this “October-themed” literature was devoted to works documenting Polish traces in the revolution of 1917. Writers themselves were hardly indifferent. In 1967, several anthologies were published that gathered together poems, memoirs, stories, and excerpts of novels glorifying the revolution.28 While the writers took to their pens, the journalists took to the field. Their destination was obvious – the Soviet Union – as was their task – to describe Poland’s cordial relations with the Soviet Empire. Some idea of the reporting produced then regarding the October Revolution can be found in reports published at the time under the title Spotkania ze Związkiem Radzieckim (Meetings with the Soviet Union), edited by Jerzy Feliksiak. That book consists of twenty-eight texts written by, among others, Hanna Krall, Tadeusz Drewnowski, Jerzy Lovell, Jerzy Putrament, Jerzy Redlich, and more than twenty other lesser-known journalists and prose writers. These collected texts are full of sympathy, often even gratitude. For example, Józef Siemek begins his text almost like a medieval panegyric, with a detailed enumeration of his patrons: “Upon the initiative of the editorial office of ‘Kraj Rad,’ at the invitation of the ‘Nowosti’ Press Agency and under the supervision of the General Board of tppr , a group of 25 journalists and employees of Ruch, rsw ‘Prasa’ and Ksiażka i Wiedza visited the Soviet Union in the spring of 1965.”29 Many of the reports in this book contain superficial observations, minor details, and rather intrusive paeans to the achievements of the Soviet Union. It is hard to imagine that after forty years they can still interest anyone except enthusiasts about Soviet issues in the 1960s. Yet Kapuściński’s slim volume, The Kirghiz Dismounts – written at the same time, by an expert on the Third World – is still fresh and intriguing reading. Why? The first reviewers of that volume found it highly original and tried to answer just that question. Beata Sowińska wrote in Życie Warszawy: “There is no descriptiveness here, no proclamation of the obvious, no duplication of stereotypical pictures. The author gives us something fresh, extremely colourful, interesting, and at the same time reaching

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deeper.”30 The critics’ opinion soon received “institutional” support when The Kirghiz Dismounts received a Book of the Year award from Nowe Książki for 1968. What makes this book unique is clear from the author’s own words: “I toured these republics and came to Poland,” he recalled. “I was then faced with a problem because I wanted to write honestly. But I didn’t know how to. I decided not to write about politics, but to get to know deeply and describe the culture of these countries. It struck me that under this official, rigid shell of the Soviet Union, these cultures existed and lived. This sense of separateness, dignity and otherness of being a Muslim, Tajik or Kirghiz was very strong.”31 In other words, as a reporter going travelling in the Soviet Union, he was not interested in “the state.” He was interested in “nations”: their diversity, identity, tradition, and history. Kapuściński found himself in a situation somewhat comparable to that of the authors of classic books of “travels” – a popular genre in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.32 Thus, his story presents a clearly outlined route, the description of which is woven together out of individual episodes, portraits, and conversations. The traveller’s personality is an important component of such a book. Here, Kapuściński was writing down his personal impressions and experiences, always deeply respectful of differences and curious about other people’s customs (while sharing a meal with Kirghiz hosts, he was honoured by the offering of a sheep’s eye – he did not refuse). In his reports, he taps various sources: ethnographic, statistical, geographic, historical, and others. And he sometimes addresses the reader directly. The book meets the demands for popularity – it is written smoothly, vividly, with stylistic verve. The nineteenth-century genre reflected the time in which it was born, and many features of The Kirghiz Dismounts allude to its genealogical identity and tap the romantic conventions of the preceding century. Kapuściński was writing about the first journey in his career that did not concern a specific event or problem to be investigated and that did not connect to war, politics, or trade. This journey was solely for the pleasure of communing with the culture, art, and mores of other countries. In that sense, it belonged to the long tradition of “travel without a destination,”33 dating back to the third century bc . Of course, for a European, a journey to the East – to the Orient – would always be especially intriguing. Stanisław Burkot, in Polskie podróżopisarstwo romantyczne (Polish Romantic Travel Writing), noted that this sort of travelling by Europeans dates back to the Crusades and that for various

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economic, political, and cultural reasons, it flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when to travel to the Orient was to explore the myth of a happy life permanently connected with nature.34 Kapuściński, like his nineteenth-century forbears, asked his guides to steer him off the beaten track so that he could find forgotten places and sit down at the table with the hosts he encountered there. He knew that this was the only way to change the standard (i.e., “horizontal”) mode of travelling into the one he desired, which was “vertical” – into the depths of history, into the roots of tradition, into the core of national and individual identity. Embracing a fascination with the periphery, chasing adventure, choosing to struggle with the unknown, and longing for authentic experience are all basic elements of the romantic toolkit. They turn an ordinary traveller into a wanderer, a pilgrim, a human who can find non-material value in distant places. This spontaneous approach is what had led to the material we find in Kapuściński’s very first book, the Incidental Tales of 1962. This time his reporter’s gaze may have been subjective, indeed romantic, but he was often more clear-eyed, copiously citing facts from the history of the nations he visited (he would later aver that to write this slim, 140-page book, he had read more than 10,000 pages of other works). As he set off for the East he was also aware of the intoxicating wildness of nature – its untouched seas, it mysterious deserts, and the towering mountains he admired were indispensable elements of a romantic landscape, but also valuable tools of romantic anthropology – metaphors for loneliness, human fragility, and hidden spiritual powers. Particular attention should be paid to his striking description of the Caspian Sea. It was night, and he stood on a high tower “to the stars” that was planted in a rocky sea bottom. Paradoxically, he associated climbing to the top with a journey deep into hell: “We enter the tower … into the darkness, into the chasm, into the abyss.” As time passes the landscape becomes even more striking: “Everything becomes unreal because you can’t see anything anymore” (K, 57). A reporter standing uncertainly on the swaying tower observes another wonder from its height: a city built on metal poles anchored to the seabed. The description of this mysterious night visit has the character of a double vision – the reality that confronts him seems half-real, half-visionary, and from beneath its clearly outlined contours emerges a suggestive metaphor of human effort. The point of this picture is the memory it spurs of a once heard “harsh and heroic epic” about simple labourers, ordinary “land rats” who did the impossible – they built a city in the middle of the sea.

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Thanks to the Romantics, nature had gained a whole new meaning: it was henceforth a separate entity, a self-sufficient intellectual object capable of communicating important knowledge. Kapuściński was now turning deliberately to this type of “reading the earth.” He would achieve the goal of his journey – to discover the particular qualities of exotic republics – by decoding the secrets of the spaces he encountered, which were encoded in the details. Jerzy Chociłowski wrote neatly about the specific character of The Kirghiz Dismounts: It looks a bit as if Kapuściński was walking on the beach along the seashore and collected shells thrown by the waves. He bent down to get this one, throw the other one at once, look at the other for a moment and press it into the water. The ones that remain in his hand do not have to be either the greatest or the most beautiful. They are whatever he can fit into the collection. Then Kapuściński sat down and described his collection. He did it gracefully and not without gentle irony, with a discreet sense of humour.35 The metaphor used by this reviewer is accurate for two reasons. First, it reflects the nature of this book well – its lightness, grace, and charm, and the holiday aura that envelops it. Second, it draws attention to the elements the author deployed to build the world of his text – the seemingly insignificant images, flimsy pieces of reality, details so easy to overlook, so fragile and common they are. It turned out, however, that they could be useful and were not to be rashly abandoned. In Filozofia i Genius loci, Stefan Symotiuk wrote: Things are not isolated entities. They enter into systems that we call “situations” and “processes” result from them … Situations create processes, but also fulfil themselves during the processes. They owe their survival not to what is “most durable” in them, but often to an element of the “average” durability – such that without it the whole system could not survive. Just as the weakest, not the strongest link in the chain determines the chain’s durability, so the lives of people and cultures are often determined by elements that seem trivial yet non-transferable.36 This is how Kapuściński’s journalistic uniqueness manifested itself in The Kirghiz Dismounts. Even in his early writing, from a very rich space – iridescent with a thousand meanings, stunning the reader’s senses – he

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was able to draw out that one faint detail, that “flimsy little thing” that was anchored to a specific “situation” and use it to communicate the entire “process.” Sensitivity to detail is thus another quality that distinguishes his book about the Soviet Union from others of that time. It is precisely because of his careful selection of details that, unlike many other travel accounts from those days, The Kirghiz Dismounts lingers in memory. It is like the famous Georgian cognac that matures peacefully for decades in barrels made from the finest oak by a cooper with the craftsmanship of a luthier, as described in his book’s first chapter. In this regard, the secret of The Kirghiz Dismounts is to be found in its taste. It is a combination of carefully selected and precisely weighed ingredients of the best quality. As a reporter he observes brief shadows, flickering iridescences. Then in his texts, from these tiny crumbs, he builds pulsatingly real worlds. And then, from beneath the surfaces of those real worlds, pure poetry begins to shine through. In each of the republics he described, Kapuściński found a particular local colour that could be found nowhere else. So we can taste the real Georgia when we mix, in proper proportions, its mountainous areas, its impressive culture, and its distant past, which makes that nation “a peer of Greece and an older sister of Rome.” But to convey Georgia’s uniqueness, he approaches it gradually: he does not describe the terrain but rather the course of two winding streets in Tbilisi, the capital. They look similar – both are “as taken from a Christmas pageant,” “carved out of wood,” tightly built up with rows of dark-brown houses. The first one is bathed in the sun; thus, all of its architecture, its canopies and verandahs, has been designed to give shade. The second one, leading to the north, is dark, and its numerous porches and terraces are built to catch the light. The street of sunshine is favoured by painters, her dark sister by shoemakers. Thanks to his finely crafted description, which exploits the spatial contrasts and sparkles with magic, this paragraph can be read as a universal metaphor for human fate – constantly balancing at the meeting point of sun and shadow, spirit and matter, joy and pain, the art and the prose of life. But the richness of Georgia lies precisely in its ability to re-evaluate these contrasts. Its inhabitants manage to make daily life a holiday. The famous Georgian feast, which is the essence of their existence, becomes a great festival of life, an opportunity to pay homage to it. Thus, life achieves the rank of art. Celebrations of friendship, ornamented by poetic toasts and sanctified by old rituals, become both an important metaphor for Georgia

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and an important premise for understanding the strong “patriotism of the earth” that characterizes this nation, whose people are reluctant to travel because their home provides them with all they need. Kapuściński places Armenia at the opposite extreme. It turns out that for Armenians the whole world is their home. That is not by choice but by necessity – their state was virtually destroyed in ancient times. Kapuściński studies a map to explain how Armenia’s unfortunate location at the junction of several powerful empires led to the permanent uprooting of its people. To explain the particularities of this nation, he turns to expressive props. Among them are the works of a young sculptor he visits,37 whose works present various aspects of love, namely a loving embrace. Yet there is no sense of intoxication in them, nor do we find happiness or a sense of fulfilment, because the sculptor is interested only in those who hug each other for the last time before parting forever. Another parable of the tragic fate of Armenia is the story of a musical genius who was about to be hurled from a cliff during the genocide inflicted by the Turks in 1915. At the last moment, he was saved by one of his pupils, the Sultan’s daughter. But the composer, who had already stared into the abyss, never made a single sound afterwards. He lived for twenty more years in an insane asylum. “He was not dead, but he was no longer alive,” writes Kapuściński. “He existed-didn’t-exist in this suspension between life and death.” Similarly, Armenians – a nation of many outstanding individuals who have been contributing to world politics, science, and culture for centuries – live outside their own country and are doomed to a double identity, to the difficult fate of a stranger. Hence the special role they give to “the book,” an object they deeply venerate, worshipping it as a symbol of their national identity. Kapuściński writes that Armenia, defeated in wars, has always turned for succor to scriptoriums, where passionate copyists rewrite old books documenting the history of their world. These books – material testimonies of national endurance – have been protected from destruction for centuries, even at the cost of human life. The author starts his description of Azerbaijan – the last republic he visits in the Caucasus – with an account of the enchanting therapies of Professor Gasanov, who treats his patients with the scent of flowers: “Whoever has sclerosis has to smell bay leaves. Whoever has hypertension smells the geraniums.” The reporter doubts the effectiveness of this method; nonetheless, he is charmed it. It is no accident that his description of Azerbaijan, the heart of which is Baku – stinking of kerosene, loud and eclectic – begins with this image. Let’s add that the

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description of the republic ends with the previously mentioned surrealistic night visit to the tower and the city in the waves. The image of the industrial centre of the country – this “hell,” as Maxim Gorky described it – clashing with beauty and magic thus gains a new dimension. It turns Azerbaijan into an amazing, mysterious place. Perhaps this was one of the first attempts by the sorcerer of reportage to turn our benighted world into a space of magic. We now move on to Central Asia: Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, among others. Kapuściński begins his journey with the “republic in the desert,” where, in the sleepy atmosphere of Ashgabat – “Sometimes a Volga will go down the street. Sometimes a donkey knocks its hooves on the asphalt” (K, 61) – he meets an old Turkmen with a little boy drinking hot tea in the Russian market. The old man is presented as a biblical sage: His head is full of wisdom, his eyes read the book of life. When he got his first camel, he got a taste of wealth. When his flock of sheep died, he learned about the misfortunes of poverty. He has seen dry wells, so he knows despair, and he has seen water wells, so he knows what joy is … He knows what thirst is and what saturation is … He saw the desert and saw the oasis, that is, he saw the whole world which in the final analysis comes down to this single division. (K, 61–2) Already at this first contact, he is deploying stark contrasts in striking ways. His images are built on the principle of clear oppositions; there are no nuances here, no mid-tones. Instead, there are simple, laconic, strong, parallel phrases. Their style immediately evokes the texts of the Old Testament, especially the Book of Ecclesiastes. Let us recall: There is “a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh,” and so on (Ecc. 3:2–4a). A clear similarity can be seen between the protagonist of the report and the author of the book of wisdom, who makes the following self-presentation: “I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind” (Ecc. 1:14). The Old Testament author ponders the futility and transience of life. And, just like the old Turkmen, he finds its meaning in his calm, reasonable existence, conscious of its temporality. The introduction of a clear biblical

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metaphor, based on a typical lexical resource, and supplemented with the figure of an Old Testament teacher, ennobles this story, turning it into a parable and universalizing its meanings. Of course, local colour is also important, and here, Kapuściński is fascinated by the desert, which is a magical place, the edge of the world – intriguing and dangerous because it brings the daredevil to the edge of his own existence and then deceives him. It is precisely the desert – as a space where one can touch the Absolute, and be tested, but also live in unhindered freedom – that is the best metaphor for Turkmenistan and the key to understanding its inhabitants. Kapuściński maintains that people who have tied their lives to the desert can become guides for the “blind,” more highly developed countries. These simple nomadic peoples, these ordinary poor old men, are, it becomes apparent, the holders of the most important knowledge – how to live to survive. The author devotes much less attention to the final three republics. Perhaps he is in a hurry, for he is expected back in Warsaw before 1 July. He visits Tajikistan, “as high as Tibet,” which, after the revolution, obtained under the Soyuz a substitute for its own statehood; thus it was able to develop its national identity and preserve its native language. By contrast, Kyrgyzstan after 1917 was modernized and “changed skins”38 – it “got off the horse.” Finally, he goes to Uzbekistan to sit in a tschaichana among the inhabitants of the republic and sip green tea with them. He has chosen a special place – on one side is a museum in the former fortress of the Emir of Bukhara, on the other, a historic mosque where billiard tables have been installed. He watches men dressed in grey bekishes and colourful tubuteikas squatting for hours on end, drinking tea. In this seemingly ordinary event, Kapuściński notes a significant feature – the silent Uzbeks are facing the former mosque, “because this is the custom of the fathers” (K, 99). Despite their modest clothing, a dignified majesty emanates from them. He writes, “I wanted to go up and shake their hands” (K, 99). This simple Uzbek custom proves to him that the character of the nation is a permanent value, independent of current fashion and the world’s frenetic pace. In his travels through seven Asian republics, Kapuściński peeks under the lining of events and sees when he does the lives of exotic communities functioning within the imperial colossus. And he captures the specifics of each of them. He shows how history is intertwined with topography and how both in their own ways shape national identity. He also notices what best strengthens this identity – strong

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conviction about the importance of common tradition. This appreciation of the value of tradition, which he formulates so clearly for the first time in The Kirghiz Dismounts, would ten years later come to be called “Kapuściński’s first law”: “Today, enlargement is difficult and risky, as a rule, enlargement ends in narrowing, and therefore nations must compensate for the instinct of breadth with a sense of depth, that is, reach deep into history to prove their strength and importance” (K, 54).39 Perhaps the author owed this important lesson about national roots to his recent African experiences. In his volume on the Soviet republics, he subtly contrasts the situation of the republics he visited with that of the small countries of the Third World. At the end of the book, he even praises the Soviet national policy, which helped bring an end to tribal conflicts and unite feuding nations into states. Remember here that the reporter had just returned from Africa, where he had watched state after state torn apart by tribal conflict. When comparing the Soviet policy toward nationalities with that of the colonial empires, it is the former he admires. Its greatest achievement has been “a new type of human, liberated from poverty and superstition, a person of open horizons and restored dignity” (K, 110). Yet, it is impossible not to notice that Kapuściński’s enthusiasm for the spoils of the revolution is contained in brackets. He is aware that he is seeing only what the authorities want to show him. He is forbidden to move around freely; instead, he is escorted by guardians (in Armenia, he is accompanied by a man who introduces himself as a photojournalist but never takes any photos). With ironic distance, he describes the mandatory official visits – such as a meeting with a minister, and tours of a grand construction site and a model kolkhoz (collective farm). He notes that the Turkmen women working in the fields are dressed as if for an occasion – in long dresses, high-heeled shoes, brooches, and bracelets, and with beads and tiaras in their hair. He notes as well that when asked a question, they turn away: “They don’t want to answer any questions, they are silent.” It is not easy for him to convince the guides to go off the beaten track: they hide behind a busy schedule or lack of appropriate permits, or they simply ignore his requests. When he suggests to his Tajik guardian that he is interested in politics and culture, the brief response is “Never mind … we’ll go to the lake” (K, 86). The most significant moment in Kapuściński’s Asian journey happened in Uzbekistan. He would later evoke the dark figure of Timur – a bloody ruler who was also a discerning patron of arts. At the turn

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of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, he turned Samarkand into a city that to this day continues to stun visitors with its perfection. In The Kirghiz Dismounts, the image of that city is adjacent to the following one: in Tashkent, the reporter stands in front of the empty plinth of a monument to Stalin – another criminal who was also a builder. The juxtaposition of these two men, both of whom believed that “humans can do anything,” is hardly accidental. By showing the value of tradition and national community, Kapuściński was able to paint a picture of the reality of the Soviet Union in the 1960s, which was quite different from what the state typically promoted. Faced with limited time and restricted mobility, he was still able to find the genius loci of each place – its caring spirit. In each, an enduring spirit of place – of its history, topography, tradition, culture – had triggered in a proud people a hunger for their own identity, one they would remember clearly two decades later. Kapuściński noticed this common sense of national consciousness by analyzing the details – the Georgians’ way of life, the Armenians’ cult of books, the value of the desert for Turkmen, the importance of fragrance for Azeris, the role of the native language in Tajikistan, the hospitality of the Kirghiz people, the veneration of former places of worship in Uzbekistan. Ultimately, this slim collection of reportages surpassed the Polish literary works dedicated to the revolution and eventually outlived them. More than twenty years later, when the Soviet Union collapsed and became history, this light, summery book would begin its second life with the title Imperium.

tra n sl ator of ch e g u eva r a a n d wri te r of “huma n fat e ” During his years in South America, Kapuściński considered writing two books (just as he had when he left Africa). He alluded to the first one in a letter he wrote in January 1969: “I have already started to write a book on Che Guevara, but since I have expanded it, I won’t finish it until the end of the year. Hell knows what will come out of this.”40 For some readers of Nowe Książki, which published the letter – which was largely one of thanks for the award for The Kirghiz Dismounts – this news was not a surprise, because they knew that the Książka i Wiedza publishing house was about to release Che Guevara’s Diary from Bolivia (published for the first time in Cuba in 1968, nine months after the death of the hero of the world revolution), which Kapuściński

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himself had translated.41 That he thought about writing a book about him indicates that the writer’s fascination with this figure had not been satisfied by the translation – the only one he ever did. Kapuściński confided his intention to write the second book just after his return, at the end of 1972, in what was probably his first press interview: We already noted [said the journalist] that you are writing a book about Latin America. What is it about these difficult issues that you want especially to show us? – I would like to write a book about human fate … – … but if I know you, it will be a book about politics. – In a way, it is the same. Every day we do not realise the extent to which politics affects our individual fate. It is exactly this angle from which I would like to look at human life in Latin America.42 Elsewhere in that interview, he added that he was only interested in people, “their attitudes, their mentality, what connects us with them and what separates us. It seems to me that the distances decrease only through getting to know and understanding others.” One can suppose that this intended second book displaced the idea of the first and that his notion to write Che Guevara’s biography, which was undoubtedly intended to serve as some kind of key to the current problems of Latin America, developed during the nearly four years he spent as a correspondent into a reflection on individual human destiny and its entanglements in politics. The two books he considered writing would serve his Polish readers as a bridge to understanding the distant and exotic South American world. There is probably no better way to understand what South America meant to Kapuściński’s creative development than to trace the path between the intentions of both unwritten books. The starting point seems particularly important here because it brings to light interests that were not present when he returned from Africa or in the summary of his Soviet expedition in 1967. However, it is more difficult to trace this path of writing than in the case of Africa because he did not leave an unwitting chronicle of “growing into Latin America” the way he did in the texts collected in If All Africa …. While in South America, he wrote many journalistic texts, possibly even more than he did from Africa, but they were information cables, comments, analyses – more distant from reportage, not to mention literary reportage, than ever

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before in his writing. It is relevant here to compare the number of texts he published in both five-year periods in Polityka, in other weeklies, and in the daily press. During his African years, he rarely published in Trybuna Ludu or Życie Warszawy; during his South American years, those were his principal venues: Polityka printed only two of his articles, and Tygodnik Kulturalny also only two, while Trybuna Ludu probably published around one hundred, and his pap bulletins – informational, special, and weekly specials – amounted to a few hundred. The drudgery of dispatches, and his journalistic pursuit of events that were gaining serious momentum in Latin America at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, probably do not fully explain why he sank into “agency writing.” One important factor, perhaps, is that he had left for his new post not particularly well prepared to meet the rich and diverse world of South America. This was not Africa, which, as you will recall, he had gotten to know before his longer stay, during several visits. After a few years, for Kapuściński, the crowded interiors of apartments in Santiago de Chile, where he was seeking a room to rent, would become a symbol of his encounter with a strikingly new world: After years among Africans whose only property is (in many cases) a wooden hoe and whose only food is a banana plucked off the branch, this absurd avalanche of possessions that came tumbling down upon me every time I opened a door crushed and discouraged me … In reality, however, the residences of these old ladies were simply a pathological and kitschy manifestation of Latin America – that is, the universal prevalence of the baroque: baroque not only as a style of aesthetics and thought, but also as a general commitment to excess and eclecticism. There is a lot of everything here and everything is exaggerated … If there is a jungle, it has to be enormous (the Amazon); if there are mountains, they have to be gigantic (the Andes); if there is a plain, it has to be endless (the Pampas); if there is a river, it has to be the biggest (the Amazon). People of every possible race and cast of complexion: white, red, black, yellow, métis, mulatto. All cultures: Indian, Anglo-Saxon, Spanish, Lusitanian, French, Hindu, Italian, and African. Every possible and impossible political orientation and party. An excess of wealth and an excess of poverty … This is not a world you can walk through with a calm head and an indifferent heart. You force your way through with difficulty, powerless and feeling … lost. (W, 150–2)

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But it was not simply a matter of lack of spiritual or intellectual preparation. Kapuściński had left quite suddenly, totally unprepared, just as he had when he went to India and China, without knowing the language or, for that matter, what to do when he got there. It seems that someone cared mainly about getting him out of Poland quickly, on the eve of March 1968, in order to protect him from threats he little understood even several years later. It was Michał Hofman, president of pap at the time, who prompted him to leave. In 2003, the writer told Jacek Żakowski: “I think Hofman wanted to spare me my life in the terrible atmosphere that was coming. Maybe he wanted to protect me from being fired again and banned from publishing?”43 The timing of his departure and the country where he was to go were determined largely by chance. There was already a pap branch in South America, in Mexico, run at that time by Edmund Osmańczyk. He was to set up a second branch, but he did not know where: Sometime at the end of ’67, I met Roma Pańska in the corridor. Roma was the grey eminence of the agency. When she saw me, she screamed: “What are you still doing here!?” I said I was getting ready to leave. “You, Rysiek, don’t get ready, don’t wait, don’t delay, just get out of here at once because it will be too late. Grab your bags and leave today.” I managed to get a visa to Chile, with which Poland had very good relations. Three days later, I flew to Santiago via London.44 To this day we do not know all the reasons for this rush. From the point of view of biography and creativity, it is enough to know that being out of the country between 1968 and 1972 – the years of March ’68, the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops, the bloody suppression of workers’ protests on the Polish coast in 1970, the fall of Gomułka, and the rise to power of the reformist first secretary of the Central Committee of the pzpr , Edward Gierek – saved Kapuściński from several dangers, including the requirement to declare his loyalty as a journalist, a declaration that, as a pap employee, he would most likely have had to make. But most of all, he would not have to face having his attitude questioned. Clearly, someone who desired that he not yet abandon his utopian dreams of socialist revolution was sending him as far from Poland as possible, whether he was prepared or not. Kapuściński’s lack of preparation for South America meant, among other things, that he wrote almost nothing for more than a year. His

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employer agreed that he should devote his first months at his new post to organizational matters and learning a new language, but those months unexpectedly became a year when it turned out instead of one, he would in fact have to learn two new languages. After three months, with the help of a journalist living in Chile, Marian Rawicz, and by studying for up to eighteen hours a day, he was fluent enough in Spanish that he could give a lecture on Polish foreign policy at the Chile’s Institute of International Affairs.45 Soon after, though, the Chilean authorities told him to leave the country. The reason, he claimed,46 was the Polish press had published a report he had sent them that the Chilean military under General Robert Viaux was planning an attack on the Parliament. This was viewed as interference in the internal affairs of the state. Only the intervention of Salvador Allende, then chairman of the Senate and soon to be president of Chile, saved him from immediate expulsion and permanent cancellation of his visa. At the time, though, no South American country was eager to accredit a journalist from socialist Poland. Eventually, he managed to get a visa for Peru, where he probably would not be able to fulfil his journalistic mission. As he told Jacek Żakowski, pap “had no idea what to do with me now.”47 The situation was saved by the Polish ambassador to Brazil, Aleksander Krajewski, who proposed that the pap open a branch there. Kapuściński accepted the offer, even though it meant he would now have to learn Portuguese. So by August 1968 he was in Rio de Janeiro, initially in the ambassador’s residence and then in his own apartment in Copacabana, overlooking the famous beach. After a few months of cramming Portuguese and getting to know Brazil, he was ready to start work, when the opportunity arose to take over the pap office in Mexico, which Osmańczyk had just left. He eagerly embraced this opportunity, the more willingly because the Olympics were about to be held there. A good year after his departure, reports from pap ’s correspondent in Mexico finally began appearing in Poland’s daily press. A more thorough account of the writer’s life may one day explicate all the circumstances of his departure from Poland and provide a full account of his quite mysterious adventures during his first year in South America. Perhaps some of the officers of Department One of the Ministry of Internal Affairs had some part in all of it, and it does seem that they had decided this time to corral him more thoroughly than they had in Africa – no longer would he be able to vanish on them. If we can believe the two official notes added in the autumn of 1967 to

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Kapuściński’s file (which had been opened, let us recall, without his written agreement to cooperate with the intelligence service), an operations officer approached him before his departure and presented him with a plan for quite extensive spying activities, which would have turned his correspondence work into an “official arrangement.” This being the year of the Arab–Israeli War, he was ordered to focus on “Zionism” (he supposedly received a letter of recommendation to the chairman of the Arab League in Buenos Aires) and on Americans and Germans (at the time, West Germans), as well as on matters of intelligence and counterintelligence in the journalistic environment. The information he gathered would be passed on to his handler in the Polish embassy in Santiago, and, after he moved to Mexico (which should have been in the spring of 1968), to those who made contact with him there. The facts already known to us indicate how well these plans worked out: he was in Chile shortly afterwards, he didn’t stop in Buenos Aires at all, and he arrived in Mexico in December. We can add that the officials of Department One in Mexico, “Benito” and “Grzegorz,” probably did not locate him immediately, given that the first two notes from conversations with the “source,” now called “Vera Cruz” (perhaps after the 1954 film by Robert Aldrich with Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster), are dated June and August 1969. The latter note, the first to be written under a pseudonym, has to do with the results of sociological research conducted at a university in Caracas. It states that an activist with the Venezuelan Communist Party suspects that those results have been passed to the cia . Department One’s first contact, then, was one and a half years after Kapuściński left Poland. From the point of view of the commanders of this secret mission, that time would have been completely lost. Kapuściński justified his doing nothing in a way that smacks of pure mockery (worthy of his previous code name, “Poet”). It may even point to collusion between the leader and the led, to protect both of them from the wrath of headquarters. “Benito” wrote in a note dated 18 June 1969 that “the flood of pap work has so far prevented him from being used to implement our operational plans … It should be assumed that in the next period, when the book on Che Guevara is finished (it is in the final stage), despite the above-mentioned difficulties, he will be able to steal some time to perform the operational tasks assigned to him.” Probably even the usefulness of maintaining contact with “Vera Cruz” was considered, given that in this note we also read: “We believe that he is a valuable man and we should not resign from using him to perform our tasks.”

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In light of the information about making contact with Kapuściński, the writer’s account of his conversation two months earlier with Maria Sten, a translator and researcher of pre-Columbian cultures, who lived in Mexico and did not intend to return to Poland, seems quite intriguing. In April 1969 he reported that Sten, who had just visited Poland, had called the situation there a “nightmare” and repeated rumours that the most senior figures in the Interior Ministry (msw ) were eavesdropping on party and state authorities. Could Kapuściński have sent a note about this directly to Warsaw, bypassing his Mexican intermediaries? Witold Bereś and Krzysztof Burnetko, referring to Stefan Bratkowski’s48 recollection, suggest that Sten herself wanted the authorities in Warsaw to find out what she thought and said about them in the world. Whatever the case may be, it is clear that headquarters was not interested in this kind of information and criticized Kapuściński for his lack of achievements. Perhaps the officers of Department One believed that the writer did not understand what they expected of him, for according to the notes of 9 September and 13 October 1969, they had decided to use his September vacation in Poland for some kind of training. Around this time, the vice-rector of the Mexican University of Technology was returning from Israel via Warsaw. They ordered Kapuściński to collect information from him at the Warsaw airport about the upcoming World Congress of Science and Technology in Tel Aviv. It is not known whether he received convention documents from the vice-rector, or whether, if he did, they were confidential. This brought about a long instructional conversation between the writer and his handlers “because this kind of guidance was necessary.” They ordered him to “report on his activities to date in detail,” and he promised to make better use of his contacts and meetings and to “take care of the results.” However, “general political issues” were of no interest to his handlers; they cared about “concrete material” of the sort he could not write about for pap. Once again, it was emphasized that the “special services of the main opponent” would constitute his “exclusive course of action.” He was expected to reply that he understood all of this. The next few reports by Kapuściński between 1970 to 1972, which are attached to his file, or only mentioned in it with clearly increasing impatience, show that the writer did not change his tactic of providing intelligence officers with information that could just as easily have been included in his pap bulletins. There was a five-page study on the normalization of relations between Cuba and Latin American countries,

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and there were articles about a meeting of US ambassadors from these countries and about the Trotskyist movement on their territories. There was also something described as “the study of the political situation in Mexico and the internal situation, and general information about the secret services” (28 August 1971). Another related to “fascist organisations inspired in Latin America by the cia ” (3 February 1972). Yet another provided an expert opinion on Chinese policy on the continent. Interesting or not, they were useless to Department One, which did not want or expect them. The documentation contains a mere three confirmations of receipt of three “fees” of 350 pesos (for comparison, one of Kapuściński’s “minders” demanded the return of 190 pesos for a dinner for two), two of which contain handwritten notes describing how specific studies of a political nature were used. Two of the writer’s reports from South America are more concrete, but even these are more curiosities than actual intelligence. One of them, from 12 February 1970, is a description of Pablo Morales, editor-in-chief of the Spanish edition of Reader’s Digest, who is suspected of being associated with US intelligence. It presents him as a sympathetic, sociable man, well-regarded by other correspondents and with little interest in political issues, especially in socialist countries. The second report, from 17 April 1970, recounts that two Mexican students arrested after the 1968 student revolution had been accused of possessing letters from Poland, which probably concerned tourist contacts. Even this one could have gone straight to the newspaper. It very much appears that this second attempt to recruit Kapuściński for intelligence work was as unsuccessful as the first. It would have had an impact on some details of his travel biography but no significance for what he wrote as a journalist and reporter. Department One simply could not make him write for them anything other than the things he wrote for pap . “Zaostrza się konflikt między Peru i usa ” (Increasing conflict between Peru and the usa ); “Ruch oporu przeciw monopolom usa w Ameryce Łacińskiej” (Resistance against US monopolies in Latin America);49 “Peruwiańska reforma rolna – najnowszym przewrotem społecznym Trzeciego Świata” (Peruvian land reform – the latest Third World social upheaval);50 “Ruch lewicowy na nowym etapie” (A new stage of the Left-wing movement);51 “Ameryka Łacińska na przedpolu rewolucji” (Latin America on the forefront of the revolution)52 – such were the titles of his press correspondence. The attitude of ideological confrontation in his writings flowed from his convictions at the time and from the fact that he had come to a place where

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there was a glaringly obvious need to fight “American imperialism.” If some twentieth-century guardian angel had taken care to deliver him from Poland and protect him from the need to prove his ideological purity, it also knew where to move him to strengthen and preserve that purity for the next few years. At that time, almost all South American countries were ruled by military or semi-military juntas and were undergoing more or less violent upheavals connected with liberating themselves from the remnants of a feudal system, with breaking international (i.e., American) monopolies over extractive resources, and with severing the bonds of US hegemony, which at the time was quite comparable to the Soviet Bloc’s hold over its East European satellites. All these aspirations either were being furthered “top-down” by ruling groups, usually military juntas, and thus accelerating social reforms, including land division, the spread of education, and political and trade union freedoms; or they were being suppressed by those groups, thus reviving the long tradition of Latin American guerrilla tactics and threatening a repetition of Fidel Castro’s victorious Cuban Revolution. Either way, revolutionary fever was rising, and the continent was being shaken with upheavals, reforms, and rural and urban guerrilla tactics. We can presume that Kapuściński was excited, indeed delighted by all this. He would have felt that he was back where he needed to be, in the place and time where the Third World revolution was now being shaped, witnessing events no less important than those he had recently seen in Africa. “The essence of these events,” he wrote in one of his first stories, “is that, for the first time in the recent history of the world, Latin America entered the international arena as an independent political force … This means that the centre of the struggle waged by the Third World with the forces of neocolonialism has now shifted from Africa and Asia to Latin America.”53 He could thus rebuild his earlier historiosophical optimism, which had been weakened by the turn of African affairs. Africa may have plunged into the chaos of the end of one historical era and may now have been awaiting the coming of the next, but the spirit of revolution had not faded; it had only changed continents, and he had moved along with it. He even sought an analogy between the experiences of the two continents, which probably did not make him less helpless in the face of the Latin Baroque but at least provided him with some key to understanding this new continent’s past and present social processes. That key did not always fit, however. Among other things, he made a dubious comparison between the Spanish liberation wars of the early nineteenth

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century – a sacred era for Latin Americans, one shrouded in the legends of the liberators Simón Bolívar and José San Martín – and the armed independence movements in Africa’s white settler countries, South Africa and Rhodesia.54 However, this speaks mainly to the scale of the historical turning point – which he believed in the years to come would be on a par with the nineteenth-century liberation revolutions – and to his disgust with cruel dictatorships, especially their treatment of Indians and mestizos. Kapuściński’s first journeys in South America acquainted him only too well with the intensity and variety of South America’s social and political fever. The year 1968 in Chile, under President Frei, was a time of rising dissatisfaction with the rule of the Christian Democrats and the strengthening of the Popular Unity Front (which included the Communist Party), whose victory in the 1970 elections would bring Salvador Allende to power and open the way for radical reforms. Peru was taking the same path in 1968 until a military coup overthrew the centrist civilian government; this brought in a revolutionary military junta for several years headed by General Velasco Alvarado. In Brazil, by contrast, the 1967 constitution had strengthened the authoritarian hand of the junta, exercised by Artur de Costa e Silva. The following year, new forms of social resistance and guerrilla warfare began to develop. In May, workers’ demonstrations and strikes began. Student unrest began in the spring with an attempt to occupy the Ministry of Education, which led to street battles with the police, and ended in the autumn with the arrest of eight hundred people. Brazil’s urban guerrilla movement grew out of the defeated student and worker activists, as well as younger military cadres. It soon began organizing its first high-profile actions: robberies of banks and postal trains in order to raise money for “revolutionary action,” and attacks on the overseers of the apparatus of violence. Traditional rural guerrillas, “forest guerrillas,”55 were also reactivating themselves. Kapuściński was not in São Paulo at that time, but he must have heard about the loudest and most successful of these attacks: in October 1968, on Charles Chandler, a cia officer, an expert in anti-partisan warfare, who the previous year had been advising the Bolivian authorities (among others) as they surrounded Ernest Che Guevara’s band. Bolivia, which borders on Chile, Peru, Paraguay, and Brazil, was not among the countries where Kapuściński settled down, but it is known he was there in the spring, on account of Che Guevara, who less than six months after his dramatic death had begun to turn into

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one of the world’s enduring legends of the left (as co-author of the victorious Cuban Revolution and emissary of the “anti-imperialist,” anti-American revolution throughout the Third World, free from Moscow’s tutelage). The legend of Che continues to this day, and on walls, badges, and anti-globalist T-shirts around the world we still come across his bearded face crowned with a beret.56 Kapuściński was a witness to and participant in the formation of that legend, which was already taking root during the “student spring” of 1968 in Europe and the United States, and probably also in Brazil, where that spring lasted until autumn. In South America, the myth of Che Guevara emerged as the most obvious key to understanding the reality of that time. That is probably why Kapuściński started collecting material for a book about him, just as he collected material for a biography of Lumumba and Nkrumah after his first visits to Africa. To that end, the first and most important material was the diary Che had kept between 7 November 1966 and 7 October 1967 (that is, throughout the entire period he tried to launch a peasant guerrilla war in the Bolivian province of Santa Cruz with a handful of followers). The diary had been recovered from his body and smuggled to Cuba, and now, just as Kapuściński was leaving for Peru, it had been published in a Chilean magazine. It was written in simple Spanish, and Kapuściński decided to try to translate it right away, treating the task as a continuation of learning the language. Learning Spanish and the South American reality at the same time deeply absorbed him, so much so that he would recall later that he hardly left his hotel in Lima.57 And when he did leave it, as we know from elsewhere, it was to continue his task, by flying to Bolivia to follow for himself the trail of Che’s last skirmishes as recounted in the diary. He put a lot of effort into that task, once again rubbing shoulders with death, given how many South American rebels had become desaparecidos, having vanished without a trace. Today, La Ruta del Che, the 130-kilometre-long trail from Santa Cruz to the village of La Higuera, the site of Che’s last skirmish and death, and to the town of Vallegrande, where his body was hidden for thirty years, is a tourist attraction. Kapuściński found himself on that trail at a time when a state of emergency was still in force in the province and a military unit that had recently taken part in a raid on partisans was still stationed in the area. All that saved him from being shot one night in the bush was the fact that the two soldiers who were going to carry out the execution

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(having sentenced him themselves) were persuaded by a civilian driver to drink themselves into a stupor with the local moonshine, which made it possible for the writer to escape.58 It is very possible that Kapuściński’s personal encounter with the realities of guerrilla warfare were the reason why he did not succumb to the myth of Che the revolutionary. In the introduction to the Polish translation, he drew attention to the utopian nature of Che’s foco guerrillero (partisan focus) program, which was so sharply misaligned with the place it was meant to liberate and the people it was meant to inspire. In a sparsely populated wasteland where there is an abundance of arable land, it is not easy to preach agrarian reform to peasants whose sons and brothers are serving in the same army that is pursuing you – especially if you are white and a foreigner and do not know the local language. Thus, in the last months of Che Guevara’s life, Kapuściński found a drama of futile sacrifice – the heroism of enduring to the end, of giving one’s life to an idea, even while growing more aware that the sacrifice will be for nothing because it will not serve as an example for the local people. Kapuściński summarized all this with these sublime words: [Che’s is] a notebook of the commander of an embattled unit, a notebook of a man who has been fighting hopelessly for at least the last six months of his life, who knows he could have saved himself by laying down his weapon but does not consider this alternative even for a moment; on the contrary, he goes on, falls down, gets up, and goes on further; the last pages of the Diary … are no longer illuminated by any hope, the noose is tightening more and more … He is more and more alone … in a strange, treacherous terrain, where no one knows where to go … alone in the awareness of the end which he will have to have because there was little left – a few kilometres walk, a pistol without ammunition, the last moment of joy that “the day passed idyllically,” the last night, the last ravine, the last shot.59 It seems that Kapuściński had found the key to the problem of the South American revolution in the spectre of Che Guevara, and especially in his tragically heroic actions. This helped him “grow into South America” as a writer and a journalist, for it directed his attention toward the moral questions that accompanied political commitment and individual choice, thus helping him focus on those topics that

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would stimulate his creative thought and imagination. Yet at the same time, it shifted those topics to the “back burner,” given that he could hardly reconcile them to the requirements of agency writing; besides which, they would require more extended reflection. This helps explain why the number of ambitious texts, the kind written “for himself,” decreased, especially relative to the African period, in favour of utilitarian agency reports and commentary. Even so, there was plenty of worthwhile utilitarian writing for him to do, which should have captivated him and found expression in longer texts. For example, in mid-1969 there was the Latin American tour by Nelson Rockefeller, the special envoy for Richard Nixon, the recently elected American president. During that tour, the continent’s emancipation from the US was impossible to miss. Up until then, only a handful of intellectuals could be expected to come out to protest such visits; this time, in most of the twenty countries on the tour, tens of thousands of people came out to demonstrate, engaging in street battles with the police and the army that left dozens dead and wounded and hundreds under arrest. Kapuściński closely followed and commented on Rockefeller’s journey but limited himself to short items and analyses60 sent from Mexico, where he settled permanently in November 1968. Also in mid-1969, a war of several days broke out that would go down in history (thanks to Kapuściński, among others) as “the Soccer War,” because El Salvador’s defeat by Honduras in a qualifying match for the World Cup had served as the pretext for the former to invade the latter. This provided the writer with his first frontline experiences in the Americas, which were all the more intense because he was the only foreign correspondent on the ground when the Salvadorans attacked the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa. It seems, though, that the social and political drivers of the war had been exhausted by the time international pressure brought it to an end. Kapuściński saw the conflict as a war to expand (or, from the other side, halt) the revolution. El Salvador, ruled by the United Fruit Company and fourteen latifundistas, had attacked Honduras, which had already carried out land reform, to force it to detain half a million of its own citizens – peasants who had emigrated to Honduras for lack of land. Honduras had entered the territory of El Salvador in order to create conditions for an agricultural revolution there, of course in the name of “social justice,” but probably also so that those same migrants would have somewhere to return to permanently. “It [the war] was the last attempt

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to save El Salvador’s feudal-militaristic oligarchy from the country’s growing peasant revolution,”61 wrote Kapuściński. But making peace under pressure and under the threat of sanctions, and holding victory parades in both capitals, of course, stripped the war of any liberation aspect and rendered it meaningless – except perhaps that it exposed the tragedy of those half a million peasants, with nowhere to go, who had been driven across the border and back. Kapuściński may have harboured greater hopes for the revolution in Peru, which had been launched by a military coup. He viewed this one more enthusiastically because the junta had actually carried out land reform. “The Peruvian revolution,” he wrote, “after the revolutions in Cuba, Algeria, Egypt, and Zanzibar – was the most serious and deepest social revolution that took place in the 1960s in the Third World.”62 He travelled to Peru at least twice more, in 1969 and 1970, on one occasion on an expedition to the High Andes to reach villages that had never seen a white man. Yet he did not leave any written trace of that journey at the time – eloquent testimony to his interests at the time. “I couldn’t recognize,” he reported, “villages and towns that were always dormant, dead. Everywhere there were committees for the defence of the revolution with full initiative and an action plan. There was spontaneous enthusiasm everywhere, so typical of the first years of any revolution.”63 In Peru, Kapuściński seemed to be regaining his youthful faith in revolutionary ideals as well as his sense of community with people who were changing the world. Perhaps that is what he had felt ten years earlier during his first visit to Africa. Here, while looking at “agricultural production cooperatives managed by councils elected by the crews of former latifundia,” he would have felt his memory jarred. The revolution of top-down reforms and decrees, transformed into a mass popular movement and spontaneous social change, seemed to him a model solution that could be applied in other dependent and backward countries of the Third World. Yet at this time, he did not crown his belief with any serious text; it was as if he was not sufficiently certain of the durability of the historical perspective he had just gained. And rightly so, because soon after he left South America, the transformation in Peru would come to a halt, and the other side would be revealed: debt, inflation, unemployment. But before that happened, Kapuściński would become more than anything else a keen commentator on and advocate for changes in Chile.64 Those changes accelerated sharply after Salvador Allende, the

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leader of the People’s Unity bloc, which included Communists, was elected president in October 1970. Land reform, nationalization of the copper mines, an independent foreign policy – including rapprochement with Cuba and the Soviet Bloc (manifested by Fidel Castro’s visit in 1972, his first visit to the South American continent since the Cuban Revolution) – these were clear signs of truly revolutionary change. And they were achieved not as a result of armed struggle or a military coup but through a parliamentary process in which the Christian Democrats acquiesced and the army remained neutral. Kapuściński almost certainly believed in the possibility of a victory for the concept of centre-left people’s blocs (reminiscent of the European popular fronts of the 1930s). He followed the spread of those blocs to other countries, and with growing anxiety he watched the worsening of Allende’s relations with Congress and the army.65 Although General Pinochet’s coup would take place a few months after Kapuściński’s return to Poland, by the end of 1972 there were already signs of the coming catastrophe.66 None of the South American revolutions satisfied Kapuściński’s expectations. Perhaps those expectations were too high – he had expected a historical breakthrough comparable to the one that had brought South America its independence in the nineteenth century. Perhaps his expectations of revolution were too high for any political reality to meet them. Whatever the case, his heart and his creative commitment remained with the defeated revolutionaries, the successors of the mythologized Che Guevara. This is eloquently confirmed by a piece of reportage several dozen pages long, the only longer text he wrote “live,” that is, during his stay in Latin America. Its original title was “Dlaczego zginął Karl von Spreti?” (Why did Karl von Spreti die?).67 It was printed in abbreviated form in Chrystus z karabinem na ramieniu as “Śmierć ambasadora” (Death of the Ambassador) and is now better known by that title. “Śmierć ambasadora” is a passionate defence of young Guatemalan guerrillas from the far group accused of terrorism and cruelty. At the turn of April and May 1970, they kidnapped the German ambassador, Count Karl von Spreti, to force the release of twenty-two comrades in arms. When their demands were rejected, they killed the hostage. Kapuściński would later explain himself concerning this essay, discussing the context of its creation, which was unknown to Polish readers. He had meant the piece to be a critique of the oversimplifications engaged in by the world press, especially in Mexico: a place

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where he encountered conspirators and political emigrants from all over the South American continent who were seeking refuge from the bloody dictatorships in their own countries. The interpretation most favourable to the kidnappers – in the spirit of the principle: let rape be answered by rape – called on readers to view their actions as a response to the terrorism engaged in by right-wing militias, which were cooperating clandestinely with the authoritarian military regime, thus allowing it to deny any responsibility for kidnappings, murders, and disappearances. Kapuściński could not agree to equate right-wing thugs and murderers with young people holding the purest and most noble of intentions, who typically had abandoned their education, their careers, the parents’ prosperity, and, almost always, their own lives (at that time, guerrillas in Guatemala were dying on average at the age of twenty-two) in order to fight for basic civil rights. So he set out to convince his readers that the so-called individual terror (in particular, the kidnapping of diplomats, which threatened dictatorships with complications in international relations) was “the only possible form of self-defence” against organized and unchecked state terror. A review of the country’s history and present-day situation, bravely woven into the reportage, would have made it clear that, as a result of the truly colonial external and internal oppression that prevented any social reform, the release of prisoners (who had been detained without trial or sentence) through the kidnapping of diplomats had become a form of internal warfare sanctioned by both sides. Its unwritten rules had been violated by the government itself, which refused to release the “hostages” (and even killed two of them during the waiting period) in exchange for the release of this “hostage” who was in the hands of the partisans. It seems that Kapuściński’s logic had some basis in reality. A few months earlier, in September 1969, Brazilian urban guerrillas had kidnapped US Ambassador Charles Elbrick in Rio de Janeiro; this generated publicity for their manifestos and led to the release of fifteen prisoners within two days, including leaders of various groups fighting against the dictatorship.68 Kapuściński himself mentioned talking with groups of “fighters” arriving in the Mexican capital from Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Guatemala, who had been freed in exchange for the release of kidnapped diplomats. Karl von Spreti’s kidnappers had been guided by certain established rules. They had the right to expect that their action would succeed, the more so as it was carried out on the eve of the German chancellor’s visit to the US president,

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and they were certain that the chancellor would persuade the president to intervene, a matter that absolutely could not fail to take immediate effect. What they didn’t see was how the political game would be turned against them. Germany and the United States were competing with each other for influence in Guatemala, and they both had something to gain by not intervening. So in a sense, the partisans had to carry out the execution in order not to weaken the only weapon they had, which they intended to use again. This defence of the young kidnappers’ rationality and purity of intent does not have to be accused of being too forgiving. If this defence still makes a impression today, it is because it reveals the sort of tragic ethical complications that confront an educated young man in a country with colonial internal relations, ruled by a ruthless dictatorship. Basic social awareness and a sense of justice do not allow him to remain indifferent, yet every form of political engagement leads to a more or less tragic situation. At the same time, by engaging in guerrilla warfare, he has condemned himself to the indifference and distrust of those for whom he is prepared to die. This is because the Indian village does not understand white “urban” people. “Can you not think of the terrible loneliness of a partisan who dies in this war?” (Ch, 132), Kapuściński asks dramatically. Those who join urban guerrilla groups risk entangling themselves in unpredictable political games that carry a moral risk; they will not be understood and will most likely be condemned for doing so. For a dictatorship, which forbids any open political activity, can bury the actual state of affairs in stillness and silence – brought about through fear or ignorance, or as a result of propaganda – so that no one will even want to know the truth, including about the tragedies of young revolutionists. That is why a scream that breaks the silence is necessary. That scream manifests itself as violence. And that is how Kapuściński explained in his report how the German ambassador came to die in a Central American country. After reading this report, it is easier to understand why Kapuściński was leaving his second foreign post with the intention of writing a book about the fate of people subjected to political pressure. He was convinced that this would be the best way to describe the South American experience for Polish readers. The essence of that experience could be found in a single individual’s participation in history. When applying the concept of fate, the writer did not think about the ordinary dramas and adventures of life, but rather – in accordance with the old meaning – about a destiny that cannot be avoided and that is burdened by history.

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So for him, the political reality of South America became more than one particular oppressive system; instead, it encompassed all organized violence throughout history. This is perhaps best seen in the generalizing characteristics of this “conspiracy of silence and lies,” which he tried to undermine with his reportage: People who write history pay too much attention to so-called loud moments, and not enough to explore periods of silence. It is the lack of intuition, so reliable in every mother when she hears that her child’s room has suddenly become quiet. The mother knows that this silence indicates something bad … The same function is performed by silence in history and politics. Silence is a signal of misfortune and often crime … It is needed by tyrants and occupants, who make sure that their work is accompanied through silence. Let us pay attention to how every colonialist movement nurtured silence. With what discretion the Holy Inquisition worked. How much Leónidas Trujillo avoided advertising … Silence has its rights and requirements. Silence requires that concentration camps be built in deserted places. Silence needs a huge police apparatus. It needs an army of snitches. Silence demands that the enemies of silence disappear suddenly and without a trace. Silence wants its peace to be not disturbed by any voice – complaint, protest, indignation. (Ch, 92) As he started to explore the new continent on his own, on the basis of completely different premises than the ones he had harboured in Africa, Kapuściński began to break through toward universalizing thinking and toward literature. This time, through the drama of individual fates, issues of choice and value were placed in sharp relief against the institutionalized evil of the world. Together with this new perspective, a kind of cognitive, reflective distance from unfolding history reappears in Kapuściński’s writing, and – at the same time – a genuine interest in cultural diversity, in the parameters that determine how the same subject matter takes on different shapes for different cultures. Before now, he had been seeking community – one of goals, ideas, and generational experiences – only when an individual compelled him to penetrate his own cultural distinctiveness. The book on South America he planned would have located the differences and similarities between “us” and “them.” Perhaps something like the notes for this – “collecting material,” collecting thoughts – are

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the ones he gathered together toward the end of his stay in Latin America, which the reader would encounter only in 1990 as the first part of the Lapidarium, titled “Z Meksyku 1972” (From Mexico, 1972). They testify to a significant transformation in Kapuściński since the period when he translated Che Guevara’s Diary. The greatest change to be noted is in his relationship to the revolutionary movements. Earlier, we had observed a certain disappointment in him that they were so powerlessness against the status quo; yet this made him sympathize all the more with the lonely fighters for truth and justice, and at least bear witness to them. Now it seemed as if he was beginning to question the deeper meaning of the partisans’ sacrifice. “Their movement is primarily a moral purification movement,” he noted. “The political goal is in some sense secondary and not even very clearly understood … They don’t think about whether they will win, they think about the fact that they want to be clean” (L, 27). To him, the student protests, in particular, appeared to be a cult of gesture, a manifestation of the need to participate, and sometimes a form of social life and countercultural participation in public life, an adventure (often ending in death) that in its own way actually legitimized the oppressive system, because it did not really threaten it and indeed made it easier to justify the need for it. This does not mean, of course, that he found any justification for this system. Many of his notes develop and organize his earlier observations about totalitarianism. In them he describes various ways to physically eliminate political opponents; methods of intimidation, infiltration, and provocation to disrupt the opposition; varieties of demagogy and faux democracy; and everyday terror, whose methods run the gamut from surveillance to wiretaps, enemy lists, prison terms without sentences, and suspended executions. However, he viewed all these attributes of totalitarianism as tame and in some way accepted realities of public life, coexisting with various forms of opposition activity and coalescing with the latter to form the continent’s unique political life. These were not two sides of the barricade fighting with each other; rather, they constituted a liquid conglomerate, sometimes crystallizing into grotesque phenomena, such as the government careers of former student revolutionaries, or the square in La Paz where on Sunday mornings politicians from the opposing groups came to clean their shoes. The exoticism of South America’s political life may well have been instrumental in making our author doubt the possibility of forging an ideological community that would rise above cultural differences. “The

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series of ideological conflicts,” he wrote, “stems from the fact that ideology, when changing its geographic location, becomes coloured with a different culture, sometimes even changing its original meaning. Each cultural environment gives the same ideology a different shade … The journey of ideas is an active process, at the end of this journey the idea may appear in a most surprisingly different incarnation” (L, 13). Thus, we must first understand the cultural, regional, and local differences if we are to “establish the specific goal for which a village, or a town is fighting” (L, 15). One entry begins with a title “Theory of Local Times,” another, “The Second Religion – Theme and Title of an Essay on Soccer in Latin America” (L, 17). He posed still another problem: “Word: the difference between the importance of the word with them and with us” (L, 19). Kapuściński began his stay in South America clinging to something like an ideological manifesto; he finished it with the seeds of anthropological and cultural studies essays. The moment was ready for the impressive fruits of this stay to be combined with the fruits of his experiences in Africa and Soviet Asia.

5

On His Own Account

The first important text heralding a new stage in Ryszard Kapuściński’s writing was a sketch of Che Guevara and Salvador Allende – “Which of them, the guerrilla leader or the reformist president, was right?” (Kultura, no. 1 [1974]) – more an essay than a work of reportage. In it, the author turned to South American themes he had not yet taken up, having been refreshed by a brief stay in Bolivia and by the experience – which he observed from a distance – of General Pinochet’s coup d’état of September 1973, during which President Allende died. In this text, which follows a question-and-answer format, Kapuściński takes up his old question about the two paths of the South American revolution, and in a manner quite unusual for a journalistic text, he explains them in both their ideological and political contexts. The differences between Che and Allende in ideology, approaches, visions of the future, and biographies are vividly exposed in order to make the similarity of the moments considered most important in their lives – that is, their moments of death – shine even more brightly. Che and Allende are connected by the fact that neither saved his own life when he had the chance to do so; each of them “consciously accept[ed] their death.” Che had twenty hours to save himself by agreeing to stand trial; he refused, choosing instead to await his execution. Allende had eight hours to use the airplane provided to him to fly into exile – he refused it, preferring to lead the defence of the Presidential Palace against Pinochet’s troops, with a machine gun in his hand and a mining helmet on his head. “There is some ruthless determination in the way Guevara and Allende die,” Kapuściński wrote, “some consciously chosen irreversibility, some crazy dignity … Both deaths are a manifestation, they are a challenge. This was a desire to publicly prove their point and willingness to pay the highest price for it without any hesitation” (Ch, 141–2).

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Allende personified the path of peaceful revolution on the continent, and his death reduced the importance of that path. Like Che, his path had ended in failure, and like Che, he had consciously sacrificed his life. So, again like Che, his death had profound symbolic importance. “They were both right,” in that their impact was similar. The writer saw this as a reflection of the “principle of moral honesty,” or “moral cleansing,” characteristic of the South American Left and explained by the maturation of its activists in a world that contradicted all their values: “It is a world of politics done for money, a world of unbridled demagogy, a world of murders and police terror, a world of wasteful and ruthless plutocracy, greedy bourgeoisie, cynical exploiters, shallow and deprived money-makers and girls who often change men.” It is impossible to negotiate with such a world: “I will lose or die, but nobody will say that I violated the rules of fighting, that I cheated, that I failed, that my hands are dirty” (Ch, 146). Kapuściński tried to embrace the universal, essential moral attitude that constituted a challenge to the existing reality – a challenge without hope of victory – and explain it in its sociocultural context. That essence was the human dignity that this reality insulted and that was an impossible dream in the present day. To take up this challenge, which was doomed to fail no matter which path was chosen, was both heroic and tragic, because in the conditions of South America, it meant accepting that one had to die and that one’s death must be included as a factor when calculating how to act, for only death would clearly manifest the values in the name of which the fight had been undertaken, and only death would testify to the vital importance of that fight. The author asks, “In their action, do we find a conscious creation of a pattern for future generations, for this world for which they are fighting and dying?” (Ch, 146–7). He leaves the answer to the reader. Why did this not entirely journalistic text, his first in two or three years, seem to herald a new quality in his work? Let us remember that it appeared at a time when he had again lost faith in revolution as well as confidence in the historiosophical perspective. Yet his loss of faith in revolution as a means to save the Third World did not diminish his ardent commitment to the fate of local communities – it was just that the contours of that commitment had changed, indeed sharply. He was no longer seeking an ideological community or trying to identify with a common vision for rebuilding the world. From now on, he would be seeking both a human and a literary solidarity with these lonely

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fighters, and focusing on the fate of those ordinary men who had been drawn into political conflicts, tossed between hope and despair, facing difficult choices or subjected to blind chance. His faith having been eroded in the possibility of communicating on the basis of a common idea, he had come to understand that the Other is truly different (and not simply as a result of inherited stereotypes) and that finding a new community would not be an easy matter, for it would require first-hand recognition of cultural difference – as evidenced by his first cultural observations and notes. His awareness of that challenge would only increase as he watched the societies of the Third World free themselves from superficial Europeanism, re-evaluate their own cultural traditions, and attempt to regain their lost historical identity. “I was in India last year,” he confessed in 1975. “Seventeen years ago, I was able to move freely with the English language; I read the local newspapers, listened to the radio. Now I have not turned on the radio at all: in the provinces, there are no programs in English, only in national languages.”1 Visible in his piece about Che and Allende is his exposition of dignity as a value that makes it possible to locate a community of goals between people who have chosen different paths of engagement – but also between them and those who must deal with the violence of history or social reality without taking up arms. That is the axis around which the new quality in Kapuściński’s writing would soon gather. Sympathy for other people’s dignity – as it is threatened, battered, and honourably defended – is an extremely capacious formula for understanding and solidarity across all borders. It is within that vein of thought that Kapuściński encountered a universal plane for rebuilding the community of the “human family.” It is also where he located the key to the diversity of world cultures. It is commonly accepted that human dignity is at the heart of each culture’s distinctiveness, and deciphering a particular culture in light of that principle enables one to penetrate deep into the unique ethos of the society that is encountered. Thus, if Kapuściński hoped to infect his readers with an attitude of solidarity with the inhabitants of distant regions of the globe, and make them aware that they shared the same issues, he would need to make other peoples’ dignity understandable, which meant translating one culture for another. This was not the end of the changes in Kapuściński’s writing that began with the piece about Che and Allende. Shifting readers’ attention to other societies’ destinies would bring mankind to the fore as

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the hero of his reportage, as well as change the way the author himself was present in the text. Instead of presenting himself as an expert or a spokesman for a particular camp, he would be a witness – sometimes a witness of the greatest victim – and bear the honour and the burden of ensuring that the victim’s message would not be lost. More an essay than a piece of reportage, his text about Che and Allende does not show all the consequences of this change of perspective, but it does indicate what is probably the most important of them: the writer had now placed himself as the keeper for the messages of those who, as they were dying, hoped to confirm the importance of the values for which they were dying. Testimony, an approach to writing derived from religious tradition, but popularized in the form of documentary and semi-documentary literature, born especially through the experience of the Second World War, was by then becoming a basic form of reportage. The eyewitness account had become a new genre for expressing human experience in the twentieth century. It had also established new criteria for credibility and authenticity. As early as 1947,2 Gustaw Herling-Grudziński had contrasted the account of a war participant as “full testimony of the war” with reportage understood as mere “testimony of presence.” Marek Miller, observing the craft of the most popular reporters of the late 1970s, heard this call from Ludwik Flaszen: “Not a report, but a testimony!”3 It seems that war correspondents today are specifically required to embrace testimony as an attitude.4 Yet it seems that except for Hanna Krall, whose reportage, thanks to conversations with Marek Edelman, underwent a change in the mid1970s, no one was inspired more than Kapuściński to embrace the attitude of testimony, nor did anyone else apply it so well. It renewed his need to fight for a better world, reshaped the way in which he demanded truth and justice for those murdered or rendered voiceless, and gave him a “higher” reason to write. His writing thereafter would have an intense moral message that sometimes made it possible to discern his sense of mission. Most importantly, it allowed him to open up about his personal experiences as a reporter, which he had long left out of his writing. After all, an account can only be personal and private if it is based on participation, or at least presence, in the events being described. The notion of an account is commonly associated with random and usually forced participation in the reported events, which means that accounts communicate partial and fragmentary knowledge. An eyewitness account does not oblige the author to undertake extensive

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interpretative tasks that require external distance. The strength of an eyewitness account lies in its authenticity – in the writer experiencing for himself the fate of those about whom he writes; that is what ensures its credibility and provides the moral right to reveal other people’s experiences. Was this not a situation practically created for Kapuściński, who had never been able to resist the opportunity to jump headlong toward the greatest dangers, simply to sample the fate of those about whom he was supposed to write? Hadn’t he long been trying to overcome the limitations of an observer, a reporter, a “professional witness”? How many times in the past had he allowed himself to be surprised, to become lost, to end up somewhere by accident, to see something completely extraordinary? Yet so far, his headlong adventures in Africa and South America had barely found their way into his reportage. Only now, going forward, would those adventures gain full cognitive value and consent to be revealed. Kapuściński’s new interests distanced him from utilitarian journalistic writing, especially anything related to correspondents’ work. That mode was now an obstacle to his ambitions, for it allowed only short visits to other countries. While he was running foreign desks, he had been burdened with time-consuming “material gathering” for almost daily dispatches and correspondence. He genuinely enjoyed that sort of work; he also respected it as something that readers needed, and he valued it for the opportunity to explore the world and “keep his finger on the pulse,” that is, follow the latest changes, events, and phenomena. It often provided him the satisfaction of a discoverer – the conqueror of the latest and most important news – and it was a constant stimulus for his passion for exploring and explaining the world. But if he hoped to fulfil at least some of his new plans, he would have to “unsubscribe” from at least some of his previous experiences and think about another activity. When he returned from South America in late 1972, at the age of forty, Kapuściński loosened his ties with pap while retaining a kind of permanent presence. He began teaching classes at the Faculty of Journalism of the University of Warsaw, inaugurating them with a surprising lecture on Che Guevara and the problems of the continent from which he had recently returned.5 In 1973, he developed links with the travel monthly Kontynenty. Finally, in January 1974, he started working for the Warsaw weekly Kultura (inaugurating his new home base with the text about Che and Allende) on the condition that he would still be able to contribute to pap . Janusz Roszkowski,

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pap’s editor-in-chief at the time, described Kapuściński’s duties as remaining in a “state of readiness.” “Whenever there was another fire focusing the world’s attention, Ryszard would go there as a pap envoy, immediately supplied by the agency with funds, visas, and letters of recommendation,” he recalled. “We gave him a free hand in drawing up and modifying trip plans.”6 The editorial office of Kultura also gave Kapuściński a lot of freedom. They only expected texts from him – cables and correspondence from places where he was travelling for pap. “He had special rights. He wasn’t some gobshite running around, sent into the field,”7 said Maciej Wierzyński, the then deputy editorin-chief of the magazine. During his time in Kontynenty, Kapuściński (as deputy editor-inchief) had yet another surprising encounter with representatives of the Interior Ministry. Those meetings should have been coming to an end, given that, when he returned home from his foreign posting, they had decided to leave him alone, which in ministerial jargon was referred to as “ending the case and transferring it to the archives” (note of 6 June 1972). The “decision to end the case” contained the ominous comment that “in the event of another trip abroad, the files from the archives will be taken for further development.” However, Kapuściński had no immediate plans for a longer journey, though in August 1973 he flew to India for a few days for a journalists’ congress. Yet the previous month (note from 17 July 1973), someone had been thinking about “resuming cooperation” with the writer. They visited him at the magazine headquarters and had a long conversation with him about the situation in the editorial office and in the Polish press in general – obviously not learning anything specific. They dropped by the office again in August, but luckily Kapuściński was flying to India at the time. It seems that they were browsing through and summarizing the history of their efforts with him to date in order to obtain something, and despite the negative results (the note of 14 August 1973 states: “During the cooperation, he showed a lot of willingness, but did not provide meaningful materials”), someone had devised further tasks for him. However, nothing would come of it. Kapuściński’s file would be enriched with only two more requests addressed to him by intermediaries: after his return from Angola in December 1975 (asking him to share information on his return – he did not answer), and in May 1977, with regard to an English journalist, Alice Berni, whom he had met in Angola (this request is confirmed by an unpleasant note written by an officer allegedly drawn up after an interview with the writer).

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So it can be said that this third, unexpected admonition from the “services” helped him finally free himself from their network.8 Perhaps it turned out that their arms were too short for him? That possibility is suggested by Krzysztof Mroziewicz, who stated that “when his colleagues, especially Ryszard Frelek, became prominent in the party – the secret police received an instruction ‘from on high’: ‘p*** off … away from Kapuściński.’”9 Frelek seemed to confirm this in a memoir published after the writer’s death: “In the days of Gierek – I was the head of the foreign department of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party at the time – I started to convince Rysiek to move to Kultura. A great weekly, the best, and I was friends with the editorin-chief Dominik Horodyński. He gladly accepted Rysio in 1974 and promised that he would find money for his trips.”10 It can probably also be assumed that Kapuściński himself understood that taking an important function in the editorial office exposed him to contact with the services to a degree no less than long-term trips abroad, and he rid himself of this as soon as he moved to Kultura as a staff reporter. At Kultura, he was able to arrange exactly what he needed at the time: the ability to travel around the world, maintain a connection with history as it was happening in places of conflict, upheaval, and revolution, and focus on longer texts in the periods between trips. Probably no less important, it also meant an opportunity to connect with readers in ways that only a large-circulation weekly could provide him and that Kapuściński recalled from his time providing African correspondence for Polityka. Why didn’t Polityka become that place again? When asked, the writer claimed11 that it was Kultura that gave him the opportunity to design his own job (though he had to maintain his association with pap ). At Polityka, he would have had to conform to the needs of the team there. Kapuściński, however, lost nothing through this change of editors. Those were good years for Kultura. Edited by Dominik Horodyński (formerly a correspondent in Rome and a reportage author), the magazine had just emerged from the fatal, “post-March” years at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s and the period of management by the notorious Janusz Wilhelmi, who died in a plane crash in 1978. They were good years for Kultura, especially because of the reportage provided in its pages by Stefan Kozicki, Andrzej Mularczyk, Józef Kuśmierek, Janusz Rolicki, and Edward Redliński, as well as by outstanding beginners: Joanna Siedlecka, Barbara Łopieńska, Ewa Szymańska, Teresa Torańska, and Mariusz Ziomecki, among others. These were the older and younger sides of national reportage, and Kapuściński fit perfectly

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into this environment as a star of foreign reportage. Many older readers continue to associate the author of The Emperor with the great titles on the front page of Kultura: “Trochę Bliskiego Wschodu” (A Bit of the Middle East), “Trochę Angoli” (A Bit of Angola), “Trochę Etiopii” (A Bit of Ethiopia). This new mode of work and travel turned out to be no less exhausting than the previous one. Kapuściński wrote about this period of his life: Pack the suitcase. Unpack it, pack it, unpack it, pack it: typewriter (Hermes Baby), passport (sa 323273), ticket, airport, stairs, airplane, fasten seat-belt, take off, unfasten seat-belt, flight, rocking, sun, stars, space … landing, earth, unfasten seat-belts, stairs, airport, immunization book, visa, customs, taxi, streets, houses, people, hotel, key, room, stuffiness, thirst, otherness, foreignness, loneliness, waiting, fatigue, life. (W, 198) Shortly after taking employment at Kultura, he made a brief trip to India, the country from which he had begun exploring the world. He then returned to South America for a few weeks (to Colombia), and then set off for the Middle East, which was still shaken by the 1973 War. There he visited a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon and the fedayeen troops fighting on the Golan Heights in Syria. In 1975, he found himself in Cyprus, shortly after the Turkish invasion and the establishment of the Turkish–Greek front, which would later harden into the border that exists to this day (visiting, among others things, the Greek refugee camp). Then in September he went to Angola for three months (where he witnessed several dramatic and dangerous events leading up to the country’s declaration of independence) and – on his way back – to Portugal. In 1976 and 1977, he seemed to have settled again in eastern Africa, especially Ethiopia; from there, he sent back correspondence about the revolutionary rule of Colonel Mengistu and the wars in Eritrea and Ogaden – but we can also read reports from “our special envoy” about Nigeria, Uganda, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Uganda, which he probably visited from Tanzania, which, as in his correspondent days, would be his somewhat permanent base during subsequent trips. The year 1979 was mainly about Iran, the Islamic Revolution, the overthrow of the Shah Reza Pahlavi, and the early days of Khomeini’s Islamic Republic. The exhausting pace of work and travel turned out to be highly beneficial for Kapuściński’s writing. Beginning in 1975, he prepared nearly

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five books in five years – Chrystus z karabinem na ramieniu (Christ with a Rifle on His Shoulder), Another Day of Life, The Soccer War, The Emperor, and the greater part of Shah of Shahs (which was printed in Kultura in 1979 with the title Katharsis). And he was planning at least two more: about the mechanism of political and social upheavals and about the zmp generation. Of course, one should not think that this eruption of creative possibilities was due solely to conditions more favourable to writing. Most important above all was that these were the conditions that made it easier to separate writing “for oneself ” – ambitious, creative, of the type that would soon be considered a new type of reportage – from utilitarian journalism. The very fact that he carried out the latter mainly during his trips, in the form of dispatches and correspondence, and the former, the “real” stuff, during breaks between trips, with books and excerpts from the world press at hand, is of great importance. Even so, we can assume that the frequency and variety of these new journeys contributed to the emancipation of what was now the main trope of his writing. They provided him with new journalistic adventures and with many opportunities to observe the changing world. They also allowed him to acquaint himself with new cultural and social incarnations of people who were defending their dignity under the most extreme conditions, in times of violence, loneliness, and abandonment. Those who fight for their dignity occupied a special place for Kapuściński, for they were fighting to change their own reality. His interest in such heroes stemmed from his earlier fascination with the myth of revolution and guerrilla war. Indeed, he gave them a special place by grouping texts he had devoted to them in a separate book, published in 1975. That book’s title is the same as one of his recent reportages for Kultura – Chrystus z karabinem na ramieniu (Christ with a Rifle on His Shoulder; no. 15 [1974]). Clearly, that book is intended to offer a fresh look at the figure of the combatant – presenting, as in his sketch of Che and Allende, the theme of death as a conscious sacrifice – and to link that figure unequivocally with South America, where in the late 1960s and early 1970s a revolutionary interpretation of the Church’s teachings – liberation theology – was born, and where it was not uncommon for clergy to engage in opposition and even partisan activities. Kapuściński was familiar with the figure of the Colombian priest Camil Torres, who lived among the most impoverished peasants and then, in a cassock and carrying a rifle, joined a partisan unit and went

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off to fight to his almost certain death. He knew that the priest’s sacrifice had inspired the famous painting by the Argentine artist Carlos Alonso, which depicts the figure of Christ with a rifle on his shoulder, in appearance and dress resembling a South American partisan. The author saw reproductions of that painting on university walls in mid1971, and the same image is reflected in the report’s title. At the time, Kapuściński paid little attention to liberation theology. If anything, he paid more to the bombastic speeches of South American bishops. Only now, on the cover of his book, did he display the emblem of partisan sacrifice, which had since been transformed into a cultural emblem. The writer now looked at the death of a fighter from the perspective of a victim and as a testimony – perhaps with the help of the Bible or Dostoyevsky12 – when he wanted the reader to grasp the tragic fate of faraway humans making their final choices. Why was it in the ideology of victimhood, which the writer said was characteristic of South American partisans, that he noticed most strongly the tragic fate of a human who challenges reality? First and foremost, because the meaning of a sacrifice (that is, whether it helps create a future) depends on how it is received – on whether it becomes a message, a binding testament. In the book’s flagship reportage, Kapuściński points to the immediate transformation of death into a story, into a “text,” and to the social and cultural determinants of the “text” that deprive it of the uniqueness it would need in order to change reality. Chrystus z karabinem na ramieniu presents the formation of the memory of several dozen participants in the Teoponte guerrilla band in Bolivia, composed mainly of students of the University of La Paz, most of whom died of starvation before they were completely wiped out. This may sound like the beginning of a great and powerful legend. So the author has us participate in a tribute to the “heroes from Teoponte,” attended by large numbers of students, professors, families of those killed (including the father of the unit commander, who lost his third son), delegations of miners, peasants, gold panners, legal and illegal political parties – in a word, society. Everyone is listening to a recording of the story (as told by one of the eight survivors) of the tragic massacre of Chato Peredo’s unit. The writer assures us that he listened to a tape provided for him by the rector several times in order to write it down precisely for readers. What follows are letters full of longing written by the unit commander, found in his backpack after his death and addressed to his young wife, who is present in the room (in mourning yet dressed coquettishly). These letters are also cited at

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length. The description of the ceremony is preceded by a description of the university building in which it takes place. The building reminds the writer of the buildings still standing after the Warsaw Uprising. The final event of the story is a demonstrative procession of the families of the dead to the General Staff ’s headquarters, where they demand that the bodies be handed over – unsuccessfully, as usual, the more so as the building is about to be targeted by yet another coup. In this story, devoid of any commentary, filled with citations, quotes, and crypto-quotes, and offering an objective, factual, inevitably ironic description of stock behaviour, we can observe how the truth of heroic sacrifices is sucked into ritualized forms of public life and tamed by a mentality that is fond of spectacles and yearns to participate in their performance. The ceremony as he describes it ends rather quickly, with the students rushing to the next demonstration, and the writer himself must now occupy himself with the events accompanying the military coup. The victims of another futile attempt to launch a guerrilla war will most likely join the victims of previous attempts in collective memory. In that memory, they will have to compete with hundreds of dying miners who are just as young as the students … and this recasting of death as routine and commonplace – different from the recognized, festive forms of accepting death – becomes perhaps the main obstacle along the way to making the sacrifice of life a binding message. The deaths of young people, which are now everyday occurrences, the celebration of which becomes an element of political folklore, have little chance of becoming anything more than personal gestures of a rejection of degrading reality. Kapuściński, who tries to make us understand the tragedy of all those who challenge reality, also tries to make us aware of the most important difference between “them” and “us”: our differently shaped cultural understandings of the border between life and death. His interlocutor, the rector of the university, says, among other things: “In Europe, people die in wars, and death takes millions of them at a time, but it is the harvest of only one season. Here, death has a different face. Even though it also takes millions of people, it blends into everyday reality. We are accustomed to it because it is with us always and everywhere; it is commonplace, simple and ordinary, as if it started developing in the life of every single one of us a long time ago” (Ch, 60). Together with two new South American texts, Kapuściński placed three others, written back in his days as a correspondent, which seem to indicate that a different understanding of death was now key to his understanding of the South American political and cultural exoticism

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and central to explaining the tragedy of the struggle to dignify the sacrifice of one’s life for the cause. The report we discussed earlier about Karl von Spreti, “Śmierć ambasadora” (Death of the Ambassador), is presented in this book, devoid of the most shocking political references; here it can be read as a confrontation between the world’s indifference to, if not consent to, the daily murders by Guatemalan authorities of their own citizens, on the one hand, and the international outcry over the death of a German diplomat, on the other. “Człowiek boi się człowieka” – a brief description of terror in the Dominican Republic – can be understood as a bitterly ironic tale about the popularization of death through the practice of political murders. The editor of a popular Mexican newspaper complains that state authorities have stripped away the best subjects from his paper because the reader is already bored with even the most garish descriptions of sudden death. And the books ends with a shockingly concise and objective account of how to prevent a partisan’s death from becoming influential by exploiting the Latin fascination with sport and robbing death of its dignity by turning it into a tv presentation (“Victoriano Gomez przed kamerami tv ”). •

In deciphering all the circumstances of the tragic fate of the South American guerrilla, Kapuściński was shaping a universal model of dedication and commitment, which he would test in other situations. He would find a very similar understanding of struggle as an opportunity to sacrifice one’s life among the Palestinian fedayeen he met in the Middle East when he went there shortly after the Israeli–Arab War of October 1973. At that time, the fedayeen, or Palestinian warriors, had a choice between two paths: they could fight a guerrilla action on Israeli territory, which, because of that state’s exceptionally strong defences, was suicidal (“You can kill at the cost of your own death”), or they could engage in routine hostage-taking and make impossible demands, which would usually lead to being blown up together with the hostages during their rescue – in effect, a form of suicide. Sacrificing one’s life in either way provides no assurance that it will have any impact. At best, it may maintain the world’s interest in the Palestinian problem, and even that is unpredictable because it depends in part on how strongly Israel retaliates. It will not untie the tragic Palestinian– Israeli knot, but it will assuredly add further entries to the bloody book of harms and victims in the history of Palestine and Israel.

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Yet every young Palestinian, especially one who was raised in a refugee camp, wants to become a fedayeen. In the Palestinian–Israeli conflict, the reality they face is one in which no dignity is possible for them, only humiliation. The one million Palestinians (that is half their population!), most of them of peasant stock, have for decades been hounded from place to place and from country to country, sometimes repeatedly. Invariably, their previous lives had been linked to the family village, a farm, a house with a garden. Kapuściński suggests that one need only familiarize oneself with the topography of Palestinian camps – many of whose streets are named after villages or districts – and listen to how the people introduce themselves – for example, “Ahmed Shoury from Bet Shemesh, 25 kilometres from Jerusalem” – to understand that whatever the sacrifice, they will continue to embrace the idea of return, for without that idea, they would be nothing. “A Palestinian, driven out of his village, feels stripped of everything, naked, degraded, meaningless … Ahmed wants to emphasize … that he has a definite place on earth and that after regaining this place – he will regain his entire personality” (Ch, 15). A Palestinian’s dignity has a different source from that of a South American rebel; even so, it can evoke a similar sense of human solidarity, for it taps into basic and commonly understood values. It seemed that the editors at Kultura were a little afraid that this thread of solidarity the writer pointed to would be taken as political bias. It also seems that they would have preferred a less “philosophical” approach, for they prefaced the writer’s series “Trochę Bliskiego Wschodu” (A Bit of the Middle East) with this careful comment: “The text printed today presents the situation through the eyes of one of the parties to the drama of this region of the world. In the following episodes, the author will deal with the broader political aspects of the Middle East conflict and the possibilities of peaceful solutions.”13 But Kapuściński no longer wanted to address present-day politics in the texts he was writing “for himself.” He might provide instead a short lesson on the history and geography of the region, intertwined with the story of bathing in Jordan with the Palestinian Zouhdi (“Kain i Abel” [Cain and Abel]), or updating the biblical characterization of Palestine as a cursed land. In Zouhdi’s uncle’s secluded inn in “Droga krzyżowa” (The Way of the Cross), where various roads to peace are discussed, the writer presents the dispute as literature, in such a way as to present not just various opinions but also various trends in Palestinian life, as evidenced by the diversity of the speakers.14 The author shows us that not

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all Palestinians are fedayeen, and not all are camp dwellers: there are peaceful people and intellectuals among them, merchants and diplomats, emigrants and residents of Jerusalem. But he doesn’t try to reach them to find out their real motivations (he disposes of them rather peremptorily, with rather stereotypical imagery). What really interests him are people who risk their lives, putting everything on the line – the lonely and tragic heroes. In “Bitwa o Wzgórza Golan” (Battle for the Golan Heights), the author encounters a mysterious, nameless fedayeen. He is a member of his group’s command, recognizable in his “Palestinian-ness” because when he meets the writer, he offers him an apple, in accordance with age-old local custom. This man is no mere bomb-thrower, supposedly so characteristic of the Palestinian struggle. Rather, he represents those militants who are battling a standing army (in this case, the Syrian one), and this confronts the writer with the tragedy of a man participating in an armed conflict. Such a soldier is alone in the face of death, in the sense that the front where he operates is separate from the social base, and solidarity is lacking between the Arab nations and the people who are fighting in their name. This isolation can lead to defeat in battle: “A soldier cannot be alone, he will never tolerate it if he feels like a convict … He must feel that what he is doing is needed by someone, that it is important for someone, that someone is looking to him and someone is helping him, is with him. Otherwise, the soldier will drop everything and go home” (Ch, 49). Kapuściński’s interlocutor certainly has not succumbed to this temptation: he has participated in frigid temperatures in murderous battles for the summit of Mount Hermon, the height of which made it seem “as if they were fighting on another, foreign planet” (Ch. 46–7). He remains faithful to the cause despite the harshest conditions and no prospect of victory. Chrystus z karabinem na ramieniu closes with a story that contradicts the view that Kapuściński at that time was only interested in those who were sacrificing their lives in vain. “Pierwszy strzał za Mozambik” (First Shot for Mozambique) is his response to the independence of that Portuguese colony (one of the last European colonies in Africa) under its first prime minister, Joaquim Chissano – another acquaintance from the heroic early 1960s in Dar es Salaam. The story reads like a commentary for a photograph showing two recent enemies – a Portuguese soldier and a frelimo (Mozambique Liberation Front) partisan – during a joint patrol:

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I look at these two young people and see that the soldier is wearing shoes, but the partisan is wearing shoes as well! And then I thought that there are great things in the world and one such great thing is that after years of walking barefoot, there comes a day when a man can put on his shoes and not be afraid to leave traces on the ground. (Ch, 163) Despite the surprisingly optimistic ending to the story, it is not fundamentally different from the others. The writer mentions Mozambique’s independence with satisfaction, but this is only a pretext for remembering those who sacrificed their lives in the past: the founder of frelimo , presidential candidate Eduard Mondlane, killed in an attack, and Albert Joaquim Chipande of Cabo Delgado province, a participant in the first guerrilla skirmish. Kapuściński had once written about the guerrillas’ beginnings; now he can recount their story it in its entirety. The mystery of this book’s optimistic finale lies in part in the amazing observation that in this case, the sacrifice of both fighters – the political leader and the partisan – was not in vain. By putting on shoes, the Mozambican guerrilla shows us that he has regained his dignity, something the writer’s Palestinian and South American heroes can only dream of. During the guerrilla campaign, he had to walk barefoot, for boots in this country were worn only by Portuguese soldiers, and wearing boots would have been seen as tantamount to collusion. And it is possible to see something more in this sign: Mozambique had been waiting for independence for five hundred years, its sister colony Angola about as long, and their independence heralded the end of colonialism in Africa – perhaps a marker of the end of the first stage of decolonization, of Third World peoples reacquiring an elementary sense of dignity through emancipation. As Kapuściński noted in an article from his youth, “Metryka naszego pokolenia,” Asia, Africa and South America “are beginning to wear shoes.”15 The tragically heroic fighters from Mozambique, and especially Angola in 1975 (whose story would soon fill the pages of Another Day of Life), are among the last of the heroes of this kind in Kapuściński’s prose. Not because armed conflicts had ended, but because the time of guerrilla insurgencies, whose participants could only be assigned noble motives, had probably ended. The Angolan experience was the writer’s farewell to these men, but not quite: that comes a little later, at the end of his Ogaden report, which never made it into a book: “Now, in Warsaw, when I read reports from the battlefront in Ogaden,

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I wonder what happened to that war? To a good war of a few students, which had to give way to the colonels’ bloody war. Where did they get the money for guns if there was none for flour and salt? Where did the fuel for the tanks come from?”16 These nostalgic recollections concern the 1963 war, but he is viewing them through the prism of 1977, the time of regular armies, heavy military equipment, international “aid,” and external financing. Parting with the figure of the partisan did not mean abandoning the historical problem that figure represented; rather, it meant seeking another perspective from which to approach the same problem. This new perspective was not that of someone who chooses a position and takes up arms for the sake of helping create history, but that of someone who defends himself against the violence of history by the means available to him. Most probably, Kapuściński strongly felt this change in cognitive perspective and did not try to connect it to what he had witnessed in the past. Was it merely a coincidence that in his most “South American” book, Chrystus z karabinem na ramieniu, there is no Soccer War, his most “South American” text, which was printed instead in Kultura? His text about the Soccer War clearly displays his new perspective, for consciously or not, it takes a stance against the “revolutionization” of history. At the time, Kapuściński saw that war as one that had been unleashed to prevent the spread of the revolutionary idea of land reform of the sort that had been launched in Honduras. Now he adds that Honduras’s land reform had been designed in such a way as not to threaten either the interests of the latifundistas or the United Fruit Company; instead, it was meant to take land from poor immigrants from neighbouring El Salvador. Their illegal presence had previously been tolerated (because they were managing ownerless lands); the intention now was to expel them from Honduras, but El Salvador did not want them back. The social policies of the two countries were similar in this sense, but at the same time, there was no serious idea behind the outbreak of this war, no reason that could justify the inevitable sacrifices. It broke out as a natural extension of the confrontation between the two hysterical patriotisms that had accompanied a World Cup qualifying match; it was the bloody culmination of a football spectacle, which, as we know, serves as a kind of South American religious rite. And, moreover, it drew the world’s attention. “Both governments,” the author concludes, “are satisfied: for several days Honduras and El Salvador occupied the front pages of the world press and were the

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object of interest and concern. The only chance small countries from the Third World have of evoking a lively international interest is when they decide to shed blood. This is a sad truth, but so it is” (W, 184). Apart from the author himself, the hero of The Soccer War is someone who by no stretch can be called a partisan. As a companion in his adventures, Kapuściński takes a man in whose interests this war is supposedly being fought: a poor Honduran who has been rapidly mobilized for battle but who does not know what he is participating in, or why, and who only wants to survive without getting shot. He could as easily have been a poor rural Salvadoran; after death they would not differ in any way. But he is the only character who gives this grotesque war a measurable meaning. On his own initiative, he has procured so many pairs of military boots that, after exchanging them for children’s footwear, he can shod his entire, barefoot family. So in the end he has won this war, for he has enabled some fragment of the Third World to walk in shoes. The problem is that these shoes have been taken from the feet of fallen comrades. Is this how restored dignity is meant to look? •

This was not the only time that Kapuściński returned to earlier themes. It was as if he wanted to “reread” old events or “read” their continuations, or verify his current image of the world while finding new points of view. During the oau summit in Uganda in July 1975, he witnessed the overthrow of the president of Nigeria, Yakubu Gowon, whose rise to power (after he had murdered his fellow terrorists in January 1965) as a thirty-two-year-old colonel he had watched ten years earlier. At that time, the writer had reconstructed the events of 1965 (in “Anatomia zamachu stanu” [Anatomy of a Coup d’État]) day by day and hour by hour, because a fascinating story was emerging from those events. Now, in 1975, he was content to make the general observation that the new Nigerian president, General Muhammed, signified that Islamic civilization was on the rise in Africa. What interested him more was to watch a president being humiliated by losing his office in the middle of an international meeting. How could he save his dignity? That question fascinated Kapuściński and compelled him to observe Gowon’s behaviour hour by hour. Once, in Nigeria, he had found associations with Shakespeare’s historical chronicles; now he was finding associations with the ancient concept and tragedy of fate: “It is a situation like in a Greek tragedy, where everything is heading towards

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inevitable fate, but the protagonists are powerless in the face of fate, unable to oppose it and helplessly play their assigned roles to the end.”17 Especially moving for Kapuściński was his return after a dozen or so years to Ogaden – a disputed, desert province between Ethiopia and Somalia. On his first visit, he had travelled with Somali soldiers, risking his life, fearing an attack by Ethiopians; now he did so in the cab of an Ethiopian military tanker, fearing Somali soldiers and mines and, even more, exposure to scorpion venom and the searing desert sun. At that moment, the positions of the two clashing sides were of no consequence to him; at most, he was afraid of being taken as an enemy by one of them: “I had nothing against either nation, but circumstances had forced me to take sides in that conflict – first one side and now the other” (W, 224). The two sides’ historical and political justifications lost any sense when placed in confrontation with another war that was being waged by Somali nomads in the same region and for whom the war between states was of no importance. What was this war? It was being fought in a rainless desert, one without pastures or water; it did not want to end, and it could not be stopped despite terrible defeats, real destruction. Was it, perhaps, a war against fate for the right to be oneself, for one’s own identity? It was that last war that Kapuściński addressed, in the manner of a courtly song: First the sheep fell, and later the goats. Then the children began to die, and later the asses fell. Next, the women died. Anyone who comes across a tea-kettle or a pot while walking will find the remains of the woman nearby. Next, the camels fell. They – these four thirty-year-old elders – kept going. Or rather, at the beginning there were more than a dozen of them, but the others gradually dropped away, dying of thirst and exhaustion. These four, as well, finally ran out of strength. They lay in the sun, unable to take a single step. (W, 225–6) Kapuściński met these four survivors as they lay dying in a camp for drought victims, where he learned that they had been saving corn that had been distributed to them to buy a camel and return “to their world,” to the desert from which, by merest chance, they had been rescued. Of course, revisiting the old threads of one’s writing was not a way to verify one’s previous attitude toward history. People also engage in wars that do not reset the order of historical events, and such wars are fought against or alongside the official ones. But the revisiting he

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conducted makes it easier to see what now interested him, which manifested itself in his accounts of places where he found himself for the first time. Perhaps there is no better example of this than his report from Cyprus, which he visited for the first time shortly after the surprise Turkish invasion in 1975, which had led to the permanent division of the island into Greek and Turkish zones. Cyprus had freed itself from Britain only a dozen years earlier. Now, Kapuściński penetrated both sides of the front (crossing to the Turkish side illegally). He visited the trenches and met with the island’s president, Archbishop Makarios, at his headquarters. His report includes two powerful images: the first is of a Greek refugee camp, the second of a disorderly night shooting involving all types of weapons sparked by an accidental, hysterical shot fired by a tired soldier, which likely summarized the meaning of this whole war. In a three-episode report in Kultura,18 the discussion of Cyprus’s historical and political context appears only in episode three, and in the book edition of The Soccer War, it completely disappears. His Cypriot reportage is primarily about the inhabitants of a camp for peasant refugees, who have been deprived overnight of their place on earth. They do not know what the next day will bring, and they demand everything from the world – news about those who are lost, compensation for wrongs, opportunities to return – even while being offered, at most, basic humanitarian aid and the possibility of engaging in ongoing protests, to which our author is also drawn. But this is not simply a text about just another camp in a different place. His response to this crowd that is so hungry for consolation and hope is simply to tell them, and the reader, in simple, elementary words, that the fate of a refugee is a universal sign of the fate of a human of the twentieth century, oppressed by the shifting vagaries of history: “There are always dark clouds and we can never know where and when these clouds will produce a deluge. You are this time victims of the deluge. The deluge on Cyprus has taken the form of an armed invasion: a foreign army has seized your villages” (W, 207–8). This is the fate of men humiliated by idleness – “What could this man have been yesterday? A sower in the spring, a harvester in the fall, the lord of himself all year round. And today? A refugee, with a bowl in his hand, queueing for soup” (W, 206) – and women, who have been deprived of the raison d’être of a house and who struggle to replicate that house in a shabby tent. These people find it impossible to predict the future, for it depends on the hidden games of great political forces and whatever strength one can find to protect one’s own dignity and humanity. In the Greek zone,

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Kapuściński finds a sign of hope in someone resembling the then universally recognizable Zorba the Greek – the protagonist of the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, later made into a film by Michael Cacoyannis: “I would like to have him here on the stand … Let him say how a man should accept defeat, what he should be in defeat” (W, 219).19 From Allende to the anonymous “wiry peasant with his head held high,” picked out from the crowd of peasant refugees, the writer searched for members of his “human family” and found them on three continents, in various existential and sociocultural situations. Despite this diversity, Kapuściński’s reports in the 1970s are extremely homogeneous. They are, of course, linked by a common message – the awakening of solidarity with those who do not give in to defeat and who defend their own dignity, or the dignity of the cause they serve, at any cost – but the author himself begins to knead them together more and more clearly, saturating his texts with his own presence and personality. He appears in them as a witness proclaiming the truth of everyone who has no one, in order to pass on their messages, because testimony must be personal to be credible. Kapuściński sometimes appears quite openly in the role and mission of the witness. Thus, he ends his report on the fedayeen in this way: “I am rewriting these names for posterity because maybe these boys are already dead” (Ch, 20). He attaches great importance to names and places that we would not have known without him, for example, in his South American reports, in the recollections of a Mozambican partisan, and in the quoted voices – from letters, recordings, written accounts – of those who have already disappeared. However, his way of participating in the events he tells about is probably more important for the credibility of his testimony. Kapuściński tried more and more clearly to present his observations as non-journalistic, natural, and appropriate to the environment in which he had found himself. It was important not to be a journalist; indeed, he strove to abandon that role so as to personally experience the fate of those he was writing about. This happened twice in The Soccer War. Kapuściński was the only foreign journalist in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, when the first Salvadoran bomb, which started the war, fell on that city in the evening. He managed to reach the post office and send a telegram, then he got lost in a darkened, silent, depopulated city (it was already forbidden to leave the house at night) that was completely unknown to him. He knocked over a tin garbage can, which rolled down the sloping

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street for a long time. He panicked, ran away, banged his head, hid himself in a recess in a wall, and waited until morning, shaking with fear that the noise he had made would cause an enemy invasion or cause him to be suspected of sabotage, for he would then face a military court. He barely described the reaction of the city, which had been thrown into panic by the sudden raid – instead, he depicted his own fear, which came from absorbing the atmosphere of the night, and this made him an involuntary participant in panic-stricken behaviour and all too ready to exaggerate dangers. The same would happen during a collective journalistic visit to the front, which had been so badly organized that they ended up either where nothing was happening or in a place of live fire where each participant had to save himself. It was in this situation, while escaping, dodging bullets, crawling, becoming a forced combatant, that the writer met the protagonist of his report, who was gathering shoes for his family. Reporters, especially so-called war reporters, often through necessity become participants in the events they describe, later emphasizing that participation for the sake of the boosting their credibility. With Kapuściński, however, we have something more: an accidental, unexpected experience does not so much broaden his journalistic participation as hurl him from it, into some other kind of participation that becomes the real subject of the report. This happens in the Middle East when Kapuściński is drawn into a conversation by the friendly gesture of a fedayeen in a hotel elevator, and again later when a Jordanian soldier interrupts his bathing (due to the threat of mines). That man takes him on a trip to the south, thus generating a debate about Palestine. Kapuściński’s desire to dive deep into other people’s fates whenever he can is also evident, perhaps especially so, in his account of the aforementioned trip to the Ethiopian–Somali borderlands. Both the place and the topic of that reportage emerged from travelling improvisation: I had flown from Addis Ababa at the last moment, without any certainty I would reach Ogaden – a province closed to foreigners … I met the boy named Marcos in the airplane … I thought that if I stuck close to Marcos, he would pull me through all the checkpoints. To buy my way into his favour, I helped him to carry the box full of pesticide. In general, I behaved as if I’d been assigned to him officially. (W, 218)

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Luck would have it that this pesticide was intended to fight corn pests in a camp for starving Somalis. And this is how the writer discovered perhaps the most poignant example of those beaten by life, fighting in the most difficult conditions, on their own, to save human dignity as they understand it. Falling out of the role of a journalist, a professional witness, Kapuściński revealed more and more of himself that was not journalistic, but “human” – personally experienced, written into his biography and also into the generational, social, national narrative. This made it easier for him to enter someone else’s experience. It also gave him the competence to understand other people’s fates and participate in them, if only briefly. As he most often dealt with people who were in situations of extreme danger related to war or some other bloody conflict, this sphere of his own experiences – personal and specifically Polish – was easily activated. He had alluded to the landscape of post-Uprising Warsaw in Chrystus z karabinem na ramieniu (Christ with a Rifle on His Shoulder), and both there and in the Middle Eastern reports we find comparisons of “their” and “our” wars, “their” and “our” migrations. It is rare, however, for him to use these references as a backdrop or plane of reference to help the reader understand historical differences and similarities. In his writings, his own memories of war – or more broadly, of Polish history as he himself experienced and remembered it – usually appear in reaction to what he is participating in, sometimes as part of an eloquent search for approval from the people he intends to write about, as a means to establish his competence to speak about his subjects’ experiences. It is through the true or invented speeches that Kapuściński delivers in his contemporary reports to his interlocutors and listeners that we begin to grasp the nature, meaning, and durability of his own wartime experiences. Thus he told a fedayeen: In my country, the war didn’t miss anyone, it went through every house, hit every door with a gunstock … The war hurt everyone, and those who survived cannot heal. Someone who has survived a great war is different from someone who has not survived any war. These are two different species of people. They will never find a common language because you can’t really describe war, you can’t share it, you can’t tell anyone – take some of my war. Everyone has to live with their war to the end. (Ch, 47–8) And speaking at a rally, he declared:

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The roads of my country have been trod upon by millions of refugees, and in every great war my country has lost everything. I myself have been a refugee and I know what it means to have nothing, to wander into the unknown and wait for history to utter a kind word. (W, 208) Compared to his earlier references to war – for example, in The Polish Bush – we are dealing here with a clear individualization, with a confession about his own memory and personal experience. We can observe a similar phenomenon in relation to his experience of the ztp generation, which for the first time the writer places against the background of his Pińsk origins, as he explains his “revolutionary” enthusiasm for a leap into the future, as well as his understanding of the processes and difficulties of “leaping epochs” in the Third World.20 His early memories of Pińsk and Polesie resemble a biographical key explaining his interest in other regions, still living in their own historical epochs; they are a means to express his own kind of competence in the field, be it in Africa or South America. Thus, in Kapuściński’s writing, a distinct kind of “privatization” was taking place – not only in his way of talking about the present world, but also in his cognitive perspective and in his justification of the moralistic message that had replaced all his previous missions. An impressive culmination of this process, and of other explorations from the 1970s, is found in two very different books – Another Day of Life and The Soccer War – in which he attempted to verify his achievements to date in the form of a selection of reportages. •

Another Day of Life is about his journey to Angola, where the echoes of the Portuguese “Carnation Revolution” of 1974 had just been heard. This military coup was supposed to fundamentally change the face of the oldest colonial empire in Africa.21 The new Portuguese government hoped to reach an agreement quickly with representatives of the liberation movements. This would not be easy – the quarrelling parties wanted to fight each other as much as they wanted to defeat the occupier. For fourteen years, there had been ongoing guerrilla warfare among three political and military forces: the mpla (Agostinho Neto), the fnla (Holden Roberto), and unita , a party founded in 1966 by former Foreign Minister Jonas Savimbi. On 15 January 1975 the Alvor

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Agreement was signed, under which the Portuguese and the three liberation movements formed a provisional coalition government. It was then announced that Angola would gain independence on 11 November 1975. Unfortunately, soon after, the parties split and armed riots erupted. In mid-1975, pap decided to send its own correspondent to Luanda. The trip involved considerable risk, so it was difficult to find someone willing to go. Kapuściński went. It is understandable that the Angolan events caught his attention. After all, they were the last stage of decolonization; they were the finale of the new Africa’s birth, whose beginnings he had observed while in his twenties as a pap correspondent. The witness to the birth of a new Africa simply couldn’t miss such an opportunity; he had to see the final collapse of European colonialism with his own eyes. The possibility of engaging in one of the last national liberation guerrilla wars, illuminated by the light of his old belief in the African revolution, was probably also significant. The expedition to southwestern Africa was one of the most difficult he ever conducted. Leaving Lisbon, Kapuściński expected the worst: I arrived in Angola with a conviction that I wouldn’t come back, that I wouldn’t leave that place alive. It was one of those conscious departures to death. We went to a military base and got on the last plane that flew to Luanda. The secretaries of the head of aviation were crying terribly and pleading – “Ricardo, don’t go.” Mirek [Mirosław Ikonowicz, then pap correspondent in Lisbon] asked me if I wanted to withdraw. “No – I told him – I’m going! Whatever happens, happens!” But I flew with my heart in my mouth. We set off at night, landed at dawn. There was still tension, fear of being shot down. I looked out the plane’s window, expecting to see soldiers, and saw a bunch of children in uniforms going to school with school bags. I breathed a sigh of relief!22 Despite that optimistic sight, the situation on the ground allowed no illusions. It soon turned out that his fear of losing his life was not exaggerated. Kapuściński described Luanda, where there was feverish bustle – wooden boxes were being built in a nervous rush, and the fleeing Portuguese were packing all their belongings into them. Hundreds of these crates were being loaded onto ships departing for South Africa, Portugal, and Brazil. The depopulated city now became a trap for citizens of the Soviet Union, Poland, and Hungary, all of whom

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were considered guilty of starting the civil war. The people of Luanda were being called upon to murder the intruders “who commanded the mpla units and were the cause of the whole war and all the misfortunes that had befallen the distressed nation” (J, 7). It was September 1975. Kapuściński said he was then the only man from Eastern Europe in the whole of Angola. The next threats he faced were waiting at the front. The next chapter of the book is a story about dramatic skirmishes with death, fragile victories, and tragic farewells, the death of an anonymous person and the death of a friend. The climax of this chapter is his description of a daring trip to a facility 400 kilometres to the south to deliver supplies. The journey takes place in dramatic circumstances: they are driving a dilapidated truck on a road surrounded by enemy forces. No convoy has travelled it for a month – any that have tried have been ambushed. The heroes see burned cars and charred human remains by the road. But it is no longer possible to turn back, to escape, to avoid it. This is a journey to the African heart of darkness. Kapuściński is unable to find words to describe his terrifying experiences. Instead, he reaches into his shirt pocket for a cigarette and finds that his packet of “Radomskie extra-strongs” has transformed itself into wet, smelly hay. After describing the frontline events, he returns to the topic of Luanda, where the last of the fighting is continuing. The formal proclamation of independence will soon follow. However, the reporter, exhausted by his wartime experiences, is no longer able to enjoy the victory. He sends a message to Poland: “My money ran out long ago and I am barely alive. It is more or less clear what will happen, which is that the Angolans will win, but it is going to take a while and I am on my last legs. So I ask you to give me permission to return home” (J, 126). His last days in Luanda are particularly difficult for him – he is exhausted by his intense war experiences and feels lost and terribly lonely, but also, above all, disillusioned. Let us recall that he went to Luanda as a pap correspondent to observe the activities of the Sovietbacked mpla . He was friends with the heroes of this group, and he sympathized with their struggle. Even in the first pages of the book, there is a trace of this fascination: he uses a distinct military style, referring to the opposing side as hostile, writing about the slaughter of communists and the aggression of enemies. In the ranks of the mpla , he finds heroes worthy of Conrad’s pen – young, brave, dedicated fighters for the cause: the young Carlotta and the heroic Commandante

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Farrusco, who has left his several-month-old son at home and gone to the front and is ready to die … In a nutshell, the mpla is “all sixteen and eighteen-year-olds, our high school students, our [Warsaw] uprising.” On the other side are fnla soldiers, who practise cannibalism. Their leader, Holden Roberto Alvaro, is a nepotistic careerist. Their direct antagonist is Agostinho Neto, the head of the mpla , a doctor and poet who has been drawn into this war as if by accident. Kapuściński writes about him: “A wall of books in his cramped office forms a better background for this figure than a public rostrum (though he is an excellent speaker)” (J, 128). This attitude changes after he returns from the front. The reporter is there handed a mysterious piece of paper with a telephone number written on it. Kapuściński has a strange telephone conversation – first in Portuguese, then in Spanish. He quickly recognizes the interlocutor’s Cuban accent and – as it soon turns out – incorrectly assumes that he is a representative of the Latin press. But when he asks for the man’s identity, he is told, “Man, don’t ask too much, because whoever asks too much gets too much of an answer … We’ll see you in your room … We’ll be there in an hour” (J, 88). Shortly after, two men visit him. It turns out they are instructors from Cuba. Kapuściński is surprised – “This was something new to me – I didn’t know there were Cuban instructors in Angola” (J, 88). The arrivals ask about the situation at the front, and he gives them information that may change the outcome of this war – the regular South African army had entered Angola. The Cubans disappear as imperceptibly as they have appeared – “In a dark side street stood a covered Jeep, new, with no licence plates. The hand of someone sitting inside opened the door” (J, 89). Two weeks after this meeting, on 5 November, Cuban troops begin to land, and this tips the scales in favour of the Communist mpla , although it does not bring about an actual end to the fighting (which will continue for twenty more years). Kapuściński also describes the moment of the declaration of independence. On 11 November, shortly after midnight, people gather in one of the squares and the People’s Republic of Angola is proclaimed to them. Future president Agostinho Neto speaks; after a while, the lights go out, the soldiers fire chaotically to cheers, the crowd comes alive for a moment, and finally, everyone goes home. One of the reporter’s friends then despairingly says: “If this is what independence is like, I’ll blow my brains out” (J, 117). Once again, the spontaneous liberation movement has rolled out in a top-down manner, as a calculated play of interests in which African

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states serve as the arena for an ideological war waged by great powers. Kapuściński is reminded once again that revolution always devours its own children and that it never leads to “New Time, Absolute Beginning, Total Youth,” though it always deludes itself that it does.23 The murderous trip to Angola turns out to be a difficult school for him, and he returns from it disappointed and resigned. Yet he maintains a fragile hope that humanity has not been reduced to the realm of politics. That is why, in saying goodbye to the departing Portuguese soldiers, who to date have been on the other side of the barricades, he writes that “there is some kind of interpersonal solidarity that should not be destroyed through dry political causes” (J, 116).24 Another Day of Life has all the features of a liminal work. Kapuściński’s commentary from Angola is somewhat uneven; it has no clear dominant key, and the literary turn in his writing is just beginning to show itself. The book is written from two sharply delineated yet independent perspectives – in the first, he describes reality, taking the same approach as in his earlier texts, whereas the second is a harbinger of a new approach. These two perspectives alternate in Another Day of Life. The chapter titled “Scenes from the Front” fits almost perfectly the type of literary production we know from Christ with a Rifle on His Shoulder. This similarity is especially visible in the selection of heroes – young in spirit, full of ideological optimism, sincerely committed to the idea of revolution. The other two chapters – “We’re Closing Down the City” and “Telegrams” – are a completely different record of reality. This difference arises from the reporter’s new conviction that his own experiences require literary processing. Thus, the first chapter is an elaborate metaphor for the end of colonialism, and the third is a literary description of an individual lost in history. After the book from Angola, which would be the last in which he recorded the relative homeostasis between two different creative perspectives, the idea of literary contact with reality would come to dominate this writing. “Scenes from the Front” amounts to a funeral oration for fighters who sacrifice their lives in vain. It presents these heroes battling against history to the very end. These tragic characters were aware that they were alone in their mission, but they had no choice except to stand heroically by their values. Among these fighters, two deserve special attention – the already mentioned Carlotta, and Comandante Farrusco. Carlotta, a charming twenty-year-old, was to escort a team of journalists to the front. Young as she was, her military courage was already shrouded in legend. Kapuściński remembered her as a

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beautiful, sensible person who felt a strong sense of responsibility for her companions. In the middle of the Angolan hell through which she guided her charges, her figure must have evoked the image of Dante’s heavenly guide. Her presence was soothing. At times, she made a dangerous trip to the front resemble a Saturday trip out of town – men filmed her, courted her, took her picture. Carlotta died right after saying goodbye to the team of journalists, having organized their safe departure. “But Carlotta knew this war better than we did,” the author concludes. “She knew that dusk, the customary time for attack, was approaching” (J, 58). As the reporter continued his journey, he met another young fighter, Comandante Farrusco, the son of a Portuguese peasant. He had once fought as a commando, but when the civil war among the mpla , the fnla, and unita broke out in 1975, he decided to join the mpla, a left-wing group led by Agostinho Neto. He organized a detachment, rose to important positions, and confidently commanded his people. Assisting a reporter on a perilous journey to Lubango, Farrusco was excited to see his infant son. However, he did not expect to watch him grow up – he was ready to die, and over the roar of the vehicle’s engine, he shouted to the reporter in broken sentences: “I think they are going to kill me … But you know … I’m not afraid, listen, I don’t feel any fear” (J, 77). The gallery of extraordinary figures ends with an eighty-oneyear-old Portuguese woman who has been running a bakery for half a century. She does not understand that there is a war and that she should escape to safety with her son. She knows, however, that people will always need bread, so she patiently waits for the delivery of flour. When her son, risking his life, brings it, she will bake bread and give it to soldiers for free. “We all love that woman,” Farrusco says about her, “even though she isn’t exactly for us, but she’s for life and bread, and that’s enough” (J, 69). In the two remaining chapters – “We’re Closing Down the City” and “Telegrams” – the writer’s distance from current politics is more clearly felt. A change of perspective has altered these texts, which have dropped the ballast of history and are saturated with literariness. Another Day of Life is not simply an account of a war from thirty years ago. It is primarily a story about the collapse of a world – the end of white civilization in Africa, probably one of the most important events in the history of our world – and Kapuściński is fully aware of that importance. It is precisely in the sense that this is the last act in the history of European

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colonization that we locate the strength of his famous metaphor of a dying city. Luanda, the capital of Angola, now a place of bloody riots, is being abandoned in panic by the Portuguese who have inhabited it almost continuously for four centuries. The author shows us the slow agony of a city that “lived in an atmosphere of hysteria, trembled with fear.” Then a mass exodus begins – doctors leave first, then craftsmen, merchants, policemen, firefighters, and, finally, garbage collectors. They flee the city in a mad rush, as if from a murderous plague, “as if from pestilential air … [that] inflicts death’ (J, 13). They pack the contents of their stone city into wooden boxes, as if into coffins, nail down the lids, and consign them to the water. At times, the place still rises – “as a sick person suddenly revives and recovers his strength for a moment in the midst of his agony” (J, 13). But the death of the city is inevitable. In the end, only a handful of dogs of the most expensive breeds, abandoned to their doom by their owners, roam the area in search of food. The city sails away in wooden crates, and a dead city is left on land, an empty stage after the performance has ended. This sad, abandoned place no longer interests anyone. Once the last residents leave, “the stone city lost its reason for existing, its sense. It was like a dry skeleton polished by the wind, a dead bone sticking up out of the ground towards the sun” (J, 26). Finally, it dies. If only it could die heroically – valiantly defended like other cities! But Luanda dies tragicomically, lonely and grotesque. Without rituals, without mourners, without the proper reverence that is usually given to the departed, but to the joyful sounds of the local cinema, where the well-known erotic film Emmanuelle is being shown non-stop. The mournfulness of this fragment is reflected in its peculiar, slightly elegiac style; the leaving of Luanda by the inhabitants has the character of gradation. As the various professional and social groups leave the city, this is displayed graphically in the text, almost like a refrain: “All the doctors have left …,” “All the policemen have left …,” “All the firefighters have left …,” “All the garbage collectors have left …” In this way, the text acquires a quasi-prayerful character: as if by a sung litany, successive heroes of a gloomy play are recalled. Kapuściński, the reporter, is a witness to this event. He would keep watching until the very end, present at the funeral of the world. He was its gravedigger. Another Day of Life is the first of Kapuściński’s texts to be permeated so plainly with reflections on the painful consequences of the collision of the individual with history. The book’s third chapter, “Telegrams,” is a story about the dying Luanda, a place where loneliness is especially

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deeply felt. In his efforts to overcome that loneliness, the protagonist involuntarily loses himself in adventure, spontaneously throws himself into the depths of an African hell, where he encounters treacherous situations in which he has to confront his preconceptions of war, heroism, and obligations. His experience of the world is characterized by randomness. As he exposes the chaotic nature of his participation in history, he rejects the temptation to play the balanced commentator. He deliberately assumes the role of a full participant and a reliable witness. Over time, he gives his experiences another dimension: he becomes a literary figure – not just the creator of reportage but also a self-made hero who experiences universal problems. In his book about Angola, we are dealing with a man witnessing a world falling into disaster and experiencing the collapse of a reality that once seemed eternal. The witness to this catastrophe yearns for contact with others, desperately clings to any order, looks for something permanent, and finds it in his daily ritual of connecting with Warsaw at nine p.m. The moment of sending his correspondence is a sacred one that he anticipates throughout each day. Long before that hour, he sits down in front of the telex, stares at its extinguished light, and listens intently to the silence. When the connection is finally made, he endlessly prolongs the conversations, offering meandering explanations of current Angolan politics in excessive detail, asking about every secondary detail, devouring every word. Finally, the telex disconnects and the hero is alone again. The telegrams included in the book provide detailed information on the war situation that only seem to authenticate his reporter’s account. In fact, they reflect the protagonist’s state of confusion, his longing for any contact, and a terrible loneliness. They also show the gulf that separates his emotions of communing with an actual event from his laconic descriptions that the following day will be read over morning coffee all over the world. By posting fragments of cables – reporting tools considered to be the least useful for creative literary activities – Kapuściński, paradoxically, has made them literature. Remember that a dispatch is an informational genre, one that presents the truth about an event in a maximally objectified manner, devoid of commentary. Kapuściński’s telegrams look the way they should, but when reading through them, the reader may get the impression that their core reason to exist (which is to describe the current war situation) is in fact marginal to his purposes. The genre’s basic attributes – reporting, timeliness, and impartiality – have become mere carriers of personal notes informing about the fear, loneliness, and exhaustion of a person immersed in the end of the world.

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A year after his time on the ground in Angola, during which he sent ongoing dispatches to pap (which were published in Trybuna Ludu and Życie Warszawy), he published a full account of that war, first in the form of twelve episodes in Kultura from February to October titled “Trochę Angoli” (A Bit of Angola), and then as a book published the same year. Another Day of Life is unlike his earlier ones. It is not simply a loose collection of previously published articles. For the first time, Kapuściński had enough time to write something from beginning to end, to compose it properly and give it a literary polish. A comparison of the press and book versions indicates that the last significant corrections were made just before the material was submitted to the publishing house. So, for example, the Kultura series does not begin, as one might think, with the famous fragment about the closing of the city (which appears in the second episode). Rather, it opens with a brief account of the expedition to the front (“Dorastać do wojny” [Growing Up for War]), which in the book will open the next chapter (“Scenes from the Front”). Why does the author use the reporter’s material so freely? After all, the journey that took place before the closing down of the city (so we ascertain from the chronology of publication of subsequent episodes) appears to be a completely different trip. A reporter staying in a deserted town, abandoned even by dogs, has decided to go to the front. And it is precisely in this place – instead of the expected report from the expedition to the south, where the correspondent sets off – that we get a completely different story: about the one he had experienced before, but from a completely different angle. Also, the book does not include his previously published reportage “Zdobycie Samba Caju,” which he had written about yet another trip. By freely using what he has seen and done, Kapuściński has untied his material from an actual chronology. For him, the presentation of reality has taken a back seat to his literary project, and the cognitive value of his account has given way to the numerous demands of the art of prose. Kapuściński’s Angola book is the work of an accomplished craftsman who has disassembled the material available to him and nailed it back together into something new. Thanks to these adjustments and omissions, the narrative gains greatly in clarity, and the order he has imposed on it according to the new rules he has taken up gives the events he is describing new meanings, thus creating a literary reality. His reportage from the war in Angola has become a story about utter alienation, the destruction of the world, and a heroic journey into the depths of hell. The distinctive existential key he has brought to this

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book is significantly closer to the works of Joseph Conrad, Albert Camus, and Franz Kafka. Even so, there is a clear difference between the literary quality of his Angola book and that of The Emperor, published two years later. If we were to use the same metaphor for a skilled craftsman, we would say that the latter came from a different hand – that of a magician who, mixing known ingredients in carefully measured proportions, has prepared completely and unmistakably new effects. The Emperor would be born rather more from wandering through the fleeting world of literature than from the technical skills of mining lived experience. •

First, however, he had to delve into his own earlier texts. In Biblioteka Literatury Faktu – a joint initiative of Wydawnictwo Literackie, Iskry, and Czytelnik – it was decided to include a summary of Ryszard Kapuściński’s achievements, as well as a selection of reports by nine other authors. But the idea of a loose collection of texts was deeply alien to the writer; he was afraid that even limiting the selection to foreign reports would fail to avoid the effect of a random compilation. So he made a selection of the texts but stated that they did not add up to any logical whole.25 We should remember that from the very beginning, from his first trips abroad, Kapuściński had thought about gathering material for books, for fully fledged, ambitious writing, and that he treated everything he did as steps on a path toward this goal. Planning books was an important aspect of his development as an author. In his understanding, his “book-like” approach would serve as a guarantee of the value and durability of his writing. When, in 1978, he described himself as a supporter of the American “new journalism,” which he understood to mean a “description of events using literary means of expression,”26 he viewed “book journalism” as its basic attribute. So it is no surprise that he could not agree for his writings to date to be summed up by a “mechanical collection of texts.” But why should the selection of reportages from three continents to which he had been drawn by the hope of participating in the “constantly renewed work of liberating the world” (as he wrote in his early article “Metryka naszego pokolenia” [A Metric of Our generation]) necessarily give the effect of a mechanical compilation? Weren’t there sufficient texts available that they could be united by one idea, one belief, or at least one theme? There is no more eloquent proof of

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Kapuściński’s parting with the myth of revolution: he could no longer see any continuities among his texts, which had been fuelled by the idea of solidarity with revolutionaries on all continents, which meant he now had to find another way to link them into a meaningful whole. The solution was suggested by Kapuściński’s new literary awareness, already on display in Chrystus z karabinem na ramieniu (Christ with a Rifle on His Shoulder) and Another Day of Life, which had shown him the importance of his personal presence in the text, so as to display his journalistic daring, his sensitivity, his unique point of view, his intellectual and spiritual preparation, and his readiness to understand other people’s experiences. This awareness suggested to him that the only way to find a “logical whole” was to embrace the logic of his own professional development, both as a journalist and as a writer. Who was I when I wrote this text? How did I find myself in the place it concerns? What did my stay in this place teach me, and how did it prepare me for the next journeys and the next stages of exploring the world? That was the approach he would now take when seeking a throughline for his reportage. It would mean describing – in small blocks of text – the circumstances surrounding his travels (Ghana, Congo, Africa, the Soviet Union, South America, trips as a pap special envoy to the Middle East, Angola, Cyprus, etc.), as well as his sojourns in various parts of the world, weaving his experiences together so that they formed a kind of a diary of his contact with the world so far. It should be emphasized, however, that the added texts – about fifty pages in all (out of 240 or so), and highlighted by italics – are not subservient to his reports and are not mere explanations of them. Rather, they are integral to the book, if not the most important parts of it. Kapuściński referred to this material as fragments of a plan for two books not yet written. The first of these he had identified between his Ghanaian and Congolese travels: “A plan for a book that could start here (i.e., my scrapes that were never written down)”; the second, after returning from the Soviet Union and writing The Kirghiz Dismounts, but before his first reports from South America: “High time for me to start writing another book I have never written.” Needless to say, an unwritten book, or even two unwritten books – emerging from beyond the written texts as some unfulfilled potentiality – may be even more important than the texts already written, now put together inside a common jacket. In fact, they are important because they remodelled Kapuściński’s previous cognitive perspective in sympathy with his current knowledge about himself and his writing. This is particularly evident in

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the first unwritten book, because it concerns Africa and the African reportages, which we already know obviously required, in the light of Kapuściński’s new literary awareness, that he re-evaluate his personal experience and display the previously overlooked personal dimension of participation in the events he wrote about. These experiences were so varied, so comprehensive, and so rich that there are still enough of them for The Shadow of the Sun and a large part of Travels with Herodotus. They are also so important to Kapuściński’s biography that, once he had found the right place, he felt compelled to tell both about the deadly illnesses he experienced and about his brushes with death in Congo. Let us remember that the most sensational of these later reports from Congo, recounting the author’s experiences in the days following Lumumba’s murder, bring new knowledge not only about what Kapuściński went through but also the state of affairs in Africa at the time: its weave of tribal traditions and state structures not yet socially rooted, and the role of foreign intelligence agencies, African troops, and un forces. Kapuściński’s terrible adventures as a victim of blind chance also say more than other descriptions about the chaos of African reality of the time, where chance determined not only an individual’s life or death but also the course of events on a larger scale – military and political. As he reconstructed his dramatic experiences, just as in the texts from the mid-1970s, he was aware of his own creativity and of the possibility of achieving literary, universalizing meanings. In “The Burning Roadblocks,” his description of his mad journey during the 1966 coup in Nigeria, this is confirmed by how he shifts the text from an “unwritten” book to a “written” one.” It isn’t placed among the italicized pages but instead along with old reportage. The book of supplements written in this spirit had to end at some point because, as we already know, after he returned from South America, it ceased to be an unwritten book and became a just-written book in the form of reports from the Middle East, Cyprus, Ogaden, Central America, and Venezuela, all of which would be included in The Soccer War. These reports concern unexpected and unpredictable phenomena that turn people into helpless victims, forced to seek meaning and defend elementary values on their own. Such phenomena are barely comprehensible and highly unlikely and gain their credibility through the personal presence or participation of the writer. However, this was probably not the only reason why he started the “next unwritten book,” although it cannot be ruled out that he began to compose

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it in part because the previous one had ended and the concept of the volume required that this kind of binding theme be brought to an end. Kapuściński himself did not explain it very clearly. He said: “When I started writing and combining these texts, both written and not written, at one point, I found that I had a third book to write, but it was not written … And so the whole thing came into being, which then started to take shape, to come together.”27 It is very possible that the concept of the first “book not written,” which he also referred to as the book of “My Troubles Never Written,” did not encompass all the writing goals he had now embraced. The plan for the latter, for which it was “high time,” came at the moment of his departure for South America and was somehow connected with it (as is visible in more recent texts). His interest was in determining the specificities of the areas visited, so as to capture and highlight the differences among them. Through vigilant observation of the realities of events and phenomena would emerge metaphors of cultural uniqueness. Let us remember that the idea of this second unwritten book was born shortly after the publication of The Kirghiz Dismounts, which had been a veritable eruption of his interest in classical travel writing. One of the first fragments of this second unwritten book describes the architectural manifestations of the Latin American Baroque, in which the writer saw the metaphor of layering, accumulating, and enduring history in this part of the world. For a significant part of this book, his intentions seem traceable to a notebook from 1972, which was the beginning of his study of South American peoples and their customs. He would now extend his scope to develop something like a lexicon of intercultural differences: “I was thinking of weaving into this book a dictionary of various phrases that take on different meanings according to the degree of geographical latitude, and which serve to define things that have similar names but distinct appearances” (W, 203). This is illustrated by a sample of several entries in alphabetical order (cisza , czarny , duchy , hierarchia , posadzony , twierdza , wizyta, z˙ycie), which could testify to his growing longing for the essay, for liberating reflection on political events, for taking a universal view. He was around this time discovering that he had started to respond to this longing earlier, perhaps involuntarily, unconsciously. As all the “entries” mentioned are essayistic excerpts from reports, both African and South American; they are “written” previews of this “unwritten” book. In his plan for it are indications that unlike the

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first, it will look toward the future rather than add to the past. At some point, for example, he announced a few themes, then took up three of them; the others were still to be developed. The concepts of the two “unwritten books” perfectly complement each other, and together, they transform the texts selected from almost his entire reporter’s oeuvre into a fairly uniform whole. The former, restoring “rights” to his personal experience, uproots his old African sketches (about Nkrumah, Lumumba, Boumédiène, and coups d’état in Algeria and Nigeria) from their original ideological entanglements and marks them with a participatory testimony already characteristic of his texts from the mid-1970s. The latter, reflecting a growing interest in the world’s cultural diversity, gives the book a strong travelling character, emphasizing the nomadic inclinations of its author and storyteller, who wandered through diverse circles of cultural experience and found in them humanity’s essential identity. The travelling trait dominates especially in the second part of The Soccer War, where the image of the world changes with each text, and in its ending, which is introduced by a quote from Melville’s Moby Dick, the holy book of all wanderers, and recalls the hero of that novel, the sailor Ishmael, who, despite all the challenges, “sails on.” The Soccer War was surprisingly different from his previous reportage, which – to the author’s relief, for the book mattered greatly to him – did not prevent readers from appreciating how well the book held together. “This procedure,” wrote Wojciech Giełżyński about the specific approach unifying The Soccer War, “also gave the book the value that it ceased to be just a mechanical set of reports. It was shaped into a uniform structure composed of extremely diverse elements. I do not recall anyone having used such an excellent formal trick before.”28 No other authors of reportage were taking this approach, but prose writers were, abandoning more and more their concerns about formal purity in favour of “personal document” prose. Examples included Konwicki’s “Kalendarz i klepsydra” (The Calendar and the Hourglass) and Tadeusz Różewicz’s “Przygotowanie do wieczoru autorskiego” (Preparation for the Author’s Evening). A dozen years later, after the publication of Konwicki’s “liar’s diaries” and Kazimierz Brandys’s Miesiące (Months), along with similar other “contemporary silvas” – as they were commonly called after Ryszard Nycz29 – rejuvenated subjectivity of expression, blurring the line between “fact” and creation, and revealing the circumstances of the creation of old stories and the seeds of unfulfilled creative intentions, it would be easier to notice that

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Kapuściński’s book had participated in the great effort of contemporary prose to establish new measures of authenticity and credibility. It felt like a liberation from worn-out plot patterns and also from various ideological and intellectual fictions, which were now being tested by individual experience at specific times and places and in the context of specific events. When Kapuściński drew out the spectre of unwritten books from behind the texts of his own reportages, he similarly destroyed the conventions of reportage of that time. At the same time, the contemporary conventions of the novel freed it from journalistic contexts and indeed subordinated those contexts. Having looked at his earlier reports as fragmentary documents of personal contact with the world, he now extracted them from previous entanglements and put them in the service of his own creative biography. Like those prose writers, he thereby regained the sovereignty of his own point of view and shaped his identity anew: the identity of a tireless wanderer, learning “on his own skin” what the world really is. While preparing The Soccer War, Kapuściński was clearly searching for artistic prose. He had achieved it the first time while writing the incidental tales about his domestic journeys, which he had gathered for his debut book, The Polish Bush. In this sense, he was reawakening his personal cognitive perspective and returning to his own beginnings, on the border of reportage and prose fiction. As a sign of all this, we can look to the beginning of The Soccer War, with the story of “Hotel Metropole” from 1958, an African account in which we see him travelling with the “adventurous” attitude he showed in his early Polish stories; and then – after giving it an “anti-imperialist” and anti-colonial spin in Czarne gwiazdy (Black Stars) – ideologizing that attitude. “Hotel Metropole” has been liberated from its satirical subchapter “Kolon,” and the original tone has been restored in the new book. Of course, this was a return to a different level of knowledge about the world and about writing. If The Polish Bush is a rather sad picture of his home country after the collapse of a revolutionary utopia, then in The Soccer War we can speak of a similar collapse on a global scale. Andrzej W. Pawluczuk put it brilliantly: In none of Kapuściński’s books so far has the world been perceived as a coherent whole. Only The Soccer War instructs us to see that there is something in common between the appearance of a street in Guatemala during the kidnapping of Karl von Spreti, the appearance of depopulated Kinshasa, a Luanda in boxes, and the

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appearance of a sunny street in Tbilisi. And there is so much in common that from among exotic cities and countries a hometown, a familiar street, bar, the face of a friend or well-known person will often look out at us.30

6

“I decided not to write like that anymore”

Another Day of Life is a clear harbinger of the creative breakthrough in Kapuściński’s writing. Its perfect realization, The Emperor, would be released two years later. It is worth noting here that the trip to Ethiopia – his preparation for writing this masterpiece of reportage – took place even before the trip to Angola. He visited the country of the victorious revolution in the first half of 1975, after the dethronement of the “king of kings” (12 September 1974); it was only in autumn that he arrived in Angola. What’s more, even before the trip to Luanda, he had the idea for The Emperor. On 19 June 1975, he had told Katarzyna Meloch about his current writing projects: “In a book about Ethiopia, I would like to show what a one-person system of power is. How the power of the individual leads to the degeneration of the system.”1 Soon, however, he abandoned that idea, for a few months later, in the early autumn of the same year, he quite unexpectedly found himself in Angola. Upon his return, he immediately published Another Day of Life. Only two years later would The Emperor be published. Why did the Angola book precede the Ethiopian account by two years? Why the delay? Was it that he was not yet ready for the radical change that the story of the “king of kings” was still to bring? Was he looking for a new formula for his writing? Examining the two reports more closely, it is easy to see that Another Day of Life serves as a quite logical link between Kapuściński’s earlier writing and The Emperor. Though clearly presaging the new, it was still stuck in the previous stage of his work. Who knows, perhaps the reporter had to experience one last revolutionary escapade, become tired of being a reporter and of watching history repeat itself, and, finally, yearn to deepen his reflection and transform it into literary material.

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This important change was heralded by a fresh cognitive perspective he had adopted while gathering material for both books. Let us recall: he went to Luanda for a specific purpose – as a pap envoy, he was to report on the political upheaval there. He accompanied the guerrilla war, struggled with its reality on the front lines, clearly sympathized with one side of the conflict, and took up daring challenges. In the epilogue, he presented a solid piece of knowledge about Angola’s political and social reality and described its past centuries of colonization. He wrote about the country’s international relations, giving exact dates and sometimes hours. In the book, he quoted from the correspondence he had sent to the pap headquarters in Warsaw. His account included detailed information about the principal groups participating in the fighting as well as penetrating portraits of the most important actors in the Angolan spectacle. It was different with Ethiopia. His 1975 visit was not his first. He had been there in May 1963, when – as a pap correspondent and a full-time agency employee – he had been a guest of the ruler of Ethiopia during the first oau summit. It was during that summit that he made valuable contacts at the palace that he would be able to renew in 1975. The dozen or so years that had passed allowed him to take a more distant perspective on the emperor than he had as a reporter. So this time, his decision to describe the fallen ruler was not the result of a direct impulse – as had been the case with many previous reports, created just after his return from expeditions. As a reporter, he had observed the “king of kings” for many years. Now, he would finish this peculiar case study after the emperor had been deposed. Perhaps that is why, in King of Kings, information about the revolution is so scarce – we learn little about the winners, we get to know the new leader only by name, and even the most basic information about time and place is of no more than marginal interest for him. Instead of factual information, we get a statement that tells us basically nothing about Ethiopia’s present day: “How all these things get confused: times, places, the world broken in pieces, not to be glued back together again” (C, 16). In the author’s comment, containing excerpts from his reporter’s notes, we learn hardly more than that. Clearly, Kapuściński in this book was not interested in the historical circumstances of the emperor’s fall. After years of observing wars, revolutions, and political upheavals, he knew that they are all much the same. Let us repeat: it is important here to remember the moment when the journalist went to Ethiopia – a few months after the fall of

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the emperor. He was travelling to a country where the revolution was already victorious: the tyrant had been driven from power, and the yearned-for “New Time” was coming. Yet the post-revolutionary reality, touched on only slightly by Kapuściński, serves merely as a rather sinister background to the story of the grotesque emperor. After a moment of post-revolutionary euphoria, a police state is taking shape there, ruled by terror; personal searches are part of daily life, executions are daily bread. The reporter met his heroes at night, and they were afraid, asking him not to reveal their identity. This was not a country where things had changed for the better – the sclerotic, archaic court had been replaced by spontaneous, post-revolutionary chaos.2 Kapuściński wrote The Emperor at a special moment in his professional life – he was weary of recounting the same war scenarios, revolutionary hopes, and inevitable disappointments. His new perspective, a consequence of watching so many revolutions fail in other countries, was bringing about an ideological and creative turn that would soon find its way into his writing. In 1987, in a fascinating twilight conversation in the studio of the Łódź Film School, he told Marek Miller about the crisis in his writing and its happy consequences: It was 1976 – I already had twenty years of driving around the world behind me – and when I started to write it all down, I saw that I can’t go on like this anymore … That it just bored me. I’ve already done it all … a hundred times: I’ve been to a hundred revolutions, I’ve been to a hundred airports, I’ve driven through a thousand patrols … And this is where the whole story begins: because I decided not to write like that any more. But I was supposed to submit a text on Tuesday! … I shut myself at home, turn off the phone … I already decided: whatever will be, will be! This is a game of life and death. And, of course, I don’t write the text, I don’t bring the reportage. A week goes by, the second and third week goes by … The editorial staff ’s patience is running out … And I just lie on the floor waiting. marek miller: But what is it with lying down? This is the second time you have mentioned it. ryszard kapuściński: … It is quite an uncomfortable position … And you need to create a difficult situation that will allow you to be vigilant towards yourself and concentrate [better]. At this point, it was not important to me whether they would kick me out of the editorial office or lock me up – so … I started looking through these materials,

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these papers – … I had a whole library about Ethiopia. And what to do with it? Already on the verge of complete despair, this deep, hopeless depression, with no way out – I’m looking for the simplest sentence, the simplest thing – because it will save me. Always I knew that only simplicity saves … A mug of water saves a human’s life. There is nothing simpler than a cup of water … or a piece of bread – and that saves lives! And so I look at these paintings, and it comes to my mind that the emperor had a small dog … He always carried it with him … and that he had a servant who was always hanging around that dog … What can such a servant say about this dog? The simplest sentence you can write about a dog: It was a small dog, a Japanese breed. Its name was Lulu. I’m looking if there is anything else you can say here that is easier. No! There is nothing easier to say here! The moment I wrote it, I knew I had a book.3 How could these two apt sentences become the foundation for The Emperor? There were at least two ways. First of all, the image of a courtier using a satin cloth to wipe the shoes of dignitaries that had been touched by dog urine refers directly to the issues related to the relationship between the ruler and his subjects, which, in fact, serves as the axis of the entire book. Second, once we make the first protagonist in the account of court life a small, bizarre “Japanese” dog, which is a peculiar whim of the Ethiopian king, and once we add that the pet in question has a servant who considers his unpleasant duty a great honour, we realize from the very first sentence that we are in a grotesque world. The book about the Ethiopian Revolution has in this way become a story about the mechanisms of power. Kapuściński has decided to take a closer look at the emperor’s court, examine its nature, and unpack the relationship between the master and his servant. This is how the issue of power comes up – authoritarian, anachronistic, declining. The author captures the moment when power – as Leszek Kołakowski noted in his essay “Rewolucja jako piękna choroba” (Revolution as a Beautiful Disease)4 – is most susceptible to revolutionary confusion. It is precisely as that time that cracks suddenly appear in a closed despotic system – the first signs of humanity, as the authorities try to show their better side by trying to ease the sufferings of their subjects. This exact moment is captured by Kapuściński. The Emperor thus becomes a parable about absolute, corrupt, ineffective power, for which purpose the Ethiopian reality proves to be an perfect exemplar.

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The reporter describes a system built on denunciation, fear, and the distribution of privileges. He shows a system that suppresses all manifestations of free thought, that persecutes its citizens, and that does not hesitate to use artificially induced hunger as a means to cow the population and maintain the regime’s stability. The writer also paints a picture of a ruler who, having lost all contact with his nation, lives in an artificial reality, feeding himself on the myth of progress and his divine infallibility. But The Emperor is more than a simple register of the vices to which tyranny is prone. Kapuściński is interested in a second product of this sick system: the community of courtiers – dehumanized mediocrities with a deformed sense of morality who engage in deliberate self-degradation. It is a story about the nature of power and about the fruits by which we can recognize it. The Emperor is written in an ingenious blend of Old Polish and neologisms, which is a shock, given the well-recognized stylistic smoothness of his earlier texts. We would look in vain for similar projects in world reportage. In structure, the book is tripartite – it has three chapters and takes three – to use the conventional term – writing perspectives.5 The first of these perspectives is a series of epigraphs that open each part. The second is the reporter’s remarks, specifying the courtiers’ statements and their time and place, serving as stage directions. Finally, the third and most extensive perspective is a set of monologues (or rather, quasi-monologues) delivered by imperial dignitaries. Regarding the epigraphs,6 Kapuściński has used these before, but it seems that only in The Emperor does he deliberately fold them into his creative method. Drawing inspiration from a variety of sources, he has embedded his story in its broad historical, literary, and historical context, made it universal, and provided interpretative guidelines. When we take a closer look, we notice immediately that the author does not limit himself to high literature. Instead, he finds confirmation of his intuitions at various levels of reflection. He happily quotes from mass culture (a prewar Warsaw song), scientific theories (psychoanalysis, kinesiology), the Bible (Book of Jeremiah), and statements by politicians (Oliver Cromwell). The first part opens with a series of appropriate epigraphs. Especially noteworthy is a quotation from the first Polish encyclopedia – by Benedykt Chmielowski, Nowe Ateny albo Akademia wszelkiej sciencyi pełna – commonly considered an example of the Sarmatist degeneration and ignorance of Saxon times.7 From that book is taken a definition of delphinus (Latin for dolphin), an animal that, it is stated, when “desiring

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to sleep, floats atop the water; having fallen asleep, he sinks slowly to the floor of the sea; being awakened by striking the bottom, he rises again to the surface” (C, 3). This serves as a metaphor for weak and ineffective power, maintained solely by its own inertia. An epigraph taken from a book about the lives of vertebrates allows us to view the mechanisms of power from a different angle – from the point of view of courtiers. Here is quoted a passage about a “community” of chickens that function excellently within a “linear order of rank with a top hen who pecks all the others. Those in the middle ranks peck those below them but respect all the hens above them” (C, 3). The implication is that the heroes’ actions will not go beyond the elementary dimension of existence (perception limited to the basic senses, triggering primal instincts). The second chapter opens with a quote about the art of falling in figure skating. This amounts to an ingenious metaphor for falling in the broadest sense. It rationalizes an event that, being inevitable, should not be feared. On the contrary, falling is an utterly obvious phenomenon, and one can – indeed should – prepare well for it. In the third part of the book, the epigraphs clearly anticipate what will happen next. Quotations from Alexis de Tocqueville, Joseph Conrad, Procopius of Caesarea, Marcus Aurelius, and Ivo Andrić concern the Final Judgment; they herald doom. Among the epigraphs that unfortunately did not find their way into the book, a fragment of a poem should be mentioned – “Młodym uwaga” from “Uwag o śmierci niechybnej” (“For the young,” a note from “The Notes about imminent death”) by Józef Baka: “You can’t chase yesterday with a horse / You won’t plough tomorrow with a plough / It’s gone / disappeared.” The work of Father Baka, a prolific poet of eighteenth-century Poland, not only fits perfectly into the world view of the third chapter of The Emperor but also provides a valuable stylistic and linguistic context.8 Tapping a multitude of sources from various periods of history, Kapuściński has found traces of the same thought in distant historical epochs, at various latitudes, both in outstanding works and in those of dubious value. In this way, he constructs something like a choir of past ages that has forever warned mankind against the same traps. The second writing perspective resembles a reporter’s notebook. As such, it comes closest to the poetics of reportage – here Kapuściński recounts the circumstances of meetings with heroes, as well as previous stays in Ethiopia. He draws parallels, discusses the mentality of Ethiopians, explains the political and social context, and specifies the time and place of action. That’s a lot. But it’s not everything. Given the

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importance the author assigns to the opening words of his books, it is worth paying attention to the sentence that opens this writing perspective: “In the evenings, I listened to those who had known the emperor’s court” (C, 4). When you look at how Kapuściński does it, you have to admit that it is a simple operation. When we consider whether these words amount to some clear semantic field, some immediately come into our view: “evenings,” “I listened,” “court,” and “emperor” are invariably associated with the activity of telling – listening to fairy tales. The word “evenings” points to the repetitiveness of this ritual. Yet absent here is the atmosphere of peace and serenity provided by the experience of listening to tales in the evening. The protagonists’ stories may be spoken in a whisper, but it is a secret whisper, barely audible, choked with fear. Listening to tales is – as in the Book of One Thousand and One Nights – the framework for the entire book. The motif of telling a fairy tale – as a narrative trick – is an ingenious choice and highly significant for the meaning of the work. After all, the fairy tale is a universal genre – one that exists everywhere; it is also ancient – accompanying humanity since prehistory; as well as didactic in nature – presenting the main problems of our existence in a clear and easily digestible way. When we add that their characters are stock, their plots are single-thread, and their themes are perennial – such as the main character’s journey, the struggle of opposing ideas, the interpenetration of the real and supernatural worlds – we soon notice that The Emperor can be read as a fairy tale. Looking at the book about the fall of the “king of kings” from this perspective, we see its universal, not literal message; its ancient pattern, its clear existential message.9 Placing conversations within a narrative framework has one more practical feature – thanks to this approach, we do not get the impression of some surrealist chaos when we listen to the many courtiers’ statements. Moreover, thanks to a coherent style of speech, which is sometimes reminiscent of a Sarmatist Baroque rhyme, we get the impression that the members of the court, even though they are distinguished with different initials, are speaking with the same voice. It almost seems that together they exemplify a totalitarian society patterned after the principle illustrated by a well-known socialist song: “thousands of hands, millions of hands, and one heart beats.” When we count the first letters of names and surnames listed here, we are somewhat surprised to discover that there are a mere thirty-four of them. And only nine of them (L.C., T.L., M., E., Z.S.-K., P.M., D., L.M., A.W.)

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speak more than two or three times. Yet it is possible to get the impression that we are being approached by a choir of courtiers singing a single nostalgic song about a world that no longer exists. Our surprise can be easily explained by the uniform style of their voices. Meanwhile, in the concerted choir of courtiers, the falsehood can be clearly heard. Here is a character who is quoted twice, named E., who speaks at special moments – at the beginning and end of the book. His first statement about the ruler is characterized by typical esteem – we learn that Haile Selassie is “gracious,” “dignified,” “good-natured,” “kind,” and “generous.” The dignitary speaks with the highest appreciation of the special love of the “king of kings” – and also of how the mechanisms of corruption flourish among loyal servants and of how he supports the most zealous with generous gifts. He concludes his speech with a cynical recollection of an illustrious leader who refused to accept “graciously tendered gifts, refused special privileges, never showed any inclination to corruption. His Charitable Majesty,” says the servant with understanding, “had him imprisoned for many years, and then cut his head off ” (C, 46). The second statement by the same hero is significant – hewn of any stylistic ornaments, matter-of-fact in tone, not avoiding colloquialisms (“maybe that was what saved my head,” said E.). The change of attitude toward the deposed emperor is symptomatic – Haile Selassie is now simply “H.S.” E.’s account opens with the following sentence: “He spent the last days alone in the Palace, with only his old valet de chambre for company” (C, 150). In this part of the sentence, the emperor disappears absolutely. First, in the sense of meaning, for who is a ruler without his court waiting for every nod of the royal head? God’s anointed one has turned out to be a little man nervously stuffing bundles of dollars under the rug. Meanwhile, the final demise of the emperor takes place on the grammatical plane. In the quoted statement by H.S., the former “king of kings” disappears, replaced by a personal pronoun, and even tossed from the sentence entirely by an ellipse. The juxtaposition of two statements by the same servant seems an important incentive to make a more in-depth description of the courtiers’ characters. Even a rough linguistic analysis shows that the emperor’s servants tried to uphold a certain fiction and did so entirely consciously. Adopting a distanced writing strategy free from commentary turns out to have been an excellent idea. Not just because Kapuściński in this way exposes the omnipresent hypocrisy. It is also because, recalling the voices of courtiers, he describes their world and the mechanisms of governing

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from the inside. Here we know power from its rotten fruit. And when the fall finally comes, the servants continue to live in their world of delusion and falsehood. They are completely unprepared for the new situation – they cannot see until the very end that the palace has lost its raison d’être. It is their archaized monologues that become the best carrier of these meanings. What’s more, by reaching for this means of describing reality, consisting of a collection of recorded conversations, Kapuściński is completely subscribing to the convention of reportage. After all, for a reporter, an interview is the most basic method of gathering material and constructing a text, one that he often used. At the same time, however, the dramatization of these statements (which, after all, also work well as stage monologues), and their extremely careful, stylistic processing, raise them to the rank of literature. In this way, without abandoning the rigours of reportage, the author fills it with literary essence. In carefully chiselled words, Kapuściński shows the ruler’s outof-stepness while also conveying his exoticism. His stylistic choices resemble those of an art restorer – he pays the utmost attention to every detail, restoring old, worn-out words to their former meanings, bringing to light beautiful, strong, long-forgotten words (for example, “voracity” to describe the rapacity of all the new people that “got a hold on” power). This stylistic virtuosity is perfectly matched by the oriental “scenography” that serves as the story’s background. Kapuściński introduces us to a world with an impressive history that extends back to biblical times, to sumptuous palaces, to the fairy tale land of Scheherazade. Yet the magical mood is broken when, on the last page of the book, the author treats us with a very non-fabulous press cutting from the Ethiopian Herald: “Addis Ababa, 28 August 1975 (ena ). Yesterday Haile Selassie I, the former Emperor of Ethiopia, died. The cause of death was circulatory failure” (C, 164). The final episode of The Emperor, as published in the pages of Kultura, ends differently, with a fragment of Andersen’s fairy tale: “– ‘Then what was the animal in me?’ inquired the soul. The Angel of Death silently pointed to a haughty form around whose head spread a bright glory of rays, with shining colours, but in whose heart could be seen lurking, half-hidden, the feet of a peacock. The spreading glory above was merely the speckled tail of the peacock.”10 Ending the book with a press release instead constituted a strong counterpoint to the soothing atmosphere evoked in this story through the category of fairy tales. This laconic press release text makes the readers aware that the story they heard did not happen “long, long ago,” but in the second half of the twentieth century.11

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The image of anachronistic and incompetent power, full of showy rituals, shines through each of the discussed writing perspectives. The nature of power is shown in epigraphs, self-commentaries, and monologues, all of which contain pieces of the same thought – pieces that, to use the language of psychoanalysis, make up the images of the collective unconscious: primeval archetypes, which are the shared legacy of mankind. A creator who activates these primeval images builds a bridge between what is ancient and what is modern, immersing individual passing events in the sea of eternity. In this way, the three literary perspectives that comprise the book form a harmonious, mutually complementary set of variations on the theme of power. About The Emperor, Kapuściński wrote that he wanted to revive a world that no longer existed, that he wanted to “recover pictures doomed to destruction: we wanted to make an exhibition of the old art of governing” (Sz, 23). In fact, he did much more – having saved those pictures, he coated them with the patina of his new style and placed them within a fairy tale frame. He had by then grasped their capacity as archetypes, as records of the same experiences preserved in the psyche of countless generations, and touched the core of the idea of absolute power. As turned out, his approach to describing the revolution in Ethiopia was flawless. On 19 February 1978, Kultura began printing a new book by its star reporter. Soon, however, a significant problem arose: When I brought in the first and second episode, everyone said: “Alright, alright. But where are those reports on Ethiopia? Here we start something about the Emperor, about a dog, about how he feeds the animals, but where is Ethiopia? There was a big revolution, a huge campaign, mass arrests!” I answered: “Calm down. Wait. That will come a bit further on.” Then I brought in the third episode, and the fourth. Then there was an opinion that this was a very good description of Gierek and the whole Central Committee. At the editorial office, they started to be afraid that there would be unpleasant consequences because of this, they started to ask questions: “What are these texts? It’s apparently about Ethiopia, but it’s not really about Ethiopia.” They wanted me to finish with these texts as soon as possible so that there would be no more concerns … about what could happen. Then it was clear to everyone in Poland that this was actually an allusion to the ruling regime. But fortunately, there was such a rule in censorship at the time that if a text was accepted once, it never had to be censored

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again. Because each of my episodes had been stamped by the censorship office – the publishing house didn’t have to worry about anything anymore. And so the book came out.12 Polish readers, exceptionally skilled at reading Aesopic language, quickly gathered that the weekly episodes collectively titled Trochę Etiopii (A Bit of Ethiopia) were not only a special event in the author’s oeuvre but also a phenomenon unprecedented in the history of reportage. The publication of the instalments immediately became an important social event. Their importance was quickly appreciated by theatre people, who realized that this reportage was actually readyto-stage material. The very structure of his series was reminiscent of drama: after all, it had three parts, with the action moving steadily from exposition through development toward climax and denouement. The Emperor, they realized, was also a set of monologues (or rather, statements addressed to Mr Richard) in which the protagonists were self-characterized. It also contained side text: author’s comments and specifics of time, place, and action that together organized the stage business.13 The world premiere, directed by Jerzy Hutek, took place on 24 November 1978 at the Stefan Jaracz Theatre in Łódź,14 and thus before the book itself was published. The adaptation was based on the instalments printed in Kultura.15 The Emperor was released as a book at the end of 1978 and immediately caused a stir among the literary public. The critics were puzzled, wondering whether Kapuściński’s latest book was reportage or literature,16 but readers, without waiting for the specialists’ verdict, saw it as a clear allegory. Perhaps it was never perceived solely as a story about the last days of an Abyssinian ruler – which, after all, would fit within the poetics of reportage. It was treated rather as a parable of totalitarian power or as an allusion to the dying court of Edward Gierek. Many years later, Andrzej W. Pawluczuk placed The Emperor in its specific historical context: It was 1978, and in two years’ time the strike was to break out at the Gdańsk Shipyard, which was the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet system in Poland. Despite appearances of normality, the first symptoms of economic inefficiency of the system had already appeared. There were sugar ration cards – a thing that was unprecedented in Europe, even in socialist countries poorer than Poland. People were saying: “This can’t go on,” “there have to be

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fundamental changes.” No one knew (or even predicted) what specific shape such necessary changes would take. It was felt, however, that social tensions were growing, and the authorities were less and less eager to use repression … In this state of affairs, The Emperor hit the proverbial jackpot.17 Reading The Emperor as a parable of Gierek’s reign was a very attractive proposition for literary audiences. Tracing the encrypted parabolas and noting tempting analogies became an engaging parlour game at the end of the 1970s. A clear sign of the durability of this interpretation was Michał Smolorz’s ingenious book Cysorz (Memoirs of a Butler), published in 1988 under the pseudonym Stefan Szulecki. The book, written between 1981 and 1986, described the discredited rule of Zdzisław Grudzień, the first secretary of the pzpr Voivodeship Committee in Katowice. We get to know the story of “Dezember” – a complacent, vindictive, and morbidly ambitious “ruler” – thanks to the account of his personal secretary (a fictional character). It is he who describes the lavishness of the “court” and its “courtiers” – loyal mediocrities who fulfil themselves by playing cruel little games behind the scenes.18 Smolorz’s book points to the durability and accuracy of the parable of Gierek. The possibility of an allegorical interpretation probably contributed to the stunning success of The Emperor in the late 1970s. However, the readers soon realized that such a literal reading did not exhaust the text. In fact, as early as 1979, there was a different interpretation of the story of the Ethiopian Negus. It was then that several significant reviews were published that established the interpretation model for The Emperor. The critics gave up searching for current political meanings in the text and even declared that Kapuściński’s latest report was not, in fact, a story about the Ethiopian “king of kings,” It was, rather – as Zbigniew Bauer wanted – “a book about … the idea of all imperiality and the idea of every revolution … A book about how the nation slowly loses its fear, how slowly the robe falls from the emperor, and how the revolution becomes a curse.”19 Andrzej W. Pawluczuk also proposed a universal approach, calling this Ethiopian account “a treatise on collapse”: Kapuściński’s reportage goes far beyond Ethiopia and is yet another element from which the author painstakingly paints his image of the world. This is because, in The Emperor, we also observe

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decomposition, dawn, the fall of a certain form, considered by many to be permanent and unmoved. It is a complete and total fall because absolute authoritarian rule only ends with such a fall. But before the collapse, these governments exist, they are supported, and the newspapers praise them for wise decisions. They rule in peace and quiet because they employ whole teams working to ensure that there is peace and quiet around them … And Kapuściński’s book about this mechanism speaks out, reveals it, exposes it, rips off the veil of silence not from the Emperor, who is already dead and will not harm anyone anymore, but from the system that didn’t go away with him at all. This system, if not in Ethiopia, will appear elsewhere wherever it is needed, where silence and corruption are needed. It will serve anyone who wants to enslave and degrade someone.20 The author’s reportage about Ethiopia was gaining more and more publicity and becoming the subject of many serious, insightful, critical and literary assessments that ranked it among the outstanding works of Polish literature. Meanwhile, the author was preparing for another journey. In January 1979, the revolution against the shah of Iran, who had ruled since 1941, was entering its decisive phase. Fascinated with technology and the army, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi set out to create a strong, modern Iran. Instead, as it turned out, he built a brutal system in which fundamental human rights were violated. Kapuściński viewed the shah as an inept ruler who had failed to appreciate the role religion played in the society he ruled. With his eyes trained to the West, Reza failed to see that in the wings, a powerful opponent was growing in stature – the Ayatollah Khomeini, the man of providence the shah had always wanted to be, a leader adored by the masses, an old man who demanded that people be treated with dignity. In other words, he was the complete opposite of the ruler of Iran, who fussed over his appearance and surrounded himself with beautiful women and expensive toys purchased for billions of dollars in the West. The Iranian Revolution began in early 1978 with an article in the regime’s press slandering the name of the Iranian spiritual leader. The inhabitants of the holy city of Qom protested against the text. The police responded with a massacre. Clashes with the authorities now quickly began to erupt. Within a month, there were demonstrations in Tabriz and later in Tehran. In the end, the shah lost control of the country, and on 16 January 1979, he was forced to

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leave Iran. On 1 February, Ayatollah Khomeini returned from fourteen years of exile. Two months later, on 1 April, he proclaimed the Islamic Republic of Iran. When news of the revolution reached Europe, the pap leadership decided to send a correspondent there. Stanisław Zembrzuski was to go. However, this Latin American specialist was afraid of the assignment. In a corridor at the agency, he told Kapuściński as much, and the latter decided immediately to go to Tehran in his friend’s place.21 Around the same time, another famous reporter, Wojciech Giełżyński, went to Iran. At the time, journalists lived in one hotel, so they watched the revolution together. However, it is significant that in observing the same events, they described them quite differently. At that time, two diametrically opposed accounts about the Iranian Revolution were written. In Kapuściński’s text, the draw of literature is clear, whereas Giełżyński’s account is simply a decent reporting job. The author of Rewolucja w imię Allacha (Revolution in the Name of Allah) carefully dated his notes, informing about what had happened before his departure for Iran, what happened while he was there, and what happened after he left. Kapuściński – the contrary. He provided almost no dates. Organizing his materials before returning to Poland, he mentioned that the revolution had just ended, but he did not state the date he had begun to witness it. It is from Giełżyński’s book that we learn that the creator of The Emperor was in Tehran before his arrival, that is, before 20 March 1979. Arriving in Iran, Giełżyński noted: “But the consul, Mr Mazurek, is waiting at the airport, and Rysiek Kapuściński is waiting, who previously witnessed the fall of the Ethiopian Empire, and now watches as others are buried. He has few emperors left, maybe he will go for kings.”22 In Byłem gościem Chomeiniego (I Was Khomeini’s Guest), a book describing his next visit to Iran, he would write: “And there – like nine months ago – is Rysiek Kapuściński, who has already grown into the Tehran landscape and is barely visible from under the towers of papers piled up in his room.”23 We don’t know how long Kapuściński stayed in Iran after Khomeini’s return. In Shah of Shahs, he tells us only that on New Year’s Eve 1979, he went to the US embassy. He adds that on the anniversary of the shah’s overthrow, he was still in Iran. So was he there all year? Or perhaps his account is of two trips – “post-revolution” and “anniversary.” We cannot be certain of that either, from reading his work. One gets the impression that he may have deliberately blurred any indications that he had returned to Poland, that he would not have minded if his

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book came to be perceived as a record of almost a year’s stay in Iran, from the first weeks after the revolution to the approaching anniversary. Indications of time in the book are no more than faint signals of the kind more associated with novelistic writing than with reportage: “One night at the beginning of January” (Sz, 99), “I spent December wandering around the city” (Sz, 120), “The anniversary of the Shah’s departure and the fall of the monarchy was approaching” (Sz, 123). Clearly, precise information about time and space was not of particular concern to the author. And the Iranian Revolution itself? Again, the author does not make the task easy for readers. From the very first page, he consistently blurs the contours, reduces proper names, multiplies the riddles. The book opens with this statement: in a dishevelled stack of papers, the reporter draws our notice to two, separated by a short time interval, in which two phrases are marked in capital letters – “he has left ” and “he has returned ” (Sz, 3). These newspapers share a similar layout – each opens with a large photo of a man. The first man has a “gaunt, elongated face” (Sz, 3) and is struggling to hide his feelings. The second man has a patriarchal face and clearly “has no intention of expressing anything” (Sz, 3). The hapless reader is not told directly that the first photo presents the shah, who had been forced into exile in mid-January, and that the second, published two weeks later, is the Iranian spiritual leader returning from exile. The reporter also elides important stages of the revolution. On 28 October 1979, Kultura published the final instalment of “Katharsis” (with the note finis at the end). Six days later, on 4 November 1979, a serious diplomatic incident took place in Tehran: a group of students, fanatical supporters of Khomeini, invaded and occupied the US embassy. So began a profoundly serious diplomatic crisis in which fifty-two US hostages would be held in isolation for 444 days. The terrorists demanded that US president Jimmy Carter extradite the shah, who was then in the US, and officially apologize to the Iranian people for supporting his regime. The hostages were not released until 20 January 1981, the day the new US president, Ronald Reagan, was sworn in. The imprisonment of the embassy employees brought about Kapuściński’s immediate return to Iran,24 where he commented on the events for pap on a regular basis, attended press conferences organized by the students, and regularly sent home extensive analyses of the crisis.25 Yet the hostage crisis that had brought him back to Iran does not actually appear in Shah of Shahs. It is only a faint background for a lonely, somewhat absurd, New Year’s Eve spent wandering through

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Tehran’s deserted streets. That night, the reporter passes by “a burnedout bank, a fire-scarred cinema, an empty hotel, an unlit airline office” (Sz, 121), buys a bag of peanuts from the only man he meets on the road, and stops for a moment at the US embassy. In front of the gate, he sees two huddled guards. In the background is an illuminated building in which he expects to see the hostages. “But much as I scrutinised the windows, I saw no one, neither figure, nor shadow” (Sz, 122), he writes resignedly. His descriptions in this scene are dominated by a sense of emptiness, loneliness, and helplessness; the participants in the Iranian drama can easily be overlooked. It is worth wondering why Kapuściński does not actually write about the event that led directly to his return to Iran. All the more so given that those events dominated the correspondence he sent to pap until the end of February. One gets the impression that this was precisely the point where his discussion of the Islamic Revolution split into two independent streams: a utilitarian one, in the form of dispatches and correspondence that organized information about the described reality in an analytical manner; and another in which he subjected his facts to literary treatment. Undoubtedly, he was deliberately creating a certain narrative situation. The author of this reportage had ostentatiously abandoned precise times, places, and facts, with the result that its dominant feature was something else – reflection on the idea of reportage, and on writing techniques. Shah of Shahs deals not so much with facts as with sources of knowledge, demonstrating their fragmentary nature and the need to speculate. So it is that the book has an auto-thematic structure – that is, it is a story about a reporter. It shows the problems faced by a journalist who wants to interpret current history. The first difficulty such a reporter faces is the sheer abundance of sources – sometimes authentic, sometimes alleged, sometimes falsified, and always fragmentary. Kapuściński, the reporter, like a master craftsman, is placing his craftsmanship in front of us: “photos of various sizes, cassettes, 8-mm film, newsletters, photocopies of leaflets – all piled, mixed up together, helter-skelter, like a flea market. And more posters and albums, records and books acquired or given by people, the collected remnants of an era just ended, but still able to be seen and heard because it has been preserved here – on film” (Sz, 4). His very first words thus create an impression of temporariness, mess, total chaos. His hotel room looks as if it has been searched – newspapers are everywhere, “on the floor, chairs, table, desk lie heaps of index cards, scraps of paper, notes so hastily scrawled” (Sz, 3). The hero himself feels lost, tired,

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helpless. This discouragement is evident in his sloppy syntax, which suddenly breaks: “But it is difficult to organise my impressions” (Sz, 4), says the reporter, who is perhaps fascinated by a photo or a press clipping he suddenly notices on a large, round table, where all the documentation of his future reportage is piled up in monstrous disorder. A sentence broken in half, without a trace of concern for the meaning of the whole, without any closing punctuation mark, is an interesting example of a narrative removed from grammatical rigours. This harmonizes well with the psychophysical state of the protagonist. This overwhelming difficulty is intensified by his feelings of absolute loneliness, which – as Kapuściński contended – are much more strongly felt in an exotic country. But the problem of Iran’s hermeticism does not come down simply to the exotic. The reporter has arrived in a city that until recently was teeming with life – international business flourished here, multilingual hustle and bustle was heard everywhere. Now, at the time of his stay, Tehran has become the arena of the Islamic Revolution, and Kapuściński describes this using poetic metonymy: “The city … doesn’t need foreigners, it doesn’t need the world” (Sz, 6). There is no doubt that in Iran, the Other has become the Stranger. The new leader offers up no illusions. Even before his return from exile, Khomeini, under pressure from journalists, had said: “Foreigners will only be approved by us if their behaviour is proper.”26 Coming as they do from a fundamentalist, these words are ominous. The reporter wants to break through the wall of strangeness. But when he tries to establish contacts with locals, some refuse to speak to him, others respond in incoherent English, and others speak Farsi, with which he is unfamiliar, and which, moreover, has begun to dominate the media. Staring at the tv screen, the reporter tries to reconstruct the basic meanings, to understand the message. To no avail. So he reaches for another tool – empathy. He is looking for arguments that can explain Iran’s isolationism. He speaks of small nations for whom fencing themselves off is sometimes the only defence against being absorbed, homogenized, and deprived of their own identity. He notes the significant advancement of local languages with which Third World communities separate themselves from the powerful, aggressive world of “higher” civilizations. The pocket radio he always carries with him is now unnecessary ballast. “When I turn the dial,” he writes, “I get ten stations, each using a different language, and I can’t understand a word … If I travel a thousand miles, I get ten new equally incomprehensible stations” (Sz, 10). Yet he still tries to penetrate the secrets of

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this foreign culture. He knows it cannot be easily assessed. When he sees a man who has purchased a luxury car, and who baptizes it with the blood of slaughtered hens, he spreads his hands helplessly. “I am trying to understand them,” he writes, “but over and over I stumble into a dark region and lose my way” (Sz, 147). Yet he continues to dig, looking for other tools. When he is unable to establish contact with the locals, when his language fails him and friendly gestures are rejected by them, he activates other senses: he reads signs. He learns about the planned demonstrations from a spice vendor, who sets up his street stall when the day seems peaceful. That vendor’s absence inevitably heralds violent events – he probably knows that a demonstration will be passing down the street and that his wares could be destroyed. Traveller Elżbieta Lisowska confirms the method for collecting materials he describes in his book. In 1979, as a student of Iranian studies at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, she was in Tehran on a scholarship. At that time, she had a unique opportunity to observe Kapuściński during his journalistic missions: “It was a great pleasure to watch him work. For reporters from all over the world who came to Iran, news, ‘journalistic meat,’ was important. He also paid attention to detail such as forsythia blooming in the park, and a man taking his dog for a walk every day in the street near the university.”27 Lisowska, who met Kapuściński in Tehran in March 1979 and occasionally served as his interpreter, especially at political rallies and meetings with revolutionary leaders, did not get the impression that he felt lost in the maze of Iranian politics. On the contrary, she contends that the author of Shah of Shahs was well versed in the realities of the revolution: he was able to recognize the elements of the exotic puzzle and had a good understanding of politics. This eyewitness opinion is confirmed by the correspondence Kapuściński was sending from Iran at the time, in which there is no suggestion that he feels helpless.28 So we can assume that the image of a journalist laboriously reconstructing Iranian reality from intuition and stray minutiae was simply a literary creation. In Shah of Shahs, by expressing a limited awareness, he multiplies the unknowns and heightens the sense of chaos. His apparent helplessness infects the reader, who now, almost tangibly, feels his uncertainty, stumbles over new riddles, feels “on his own skin” the emotions that so often accompany the clash with strangeness. Meanwhile, the reporter locks himself in a cluttered room, “where no one comes, nothing will happen,” and where he continues to browse through notes and photographs, listens to tapes, and begins to tell a fascinating story.

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This is how the second, essential part of the book begins. It consists of thirteen photographs, eight notes, two excerpts from books, and one audio recording. The most important material is undoubtedly the photos – there is the greatest number of them, and they are highlighted in the chapter’s title (“Daguerreotypes”). The notes, the quotations, and the cassette serve mainly as supplements to and commentaries on the photographs. One can easily say that Shah of Shahs is actually a story in pictures (though clearly not a comic book!). Kapuściński has selected the photos with great care on the basis of their historical value. In doing so, he sets out the history of the Pahlavi dynasty (descriptions of photos of the grandfather, father, and son), showing the turning points in the history of Iran: the conference in Tehran in 1943; the nationalization of oil by Mosaddegh in 1953; Reza’s escape to Rome in 1953; and the announcement of the price of oil in 1973, which heralds the beginning of the construction of the Great Civilization of Iran). He uses these same photos to demonstrate the mood of the Iranian street (the demolition of statues of the shah, the activities of the political police – savak – and photos of savak ’s victims). Kapuściński was a master of description who wrote about photographs in a visual way. He would create visionary images, extracting maximum significance from them. He did not, however, limit himself to mere descriptiveness; he also explained the circumstances of their development, using flashbacks and anticipations in an attempt to penetrate his characters’ thoughts. Living moments suddenly become film stills, like frozen time. Now, through his narrative gifts, those stills move again, seemingly before our eyes. In this strange and fascinating manner, the story about the fate of the last Iranian dynasty unfolds. However, this movement does not take place solely within the frame. All the materials are arranged in chronological order so that the entire report is coherent and logically composed. This is due to the montage. Kapuściński eagerly took advantage of this benefit of film art. In the book we find many examples of linear montage, ensuring the consistency of time and place of successive sequences. There are also elements of a parallel montage – joining two threads of the book so that they run parallel: an auto-thematic story, and an account of the revolution. There is also a synchronous montage, which he turns to when actions are taking place simultaneously in two places – “Europe is resting, vacationing, sightseeing … Teheran, in the meantime, has neither calm moments nor relaxation” (Sz, 30). A special example of this cinematographic tool is the montage of antithesis. Kapuściński

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juxtaposes two photographs – one in which the ruling elite travel by luxury plane to elegant restaurants in Munich, the other a reproduction of a popular slogan “A Paykan for everyone!” (the name of a car popular in Iran) alongside disappointed people who are holding fragments of the desired car in their hands – a door handle, a V-belt, a gear stick (Sz, 66). Arranging two sharply contrasted images in such close proximity makes it easy for the reader to draw conclusions about the condition of the state. It is also worth taking a closer look at the photographers’ techniques. The individual photos are taken from different points of view: the shah is shown from a very low angle, as befitting an absolute ruler, whereas an event at a bus stop is filmed differently – it is a candid photo of a savak agent in civilian clothes. Film, including all of its techniques, is of paramount importance for accounts of the Islamic Revolution, because it makes it possible to creatively manage a large amount of factual material by introducing narrative abbreviations that render the action dynamic. In Shah of Shahs, film poetics also dominate the organization of factual material. Kapuściński uses various narrative planes – from distant shots to close-ups and carefully selected details. The best example is an account of an event that appears twice in the book – the massacre in the holy city of Qom, which led directly to the revolution. We observe this event first in a general overview. One of the characters, Mahmud, tells us about his brother’s visit, which brought him news of the tragedy in Qom. His statement is structured like a classic journalistic report – it answers five questions: who, where, when, how, why. From it, we learn that at the beginning of January 1978, in the holy city of the Shi’ites, the police shot people protesting a news article attacking Khomeini. Mahmud mentions five hundred victims, a great number of them women and children. This fragment of text takes up little more than half a page – it is short, to the point, essentially a laconic newspaper item. However, in his relatively brief account of the Islamic Revolution, Kapuściński finds space for the same event again. Why this compositional extravagance, given how hard the author strove for brevity? Moreover, the account takes up several pages of text, albeit in a single paragraph. How are the two stories different? In this longer account, Kapuściński carefully explains the connotations for Muslims of calling someone “foreign” and why the use of that word against Khomeini caused such a strong reaction among his followers. He carefully examines the most important stages of this event, explaining it, reflecting on

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it, and drawing conclusions. This time, the most important moment is the one when the massacre starts. The description does not open – as in Mahmud’s account – with the encounter between the crowd and the authorities. We now witness a special encounter: it occurs not so that two people can become acquainted with each other, or understand each other; rather, it is a test of strength, a confrontation. One participant in the demonstration is approached by a policeman who orders him to return home. The representative of authority is aware of the advantage he has over a human in the crowd. But he does not realize that the paralysing fear that previously existed in submission to the shah has been replaced by strong determination. Kapuściński now resorts to the maximum zoom – his “camera” shows the faces of both antagonists, their watchful looks, and their strong emotions. We observe the growing tension of the person who wants to oppose the authorities for the first time. We see a policeman who does not yet understand that he is in a losing situation and that the roles are about to change. At that moment, he is looking at the opponent’s face – this is the climax of their mental clash … Now the demonstrator refuses to carry out the command. It is this palpably difficult moment – of change in the balance of power between the government and the subject – that Kapuściński records as the harbinger of inevitable revolution. The same motif is repeated twice in his reportage from Iran – a clear signal that the author wanted to highlight it. Why? When we juxtapose these two fragments, their different essences become clear. In the first account, we are dealing with the supremacy of the event itself. Here the fact is important, the description is subordinate to it, and the reporting style serves this. But in the second fragment, the human aspect comes to the fore – emotions, difficult choices, and, finally, tragedies. No more numbers, no grim statistics about hundreds of innocently murdered, nameless women and children. The latter fragment, a literary description of the Qom massacre, indicates precisely the point at which the text is imbued with artistry. In Shah of Shahs, literature is created almost before our eyes. It is reportage in a laboratory, or – to use Marek Miller’s tidy phrase – a reportage laboratory. It is at this point that Kapuściński fully reveals to us the secrets of his craft; he shows us how to make art out of fact. Overall, though, Shah of Shahs is not a book about Kapuściński. First and foremost, it is a book about revolution that summarizes his many years of experience with that phenomenon. He has already informed us that he is currently participating in his twenty-seventh

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revolution. His description of the Qom massacre is a vision not only of a one-off Iranian insurgency but also, vividly so, of the long historical processes that are culminating in that moment. Shah of Shahs differs in this way from The Emperor and Another Day of Life in that it presents not only the disintegration of the old structure as the new order (or disorder) tightens its embrace, but also the growing conflict between the two sides and the clash itself, the history of persecution and resistance. Kapuściński attempts to present these with the help of the perennial tropes of revolution – panoramic shots of gathering crowds, flags, banners, shooting, blood, squares strewn with corpses. Rhythm and dynamics together determine the pace of the narrative. However, when we take a closer look at this unstable Iranian fresco, it is possible to see shreds of other revolutionary experiences shining through from underneath – those witnessed by the author and by all others who have ever encountered history. Shah of Shahs is a profound analysis of the structure of revolution. Kapuściński shows us that these upheavals are always accompanied by the same mechanisms: deceptive hopes, false promises, and, finally, repression. And it is precisely people’s most ordinary needs that every revolution promises to meet and that the author recounts in the opening mottoes for each chapter. For this book he has chosen quotations from Children’s Letters to God, which express simple desires – that there be no bad things (Sz, 5); to leave the sun overnight, when it is most needed (Sz, 123). Shah of Shahs is a comprehensive, multifaceted description of revolution as a phenomenon that has accompanied humanity for centuries. However, the Iranian experience has brought a new quality to this picture. This is perhaps the first revolution to use religion as a battering ram to shatter the old system, to mobilize tradition as an active force, and to fervently underscore the dignity of the simple person. In describing this upheaval, Kapuściński, out of the corner of his eye, notices the birth of religious fundamentalism – manifested here in the form of the disciplined prayers of a million people, a fascination with blood that is incomprehensible to Westerners, and an immediate readiness to sacrifice one’s own life. It is this sight, not revolution, that instils dread in him. There is another layer in the palimpsest structure of this report – the significant Polish experience that is happening almost in parallel with the Iranian events. Shah of Shahs was written in two stages separated by almost two years. The first episodes of the “Katharsis” report were published in Kultura in 1979 between 29 July and 28 October;29 its final

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parts, with the title “Martwy płomień” (The Dead Flame), were not released until the summer of 1981. The two parts of Shah of Shahs are thus linked by the deeply personal experience of the Polish August. In the spring of 1980, right after his return from Iran, Kapuściński immersed himself in the affairs of his home country for the first time in more than twenty years. He immediately felt himself to be a participant in an patriotic uprising that he saw as a symbolic return to the hope of October. These dates, specifying the time when the material was collected and processed into a book, are absolutely fundamental to its message. Indeed, it is difficult to overestimate the influence of the Polish carnival of freedom on the final character of Shah of Shahs. It was precisely his native perspective and intense participation in the Polish experience that allowed Kapuściński to glean some nuances of the Iranian Revolution: the role of religion in breaking up the hated system, the persecution of the intelligentsia; the elevating of the regime’s mediocrities to the top; and, finally, the helplessness of those who had achieved power. He had experienced all of this in his own country, which helped him see it all the more clearly in Iran. The Polish context also had a decisive influence on the book’s final chapter. The piercing sadness of “The Dead Flame” is clear testimony to his disappointment with the Polish Revolution. And although the author blurs the distance that separates this chapter from the previous ones, a change in style is clearly noticeable. Instead of fast-paced action triggered by subsequent photos, we have a reflective tone, essayist interjections, and a series of general judgments. The reporter also observes the painful finale of the victorious revolution – the ideological burnout of the heroes, their helplessness, and, above all, the perversity of the new government, which may have changed the props, but not the methods. However, the last scene of Shah of Shahs gives hope of finding a new way of ordering a threatening, chaotic, and incomprehensible reality, a new form of understanding, in an encounter that takes the form of an ordinary interpersonal contact, at the crossroads of cultures, not in the field of political arguments. The book closes with a beautiful description of Persian carpets that a mysterious seller shows to the reporter. It is probably no coincidence that the merchant’s name is Ferdousi, just like Iran’s greatest poet, nicknamed the Persian Homer, who lived in the tenth century and was the author of The Book of Kings, an epic that would shape the national consciousness of the Persians for centuries, celebrating the ancient heroes but also bearing witness to the richness of that culture, the strength of its tradition, and the beauty of

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its language. For a perceptive rug merchant, a carpet is not an everyday item. To make his interlocutor aware of its uniqueness, Mr Ferdousi asks what made it possible for the Persians to maintain their identity for two and a half thousand years. And he answers his own question immediately: “It is our spiritual, not our material, strength – our poetry, and not our technology; our religion, and not our factories” (Sz, 151). Thus, in the merchant’s story, the rug is raised to the status of art. And this is precisely the key to unlocking the Persian culture and thereby reaching its people. From then on, thanks to the mediation of art, the foreign and dangerous Iranian reality becomes more understandable. For if its core is no longer the complicated, difficult-to-grasp history of one nation, but – so to speak – a generally accessible, disinterested contemplation of beauty, then the encounter between cultures takes place on a completely different epistemological level. In European thought, too, we can find appropriate arguments about the value of art in overcoming the tragedy of human fate. In his magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer wrote about art’s palliative and cognitive values: Art repeats the eternal Ideas grasped through pure contemplation, it repeats what is essential and enduring in all the appearances of the world, and, depending on the medium in which it repeats the Ideas, it takes the form of either the visual arts, poetry or music; art originates in the cognition of the Ideas alone; and its only goal is the communication of this cognition … Art, on the other hand, is always at its goal because it wrests the object of its contemplation out from the current of worldly affairs, and the object stands before it in isolation: and this particular thing, which played such a vanishingly small role in that current of worldly affairs, becomes for art a representative of a whole, an equivalent of what is multiplied to infinity in space and time: thus art remains at rest with this particular: it stops the wheel of time: relations vanish for it: only what is essential, the Idea, is its object.30 The German philosopher’s idea excellently comments on the attitude of Mr Ferdousi, who “spent his life communing with art and beauty, looking at the surrounding reality as a secondary film in a cheap and cluttered cinema.” So it turns out that in order to get closer to the Iranians, one does not have to wade alone through the labyrinths of

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current politics and ideology. Another path leads to the heart of their identity: “‘What have we given the world?,’ Ferdousi asks. ‘We have given poetry, the miniature and carpets … We have expressed our true selves’” (Sz, 151). Thanks to the change in cognitive perspective and the use of new tools for interpreting the world, the untranslatable Iranian reality can be described quite simply this way: dictators come and go, art is eternal. It may be a fragile consolation, but there is no other. The use of the key of art does not make the Iranian world immediately simple and clear. The contemplation of beauty makes it possible to meet different cultures, but this rapprochement makes us realize not just the similarities between them. For there are untranslatable differences. Using the image of the carpet that accompanies the Iranian throughout his life, in its various (family, political, social) manifestations, in the most important moments and in everyday life, the author provides an important contribution to describing the mentality of the people of Iran. By assigning such a high rank to a common object, the writer also makes Westerners, who are used to disposable items, aware of the unbridgeable gulf that divides these cultures. His account of the Iranian Revolution is a book about the dilemmas of meeting, about unacceptable otherness, about strangeness. But it is also about the fact that it is worth seeking agreement. Wojciech Giełżyński wrote in a review of Shah of Shahs that Kapuściński had managed to get to the essence of the events and write a book summarizing his many years of experience.31 The author of Rewolucja w imię Allacha (Revolution in the Name of Allah) was correct. Kapuściński was describing his twenty-seventh revolution, and in doing so, he succeeded in grasping the general meaning of the revolution and elucidating its specific Iranian variant. This is especially evident when we approach Shah of Shahs from the perspective of the twenty-five years that have since passed. Kapuściński’s analyses from the heat of the moment have not lost their relevance. Indeed, the passage of time has confirmed their accuracy – the fears of a reporter observing the then-emerging fundamentalism belong today perhaps among the greatest fears of our civilization. Giełżyński was also correct when he wrote that Kapuściński’s book fits perfectly into his biography. The reporter – thanks to direct participation – wound his own biography into the work. In the book, this encounter takes place on three planes – professional, writing, and world view. Thus Shah of Shahs is a valuable book about the reporter’s lot – about trying to understand something that does not want

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to be known, about tearing through mounds of materials, about hopeless attempts to organize them, and, finally, about the painstaking transformation of those materials into literature. Shah of Shahs is also a consciously literary creation, a complement to and creative continuation of the experiment that was The Emperor. By fitting completely into this new formula for reportage, initiated by a story about the Ethiopian Negus, it consolidated what was probably the most important breakthrough in his writing. The book about the fall of the Pahlavis is also a complement to the breakthrough in Kapuściński’s world view. In this regard, the revolution was only the subject of analysis; it was accompanied by a search for new categories for evaluating and organizing reality. •

Shah of Shahs was published in 1982 – thus, four years after The Emperor, which is recognized as Kapuściński’s best book of reportage, and which had no precedent in Polish reportage and enjoyed incredible popularity. It is hardly surprising, then, that the story of the Iranian Revolution has often been viewed through the prism of the book about the “king of kings.” It has been suggested that Kapuściński’s Ethiopia book is of greater literary quality, more elegantly written than the austere Shah of Shahs.32 In this regard, some critics have suggested that the latter was inspired by Latin American prose, with its sparse style.33 Ryszard Ciemiński has remarked that the chapter titled “Daguerreotypes” bears some resemblance to the short-story essays by Jorge Luis Borges. That resemblance consists in noting a seemingly insignificant detail in a photograph and seeing in it “the long-dead truth of a detail, somebody’s gesture fixed like in an old photo.”34 Jerzy Surdykowski for his part made this observation: The Emperor was benevolently mischievous, perversely ironic, and if at times the fall of that Byzantium crushed people and squeezed out blood, it was at most a macabre form of tragicomedy. This whole Byzantine-like, richly ornamented Court, all those household servants, those operetta crowds of bribed chamberlains and corrupt lady housekeepers were not able to arouse horror, sooner a giggle, a peal of bitter laughter at best. Now, however, it is different: the fall of Shah of Shahs is terrible, bloody, cruel, without a smile and void of mockery, monumental and tragic like an overthrown monument devastating the revolutionary crowd gathered in the square.35

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In his book about Iran, we encounter glimpses of Kapuściński’s most outstanding work. Wojciech Giełżyński wrote that as much as in The Emperor it was possible to see “the desire for an intellectual synthesis of the experienced world,” which the author “still camouflaged in rhetorical figures, in subtexts, in Aesopian language,” it was in Shah of Shahs that he managed to get to the essence of events and write a book summarizing his many years of experiences.36 The reviewer for Radar proposed a similar approach.37 He recognized that the degree of generalization used by Kapuściński in these books allowed them to be interpreted as allegories. From such a broad perspective, The Emperor is – as has long been noted – a “political and moral allegory,” for it “tracked and showed – from small details to a comprehensive philosophy of the world – common features, which are the same in Ethiopia as in every latitude.” By contrast, Shah of Shahs is not a story about the revolution in Iran, but “a book about the otherness and impenetrable nature of the described world.” The Emperor and Shah of Shahs: only four years separate the publication of these two books (1978, 1982). The intensity of political life in Poland at that time significantly influenced their reception. Neither of them was perceived as the story of the collapse of a distant empire. The former was often read as an allegory for contemporary Poland, the latter as a universal message about tyranny. This is in part because Shah of Shahs did not demand a symbolic reading. In 1982, Zbigniew Bauer wrote: “Someone else who is searching for the hidden agenda in Shah of Shahs, a story with a ‘key,’ so someone who follows The Emperor’s stylistics and poetics, will finally say: couldn’t Kapuściński have said it all straight? After all, what he said in Shah of Shahs about Poland in the seventies was written quite recently. More sharply. More aggressively. More ruthlessly.”38 It is true. Shah of Shahs is a completely different book from the report from Ethiopia. This difference is well illustrated by the stylistic effects of the two reports: the formal ornamentation of one corresponds to the austerity of the other. However, under the stylistic shell, there is the same theme – it is simply being presented from two polar opposite perspectives. The two books comprise a diptych about power.39 The report from Ethiopia engages our sense of hearing – it is a story built like a radio drama, based on different intensities of sounds – from whispers, through factual reports, to theatrical monologues (for example, the statement starting with “Germame! Germame, mister Richard, belonged to those disloyal people who …”). It is an often

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bizarre lexical concoction, composed of neologisms, dusted-off archaisms, and emphatic apostrophes, that does not allow the reader to feel indifferent toward the word. The word plays a similar role here as in Witold Gombrowicz’s Trans-Atlantic – it imposes itself on us, attracts our attention, does not allow us to forget about it. The Emperor is a metaphor for the palace as seen from the inside – as the place where all power is built on denunciation and where the measure of success is the amount of contact with the imperial ear. It is a model of governance understood as conducting a choir of mediocrities who praise their master with one voice. It is a system in which all thinking is immediately noticed and ruthlessly blunted as dissonance. The story of the court of the “king of kings” is an analysis of the theatre of power as recounted from backstage; it is a description of the sphere that only the play’s actors can enter. And it is those actors the reporter encountered during his Ethiopian peregrinations. All of this is completely different from Shah of Shahs, in which we learn about power from its façade. We are told nothing about behindthe-scenes plots, about court life. We only receive information that is visible from the outside – that is, the information the palace provides about itself (for example, by distributing photographs of the shah posing as Napoleon). Whereas The Emperor could pass for a radio drama, the visual aspect clearly dominates Shah of Shahs. This is no wonder, given that when collecting information about Ethiopia, Kapuściński talked to the emperor’s people and used the same language as the informants. In the reportage about Iran, hearing turns out to be less useful – the protagonist of Shah of Shahs complains that he does not know Farsi, has difficulty finding people to speak to, and must rely on his eyesight. Perhaps this is why the history of Iran, its dynasty, and its revolution is shown with the help of photographs combined with the technique of film narration, and why the echoes of the battles reach us through the mass media – it is newspapers, tv broadcasts, and documentaries that inform us of the situation in Iran. This distinctly emphasized separateness of the material, which is artistically refined in literary reportage, clearly shows the difference between his work and works of literary fiction. The relics of the reporter’s actions preserved in the books – here present in the images of the “crippled” senses – prove that the final shape of the reportage depends on how the reporter interacts with reality. The differences between these models of power can be multiplied: the world presented in The Emperor is sclerotic, archaic, seemingly distant

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from reality, like an exotic fairy tale. The reality of Shah of Shahs is the reverse: Iran has superpower ambitions, wants to quickly become a thoroughly modern state, and intends to rapidly surpass the world’s largest countries. We get to know its history differently than we do the Ethiopian reality, and we do so not in the form known since the dawn of time – in a whisper, in a discreet conversation – but loudly, using modern media. These different analyses of the phenomenon of power, shown from different perspectives, using different tools, unfortunately lead to the same frighteningly sad conclusions. The Emperor and Shah of Shahs are complementary, indeed perfectly rhymed lectures about the essence of power. They are also the greatest achievements of Polish reportage, and at the same time undisputed masterpieces of contemporary Polish literature. It is worth adding that this gigantic, meaningful two-volume project is contained by Kapuściński in less than four hundred pages.

7

“Those were the days of constant emotion …”: The Polish Revolution, 1980–1982 When I came back from abroad, I always asked what had been going on here. The stories were more and more saturated with a sense of hopelessness, a sense of being stuck in a swamp, a sense that the swamp was absorbing us. The second symptom was the growing impression that something had to happen. There was a belief that the nation – smothered, crushed, voiceless, deprived of a chance of self-realization – would explode. These were visions of bloody slaughter, bloody retaliation.1

It was mid-1980. The Polish August was approaching. Kapuściński was convinced that something would happen soon. He knew it would be huge, important, and inevitable, so he immediately put a halt to his exotic journeys. For now, he wanted to be in Poland. At Kultura, he learned that another envoy of that weekly, Stefan Kozicki, had already left for the Baltic coast. He would also be going north – first to Szczecin, where he had family. However, he immediately realized that the most important events at that time were happening in Gdańsk. So he travelled to the shipyard, where he again – just as he had twenty-five years earlier – ensconced himself with the workers. For Kapuściński, this stay at the shipyard marked a clear return to the situation of a quarter-century earlier. After two decades of traversing distant corners of the world, he was returning to national issues. Participation in the events of the Polish August would restore in him the attitude he had demonstrated in 1955 when he was collecting materials for his famous text about Nowa Huta. The parallel imposes itself: in both situations, Kapuściński, as a representative of the press, entered the workforce, immediately showed solidarity with the people, demanded respect for their right to a dignified life, and interfered with power. This unexpected return to Polish affairs after twenty-five

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years shows just how much evolution had taken place in the life of the twenty-three-year-old who had gone to Nowa Huta to prepare his first important report. The then novice journalist was now Poland’s premier reporter, author of the already legendary The Emperor. Kapuściński himself was already a legend. Thus, his arrival at the shipyard was treated as an event. There he met workers who had his books with them: The Polish Bush, Christ with a Rifle on His Shoulder, and, of course, Imperium. “When I came there from the strike in Szczecin,” he recalled, “they came to me for autographs. Then I realized that among the most necessary things that are brought on such occasions, many brought my books. After all, they didn’t know I’d be there, and I didn’t know these books were so important to them either. To me, it was very touching and nice.”2 From the very beginning, the now-exalted writer had a position in the shipyard that was clearly different from that of other journalists trying to get in through the gate. Media representatives first had to gain the strikers’ trust, which the workers were reluctant to give. Indeed, the media were sometimes treated with hostility. Workers grumbled at the servility of the media, their cynicism, their mediocrity. This is how Tadeusz Mazowiecki assessed the condition of the fourth estate in Poland in the early 1980s: The daily press wrote freely about the events of August ’80, insulting the people who took part in them … just as they did in 1968, 1970, and 1976. It was terrifying. The journalistic community during the Gierek period was the community with the greatest moral devastation, a privileged, protégé and manipulated community, one might also say a bribed community. In Poland, people felt it, they knew it … In the officially published press, journalism was destroyed. Many newspapers that used to be of a certain standard became completely unreadable. Top journalists escaped into exotic topics. (290, 291) It is not surprising that the shipyard workers did not greet the media with open arms. Journalists had trouble getting into the facility, and they needed accreditation to do so. Kapuściński encountered no difficulties. When he came to the gate, he was immediately accredited. He could have gotten one-day accreditation or permanent. He got the permanent. Most journalists were then staying at the Monopol Hotel. “There, in Monopol,” Kapuściński recalled, “discussions continued until late at

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night after returning from the shipyard. Even until the morning. Usually, this took place at our friend’s place, from the Polish Film Chronicle, at Piotr Halbersztat’s, because they had a large – five or six-person room” (230). The audience listened to tapes of recorded material, commented, discussed, and speculated. The host of these meetings talked about the special role Kapuściński played in these discussions: It was impressive. After all, with my own naked eye, I saw a piece of important Polish history. I tried to sort it out in my head and comment on it. On the other hand, when Rysiek [Kapuściński] and I talked at the hotel in the evening about what had been going on today, you simply had wonderful journalism. It was fascinating – that ability of his of instant analysis, his sense of observation, his commentary that had justified points without missing anything. In addition to his routine and undoubted talent, he is an immensely intelligent man with a wealth of knowledge.3 Kapuściński’s exalted status has been widely confirmed by other journalists. Tadeusz Knade from Słowo Powszechne later recalled: “For me, the presence of famous Warsaw reporters: Adamiecki, Doboszowa, Jagiełło, Kapuściński, Kozicki in the area [of] the shipyard was an authentic reflection of the gravity of these events” (227). Lech Stefański from Polityka added: “I realized we were all writing down in a notebook what one of us was saying. When, for example, Rysio Kapuściński was telling us something, we were noting it down as if he was our basic interviewee. And yet we knew that there was no need and there should not have been an information broker, because after all, we were all there in person” (259). A journalist from Kronika Filmowa added: I was under the impression, perhaps mistakenly, that he was one of few who had complete peace of mind. Unlike us, we were quite excited, especially at times we considered to be critical (for example, when they arrested some of the advisors, especially kor members) … Rysiek had a position – I may be wrong – but I thought it was special. Maybe not among the ordinary shipyard workers, but the council: Gwiazda, Borusewicz … everybody knew who Kapuściński was – they tried to make his life easier, they trusted him. I had an impression that he enjoyed extraordinary esteem and respect. Judging by my intuition, he knew a lot of things that

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we learned in secret from various people we were friends with. For example, I did an interview with Gwiazda, who told me something with the stipulation that I could not tell anyone because it was still at the stage of negotiations – so I didn’t say anything. Once, we were in a hotel with Rysiek, wondering what would happen tomorrow – they’ll [the Russians] come in, they won’t come in. I said, as far as I knew, there was some data indicating otherwise. And Rysiek said calmly: “I know.” He was really well informed. If the committee gave someone some information first in the queue, then Rysiek had it. First of all, due to his name – authority, all those most important and wise members of the committee knew they could talk to him seriously. They had no such fear as they might have had with regard to many other journalists who, after all, were not in the shipyard the whole time, they would leave, and there were concerns that something might get out where it shouldn’t. They could tell him in confidence what they didn’t tell us.4 But Kapuściński also knew more because he understood the situation better – after all, he had completely unique experience, gained during the several dozen coups he had witnessed. “We pulled Rysiek Kapuściński by his tongue,” said photographer Zbigniew Trybek, “because he had been to Szczecin before … and besides, we asked him about the situation in Warsaw, about people leaving power and about new ones who started to appear. He spoke. He was the most informed. I was struck by his calmness and some kind of conviction about the rightness of what was happening here” (230). Kapuściński’s role expanded even more after the news of the shipyard strike spread all over the world and crowds of foreign journalists and delegations from various organizations began to arrive there (for example, the Spanish Trotskyists referred to in the pages of Lapidarium, searching in vain for their revolution in Gdańsk). Kapuściński, who spoke several languages, served as a translator. Halbersztat joked that “there is one polyglot present in the shipyard because a delegation from Portugal arrives – they call for Kapuściński, a delegation from Spain arrives – they call for Kapuściński, someone comes from Italy – they call Kapuściński. It was actually quite funny.”5 On 25 August, Polish journalists present at the shipyard considered issuing a statement addressed to the authorities on the right to fully inform citizens about what was happening in the country. Journalists were divided over whether such a declaration was needed at all. Many

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feared it would serve as a provocation. Supporters of a firm stand called all media representatives to the exhibition hall for a press conference. “I entered with caution,” recalled Tadeusz Woźniak. “Immediately, a quick glance around the room, who is there, so I could see what I was involved in. Everything is fine, Giełżyński, Kapuściński, Henia Dobosz are there. It’s good” (180). Kapuściński’s signature under this declaration was a clear signal for some journalists. One of them spoke about his own doubts about signing: “I hesitated to sign this declaration – not even out of fear for the future, but I knew that one of the organizers of this appeal was cooperating with the security service. I had no doubts, and even today, I have no doubts. Of course, the content of the appeal was beyond discussion, while the gathered group – yes. But when I saw that Rysiek had signed, I signed it.”6 The declaration was read in front of the workers and quite warmly received by them. “Light applause. I specifically looked at the reaction of the room. It would be difficult to speak of enthusiasm … It was taken on principle: ‘They took a while to wake up, but it’s still something’” (192) – so one of the signatories of the statement would later summarize the atmosphere. Journalists did not overestimate the role of their declaration: “such squeaking on our knees” (Ewa Juńczyk-Ziomecka, 192); “saving the remnants of dignity” (Piotr Halbersztat, 192). Indeed, the echoes of this event were not loud, either inside or outside the shipyard. It seems, though, that this gesture was of greater importance to the journalists themselves. It was a key moment in their accelerated evolution. “For many journalists, however, this signature was a vital life decision,” Kapuściński concluded. “We wondered if there would be repression … Finally, we protested against the entire line of propaganda against the coast” (194). After signing agreements with the government, the journalists returned to their editorial offices. Little came out of the unique and rich material they brought with them. “The censor with scissors cast a long shadow over the August journalism,” recalled Jerzy Surdykowski. An important publication and a significant testimony to that time is undoubtedly the special edition of Ekspres Reporterów, published in 1980.7 It collected texts from leading dailies and magazines by famous Polish reporters participating in the strike. This small volume contains texts authored by Wojciech Giełżyński (Polityka), Ewa Juńczyk (Panorama), Jacek Poprzeczko (Polityka), Cezary Rudziński (Trybuna Ludu), Ernest Skalski (Polityka), Lech Stefański (Polityka), Małgorzata Szejnert (Literatura), Mariusz Ziomecki (Kultura), and Ryszard Kapuściński (Kultura).

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In the introduction, the editors of the volume state that the collected texts were written “in the heat of the moment, without distance” – hence their directness. Because of this, “the co-authors of the book generally opted for a simple, annalistic style, they let facts speak for themselves, they often enabled a direct, recorder-like transcript of conversations.” Five of the reports are quite long, of several dozen pages, and contain many important details, names, and fragments transcribed from tape recordings. A reporting tone prevails. Kapuściński’s text stands out clearly among them: in less than five pages, he provides a twelve-day account of his stay on the coast, where the most significant events in the history of postwar Poland are taking place. He omits his extensive knowledge about the strike, as a nod to the exceptional trust placed in him by the members of the mks . In this reportage, there are almost no dates, surnames, names of organizations, or significant facts. So, what is there? There is a gallery of nameless heroes: women demanding respect from their superiors, workers confronting the mendacity of the authorities, strike leaders nurturing the pure idea of solidarity. All of these situational images are parabolic – protagonists and events are typical, the plot is schematic, the narration is sparse. The overriding sense of these images is hidden in the non-artistic space, outside the sphere of an aesthetic experience. The text illustrates universal truths about human existence; it is a collection of attitudes toward life, a literary record of values. The parabolic Notatki z Wybrzeża (Notes from the Coast) recalls the basic categories of philosophical anthropology, makes people aware of the truth about the supremacy of the human individual over social, historical, and economic values, makes people realize that dignity is ontologically ascribed to humanity and, as such, is an inalienable right of every human being, always a goal, never a means. Giving the highest rank to these voices from the coast, Kapuściński called the August strike “A Struggle for His Rights and the Feast of Straight Arms, Raised Heads.” Strong words beginning with capital letters have the character of a summons, a call, a battle cry. No wonder – after all, a real battle for language was taking place in the shipyard. The workers had begun an uncompromising struggle to clean up the Polish language, restore the lucidity of words, and free themselves from the “plague of insinuations.” Language – the basic tool for shaping social relations, necessary to mastering knowledge about the world – here became the harbinger of a new reality. The inevitable change in the

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socio-political situation was indeed encoded in it – Kapuściński’s short text is full of phrases suggesting the freshness of this event, the beginning of a great change: “For the first time, this belief, this certainty and unwavering will appeared with such force,” “many words suddenly came to life,” “a river that changes the landscape and climate of the country,” “new quality,” “creating new relations between people,” “young face of a new generation of workers,” and so on. Language almost becomes a separate hero of this short reportage. Here it is strong, categorical, and born of certainty, and it sometimes has the power of prophecy. The unshakable conviction that an era has ended and that a brand-new one is just now being born is expressed as follows: “We have been living in another Poland since the summer of 1980 … Can’t Nobody not understand it.” With its deliberate twist, this phrase requires the reader to concentrate harder; it forces a more thorough analysis. The sentence is built on the principle of multiple negations, while logically balancing itself with a much simpler, unambiguous phrase that does not require any comment: “Everyone has to understand this.” At the same time, the interpretative commentary of both sentences is different, each a mirror of a different reality. The simplified phrase is derived from a harmonious world in which specific values – including understanding – are overarching categories, so obvious that “everyone must understand this.” On the other hand, the statement built on the principle of piled-up negation is a diagnosis of the world in which falsehood, misunderstanding, and convolution are everywhere. Kapuściński’s interpretation is clear – the August strike has invalidated this reality; the world to come can no longer be “incomprehensible.” New human, new language, and new values are three closely related, interdependent categories. For them to bring the desired result, they must be well-absorbed and well-learned. That is why Kapuściński calls the August experiences “a new Polish lesson,” “a difficult, arduous lesson, under a strict and careful eye that does not allow cheat sheets. Therefore, there will also be failing grades. But the bell has already rung, and we all sit down on our benches.” The question arises – where does the strength of this report come from, thanks to which Kapuściński was able to so perfectly recognize the most important features of those twelve hot days in the shipyard? There is no doubt that “Notes from the Coast” is a text for which the reporter had been preparing throughout his life. So when these events finally happened, he was utterly prepared, and he knew exactly what to get out of them. He had unique abilities to see heralds of great change, he knew

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the importance of human dignity, and he was aware of the power of a thousand people who, in a single instant, as if by command, raise their heads. Thanks to the experiences of his rich life, Kapuściński understood the power that a sense of regained dignity could wield. He could recall meetings with the workers of Nowa Huta, the grave dignity of the Uzbeks facing the former mosque, the determination of the decimated Latin American partisans, and the efforts to understand of the dying Somalis, who had given up humanitarian aid in order to maintain their nomadic identity. Kapuściński, who had watched determined heroes fighting for their dignity dozens of times, for a long time had not had the opportunity to witness this desire among his fellow citizens. So when the Solidarity movement broke out on the coast, he was able to view the Polish experience from the perspective of human issues, at an incomparably higher epistemological level than other journalists could manage. That is why he ignored all pieces of information, so to speak, that were administratively verifiable. Rather, he was interested in a certain typicality of that August event, which allowed him to see another great historical change, to perceive even then the irreversible consequences of those courageous choices, to foresee without error the collapse of the old world. Twenty-five years after the publication of “Notes from the Coast,” he spoke thus about his intentions: August of 1980 unveiled a different Poland, a different society – a very mature society, which was able to organize itself, which was characterized by great determination and which was aware of the moment it was going through. This society decided to definitively say “no” and start a new life, the form of which was not yet entirely clear at the time. This is what I wanted to write in the September issue of Kultura in the text “Notes from the Coast.” I thought that if I wrote a reportage like “one shipyard worker said this and another one said that,” it would all fade away. It must be a fist-text, a hittext. A text that will move, that will trigger. I wrote it out of great passion, out of great desire to reveal something extremely important, historical. It was about showing another person, another Pole, another reality. To show that we are taking history into our own hands, that everything will be different from that moment on. (312) The fact that this intention was achieved is evidenced by the prominence given to Kapuściński’s text in a special publication by Polityka, published to mark the quarter-century since the August events. “Notes

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from the Coast” was introduced with the following comment: “A picture of those days … How can you say briefly what those days were about, how to convey their taste, their colour, before we immerse ourselves in hard facts? Let us recall the text-manifesto written by Ryszard Kapuściński, published on the front page of the Warsaw weekly Kultura in early September 1980. This article itself became a legend.”8 Yet the author of the most important reportage about the shipyard believed that the essence of the August experience was to be found neither in those reports that appeared in the media nor in those intercepted by censorship. He confides that most journalists did not go to the shipyard to work: “It wasn’t about writing. Writing was pointless because it was known that nothing would appear. It was all about sharing a common fate in these hours. It was more civic than journalistic” (289). The most valuable achievement of the Polish August was the transformation of a world view, and journalists were hardly isolated from this. Adam Kinaszewski from tv Gdańsk recalled: “Before the strike, the journalistic milieu was complete magma. Now there is a more distinct picture, clearer. At that time, it was not known who was thinking what, who said what, what they meant, what was the connection between what they said and what they thought” (284). Piotr Halbersztat said that after August, he was unable to do many things – he no longer wanted to deal with the bland, with matters that do not evoke any emotions, that are not socially important. “I was simply no longer interested, and that’s it” (287). Krystyna Jagiełło from Literatura saw the anachronism of the current reportage formula, which was based on understatements, allusions, and cover-ups. From that time on, she decided to reject “stylistic formulas” and speak with a fuller voice – her own. Without fear, she would say things as they were, in full (288). Kapuściński summarized: “We all came back from there different from who we were when we had gone. It was not only a professional trip. The changes taking place in our awareness, in our opinion of the country, in our perception of Poland were important” (289). And indeed, this transformation of The Emperor’s creator is very clear. It was initiated by his first – and immediately decisive – return to the national theme in twenty years. One of the journalists involved in the shipyard strike, Nina Rasz, recalled: “I remember Kapuściński said that at last – after travelling through so many wars and revolutions – that he felt something great was happening in the country” (230). So, when Poland experienced the force of history, he gave up travelling the world without hesitation, immersed himself in the new reality, and let

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it engulf him. This new experience fundamentally changed his professional life and reformulated his world view. For him, the 1980s were to mark a return to the formula of generational participation in history, a return to the hopes of October, a new encounter with the people who were then next to him. Participation in the Polish August made it possible for Kapuściński to take a fresh look at his own writing. That is when he noticed that he was thoroughly polonocentric. In response to the question from a journalist from Youth Banner, “Have you returned to the country?,”9 he replied with conviction: “In a sense, I didn’t leave the country at all. In such a way that while writing, I always thought about our matters, about the Polish reader. If I have already travelled around the world, I was looking for things that would have some meaning, some value for him.” He also gave two reasons for writing. The first – to provide Poles with knowledge about the world in which they live. The second – to offer them models of active attitudes toward history: Being and feeling a Polish reporter, I was searching and writing about young people fighting for independence, for their dignity, about those who knew how to sacrifice themselves for some greater cause. That’s the theme of Christ with a Rifle on His Shoulder, The Soccer War. So it wasn’t, as a concept, some kind of abstract knowledge about the world, but, as I thought, it was needed by our readers, especially young readers. Because it stirred commitment, activity. The clear emphasis on the Polish perspective underscores the extent to which Kapuściński experienced his return to his native reality. After August, this involvement translated into intense social activity. First, he joined Solidarity, as did almost the entire editorial office of Kultura; then he began a series of journeys around Poland. In an interview with him for Kontrasty, Andrzej W. Pawluczuk wrote: “From September to December, he visited over thirty provinces, talked with workers from large and small plants, activists from Solidarity and with officials from the government apparatus, he listened to meetings and discussions.”10 He also participated in lecture campaigns and founded subsequent committees of nszz Solidarity in workplaces throughout Poland. Kapuściński also became an ardent advocate for the pzpr . This grassroots renewal movement was attempting to democratize the ruling party by decentralizing the party apparatus and was supported in large workplaces. For the author of The Emperor, this was a particularly

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important trend among the various ones that emerged after August, for it was closest to the changes expected in 1956: it perfectly rhymed with the hopes of October and with the events that Kapuściński experienced and zealously supported at that time (including in his 1956 series of articles on the need for workers’ democracy). Once again, he threw himself into the party’s renewal movement, where he again encountered those who had fought twenty-five years earlier for the same cause. Proof of his attachment to the October ’56 tradition was his participation in discussions about the ethos of the working class and in a documentary film by Marcel Łoziński about Lechosław Goździk, the leader of Warsaw workers in 1956.11 These meetings with the representatives of the ’56 generation made him aware of the drastic changes that had taken place in this group. As it turned out, the heroes of October now faced each other – on different sides of the barricade. Kapuściński’s activism lasted until mid-1981. Around this time, he published little. A journalist for Youth Banner asked him directly, “Why are you silent as a reporter?” He replied, “I have decided to delve into Poland. For many years I have not travelled around the country, now I want to make up for this omission. I consciously decided to look more, observe and for now write less.”12 So again, the choice – to go or to write – ended badly for writing. However, these journeys would soon spur him to write a long-awaited book about Poland. He still thought that he could write one. He still expected to finally one day write his great reportage about Poland, a book for which his readers kept asking. He even had a working title at ready: Postulat (Postulate). Postulat, he explained, “was a form of expressing the expectations and demands of the workers and the strikers. I thought I would collect material for this. But that turned out to be completely impossible. More hot spots were emerging. I started travelling all over Poland. I was drawn into the organizational side of this great movement. Actually, I spent the entire year ’80 and half of ’81 travelling around Poland – I absorbed what was happening” (313). The consequence of the Polish August, which in 1983 Timothy Garton Ash called “the Polish revolution 1980–1982,” was the twenty-eighth revolution in which Kapuściński had participated, and the next – probably the most important – that he wanted to describe. But in the end, he never wrote a book about Poland, about the phenomenon of Solidarity, or about the ’56 generation. He soon realized that he could no longer work as a reporter in his own country. In achieving great popularity, he had lost his anonymity, which was for him necessary for practising his profession. He was no longer able

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to gather information, nor could he pretend to be someone he was not, nor could he count on credible statements from his heroes. His very presence had by this time become an event. But this, of course, is not the only reason why he abandoned his plans to write Postulat. While his almost two years of social activism may have been a serious obstacle to starting work on the book, subsequent events – especially the introduction of martial law in Poland – brought about changes in his situation that ultimately made it impossible for him to realize this project. The events of 13 December 1981 and the crackdowns of the 1980s would suppress the wave of reforms arising from the Polish October, including the formula of engagement that was appropriate for Kapuściński’s ideological formation.13 Ultimately, the book he had meant to serve as his return to the national scene was lost in the clash with the unanticipated dynamics of his international career, which permanently changed his life after 1983. Fortunately, he did not abandon another project – in mid-1981, he returned to Shah of Shahs, which he had set aside for almost two years. The new episodes, published in Kultura under the title “The Dead Flame,” differ significantly from the previous ones. Thus, where “Daguerreotypes” is a kind of narrative feast that reveals the Iranian Revolution to us, the final chapter is more of an essay-type reflection on the phenomenon of the revolution as such, a description of its theatre, which is populated by heroes preaching similar issues and using similar props. There is no doubt that in the final part of Shah of Shahs, Kapuściński is reminiscing about the Polish Revolution. Indeed, he would always emphasize that these two societal explosions had much in common – above all, a similar historical time frame, but also a specific character, in that in both, religion served as a battering ram to break open an oppressive political system, in a way that emphasized the dignity of common people and ended in a battle for language. But Shah of Shahs, written in the year following the August events, also contains the bitterness of disappointment. In it, Kapuściński describes the end of the revolution – the moment when enthusiasm fades, the community breaks down, and apathy creeps into minds that are exhausted from constant tension. In Iran, when he visits the committees that are the organs of the new government, he does not find participants in the victorious revolution. Rather, behind the desks sit complete strangers who spend their time in endless and meaningless deliberations. They have no idea how to govern. They are helpless. Does this description not hark back to his meetings with the Polish committees? Does this sad ending not also

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encapsulate the Polish post-August experience? Is Kapuściński warning us of something in 1981? These two revolutionary experiences become entwined quite unexpectedly. Indeed, it is difficult to view this observation about disillusionment with the revolution – let us add: expressed on the eve of the imposition of martial law – as a mere coincidence. On 13 December 1981, the Polish carnival of freedom was brutally suppressed. Kapuściński, along with other pzpr employees of Kultura, decided he would leave the party’s ranks if the authorities started shooting at people. When nine striking miners were massacred at the Wujek mine, almost all of the weekly’s journalists returned their id cards, and their party organization was immediately dissolved. Why did Kapuściński only then decide to leave the party? After all, he could have done so earlier, even during one of the moments of political turmoil in 1956, 1968, 1970, or 1976. When asked about it, he replied: I wasn’t in Poland during any crisis. I was always somewhere far away. In October 1956, I was in India, in 1968 in Latin America, and in 1976 I was in deep Africa. All these events from the country reached me like very distant echoes. I was actually like a one-man political party. For example, I was in Mozambique, and for years, I hadn’t been to any meetings, any deliberations. Even if I wanted to give back my membership card while in Africa, I wouldn’t have been able to, because before you went abroad, you first had to go to the department of foreign missions for tickets and passports, and you deposit all your documents there. You couldn’t take a party membership card or a driving licence with you.14 In the first days of martial law, Kultura was closed, and at the beginning of the new year, the employees were “verified.” This is how it was described by the editorial secretary at the time: Opposite me sat two guys from Soldier of Freedom and one or two people from the Central Committee, among them Paweł Łąkowski from the Science Department. They expected me to denounce Kultura. The conversation lasted no more than ten minutes. “What do you think of this columnist’s text?” I say: “It’s great.” “And do you agree with its message too?” “Of course, if I didn’t agree, I wouldn’t let the text be published.” “No. Thank you for your time.” This was about texts that criticized the party and defended the

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workers. In this way ninety per cent of the employees of Kultura were not positively verified. (326) Kapuściński did not submit to “verification.” He maintained that it was complete nonsense and decided not to appear before the committee at all. Those who did not go were dismissed immediately. In any event, Kultura itself had ceased to exist – it was the only nationwide weekly suspended during martial law that never reopened. After that, he never held a staff position again. Although he did receive offers to travel abroad, he decided that as long as his colleagues were interned, he would not go anywhere. One such proposal was mentioned by Jerzy Urban, in those days a government spokesman, in a conversation in 2002 with Teresa Torańska: I also invited Rysio Kapuściński for a talk because he had also been fired. I offered him a job at any editorial office of his choice, and he could go wherever he wanted to go as a correspondent. To some Third World country, of course. But he refused … He listened politely, as Rysio always did, and said no, thank you. So “no” it was. It was his choice.15 Instead, he became involved in the activities of the Solidarity underground. he later recounted: I took an active part in the underground lecture campaign organized by Solidarity. I had a lot of meetings. They were about the situation at home and the international situation. The loss of confidence in the official press was widespread at the time. Many colleagues had left, many were interned, so there was a huge demand for such illegal, secret readings. They were held in vicarages, churches. Sometimes also in private houses but this was rather rare because it was dangerous. The fierce surveillance continued. These meetings were of great importance to people – not only for information reasons, but also for integration. It was important that we were together. (342) The Polish revolution of 1980–82, in which Kapuściński had played an active part, completely changed his professional life and introduced a new quality to his writing. He had lost his permanent job, so he would have to proceed with a Plan B, which he did not yet have. He told Marek Miller:

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I didn’t know what to do. Until now, my life rhythm had been: I left, I came back, I wrote a book or a series of reports about it, and I left again. This rhythm was interrupted by martial law. I wondered what to do here. I would write reflections. I would write comments about the system, about life, about everything – I thought to myself. And so, I started writing Lapidaria. (333)

8

“REE-shard Kah-poosh-CHIN-skee”: Kapuściński in English

It would seem that Ryszard Kapuściński did hardly any writing in the 1980s. He left little trace, hardly any documentation. It was no wonder – in 1981, he had stopped travelling overseas on behalf of pap , Kultura had ceased publication, he had stopped contributing elsewhere regularly, and he published no new books. His reportage about Poland, for which he had been collecting materials for more than a year, was never written. Writing Lapidarium – a collection of reflections, thoughts, and memories – would serve as his creative asylum. What did it matter that the first volume was not published until 1990? True, his next masterpiece, Shah of Shahs, was published four years after The Emperor. Remember, though, that in terms of content, it belongs to the previous decade. In 1986, the writer surprised everyone with a volume of poems, Notes (Notebook). Then two years later, after a long break from publishing, readers received the series Wrzenie świata (The Boiling of the World), comprising lightly revised editions of eight of his most important books. Yet for Kapuściński, these were not wasted years. On the contrary – they were when he launched his high-flying international career. His books were entering international circulation, beginning with the English translation of The Emperor. This book, however, was not his debut in foreign markets. That happened in 1977, when, a year after its Polish premiere, Another Day of Life was published in Mexico and Hungary (as La guerra de Angola, trans. Maria Dembowska, and Golyózáporban Angola földjén, trans. Gábor Hárs, respectively). In 1980, three years after his foreign debut, The Emperor was published in Mexico by Siglo XXI (as El Emperador: La historia del extrañísimo señor de Etiopía, trans. Dembowska). The same year, The Soccer War

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was published in Mexico (as Las botas, trans. Gustaw Koliński and Mario Muñoz). However, the first foreign translation of The Emperor was done by a Czech, Dušan Provazník. His version of Shah of Shahs (Na dvoře šáha šáhů)1 was published in Prague a year before the original was published in Poland!2 Then the Hungarian version, A Császár, was published in a translation by István Nemere. However, 1983 would be the most important year for Kapuściński’s international career, for that was when The Emperor achieved stunning success on both sides of the ocean. In March 1979, twenty-nine-year-old Katarzyna Mroczkowska, the daughter of a Polish distinguished professor of English literature, was returning by plane to the United States, where she was studying for her doctorate at the University of Rochester. Just before her flight left, someone handed her a copy of The Emperor and told her this was what was being read in Warsaw. She began to read and quickly realized with growing amazement that she was in touch with a universal text, clearly a great work of world literature. “Parallel to this impression,” she wrote years later, “something like the excitement of an unexpected discovery appeared: the discovery of a very rare treasure, the existence of which was already beginning to be doubted, namely a work from Polish literature that would be translatable and had the potential to be transnational.” So in April 1980 she sent a letter to the Czytelnik publishing house in which she wrote about how much she loved The Emperor and how she hoped to translate it with her husband, Bill Brand, into English. She admitted openly that the book would be their debut as translators. Soon she received a reply from Ryszard Kapuściński himself, who enthusiastically granted their request and wished them good luck. William Brand began looking for a publisher that would be interested in the book. A friend of his, on hearing that he wanted to publish a book of reportage about a distant African country whose author was an unknown Pole, gently advised him: “Okay, so we have a book here written by a Polish journalist. About Ethiopia. And you’re asking if I think my New York agent would be interested in publishing it. Let me explain to you how the publishing market works.” They sent samples of their translation to many publishing houses, which at best replied with polite refusals. Finally, a desperate Brand encountered the name of Helen Wolff. This German immigrant and her husband (Franz Kafka’s prewar publisher) had founded a prestigious series presenting outstanding achievements of world literature under the imprint “A Helen & Kurt Wolff Book.” She was the publisher of,

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among others, Boris Pasternak, Günter Grass, Georges Simenon, Max Frisch, and Italo Calvino. Soon after, the Brands sent the first chapter of The Emperor to the headquarters of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, where it landed right on Helen Wolff ’s desk. Kapuściński recalled his later conversation with her: It was her last day at the publishing house, as she was retiring and browsing through correspondence. At one point, she came across a letter with a fragment of a book, to which she immediately took a liking. She decided to contact the translators and told [them] that she wanted the whole text … But when the book was supposed to be published, martial law was introduced: the airports were closed and only after some time did the first planes with foreigners start arriving in Poland. I wasn’t going anywhere at the time, and the post office wasn’t working under martial law. William Brand signed an agreement with the publishing house in New York on my behalf. The book could be published. (220) From the translator, we also learn that signing the contract was by no means the last obstacle on The Emperor’s journey to Western markets. Soon a lawyer from hbj called the Brands, demanding that they provide certificates of release notarized and signed by all the courtiers quoted in the book, along with their personal data. They replied that in a country ruled by the Mengistu regime, even attempting to contact former imperial officials could end tragically for them. Yet the lawyer remained adamant – the lack of these documents could cost the publishing house millions and millions if they were sued by any person described in the book. What was to be done? Bill Brand contacted the publisher and assured him that “the author and his representative stand ready to assume responsibility for any claims arising in Ethiopia.”3 It was all they needed. The Emperor was published in the West in 1983. The first edition had an exclusive graphic design, which – as noted – “is a feature of the so-called first edition of a self-respecting publishing house. If critics notice a specific book, which is not an easy thing given the huge number of titles published each month, the publisher starts to publish cheaper and more mass issues at the same time.”4 The Emperor was released as part of a prestigious series, with Alvin Toffler’s recommendation on the jacket: “The Emperor is a nightmare that rulers dream when they feel most lonely. It is a terrifying and brilliant fairy tale written in a crystalline style, full of political acumen.”

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The story of the Lion of Judah immediately became an event in the literary world, soaring to first place on the Time Out bestseller list and even topping The Name of the Rose in the Newsweek ranking (Ten Best Books of 1983).5 There were enthusiastic reviews in the press. Kapuściński was compared to Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, Italo Calvino, Egon Erwin Kisch, Truman Capote, Graham Greene, Norman Mailer, Hannah Arendt, Jan Potocki, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Gabriel García Márquez, Jonathan Swift, Denis Diderot, Voltaire, Dante … The most serious magazines published reviews by world-renowned writers. The first major review was by John Updike in The New Yorker,6 who recognized the high artistic worth of the book as creating “a more than documentary effect, a Kafkaesque poetry and mystery.” Salman Rushdie, replying to a Sunday Times poll, declared The Emperor to be the book of 1983, justifying his choice this way: Kapuściński’s writing, always wonderfully specific and full of insightful observations, conjures up miracles of meaning from the smallest details. His book goes beyond reportage, becoming a nightmare of power shown as a rejection of History. You read The Emperor as if you were reading a new version of Machiavelli’s book written by Italo Calvino … This Ethiopia is the murderous Ruritania … in which thousands of real people are starving to death.7 Also in the Sunday Times, writing about Kapuściński’s plans to travel to the UK to promote his books, Phillip Knightley urged readers who might be put off by the unfamiliar Polish name to look past their prejudices about his origins in order to experience an “amazing” literary adventure.8 Knightley was echoed by Richard Gott in The Guardian: “This is a wonderfully written, humorous and humanitarian book, which suggests that Eastern Europe is capable of being at least as well informed about the Third World as we are – and perhaps more so.”9 Another reviewer wrote that the author “has no equal, unfortunately also on Fleet Street.”10 One of the first reviews was published at the beginning of April by Newsweek, by Peter Prescott: “[This book’s] mordant humor rises from its interior, like gases from a swamp. The effect is rather as if Kafka had written ‘The Castle’ from inside the keep.”11 Prescott also suggested an interpretation of the book, which for a time set the model for reading The Emperor:

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What did Kapuściński give us? An accurate account? Not exactly: all his informants were poets who spoke in the same voice … Or was it fiction? Maybe, but I hope not … An allegory of totalitarian governments today? Almost certainly. Haile Selassie is a stand-in for Stalin, for Big Brother, the ruler who brings his country to a condition of near perfect stasis. It’s a fascinating performance, seductively written and translated as if there were no language barrier. In the West, The Emperor was often associated with the parable of “Gierek.” This is hardly surprising. It was 1983, a year when Polish artists were being carried into the world on a “Polish wave.” Many of them there were stars of only one season: the West quickly grew bored with tales of systemic crackdown and political persecution. Discovering Aesopian language lost its magic over time, so that the codeword “Gierek,” after being repeated in so many reviews, quickly ceased to be a useful key to understanding Kapuściński’s book. In 1985, Adam Krzemiński wrote extensively in Polityka about the parable of Gierek in the West and how The Emperor’s “epidermal Polishness” had given way to a deeper discovery: The dispute over whether The Emperor is a book holding the key to Gierek’s times has also swept through the West German press, with interesting polemics from Czech and Polish emigrants. In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Tadeusz Nowakowski narrows down, as far as possible, The Emperor’s driving force, making it an up-to-date agitator: “Such a reckoning with God, who was not God, gives the Polish readers a great, although sad joy. It all seems very familiar to them. The cult of an individual consisting of two things: the object of worship and zealous ministers.”12 Meanwhile, two Czechs took a different tack when writing about Kapuściński’s book in the German publications Der Spiegel and Die Zeit respectively. Werner Paul in Der Spiegel: Shah of Shahs is not a key book about Poland. Also, the subtitle “A parable of power” is an addition to a German publication. What is Polish in this book is the sense of the absurdity of human action and the play of authority with the individual. However, the sticking to power, the dehumanization of rulers and the tendency of power to transform from instrument to subject is common.

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Gabriel Laub, in Die Zeit, pointed his interpretation toward universal and abstract meanings: What Kapuściński shows us is autocratic power as such, the mechanisms of power in pure form, the important elements of which can also be seen in the democratic system … The ImperialEthiopian model of governance was anachronistic and therefore transparent. But autocratic power is archaic, even when covered with a cloth of modern technology. It constitutes a prehistoric relic of the herd system. Finally, Krzemiński quoted a significant statement by a French reviewer from Nouvel Observateur: “Edward Gierek is not Haile Sellasie, and the building of the Central Committee in Warsaw is absolutely not the imperial palace in Addis Ababa.” The Emperor quickly began to function as a classic study of power. David Rose13 found the archetypal model of the ruler, known from fairy tales, so universally understood, in the mechanism of governance described by Kapuściński. He starts his review with the image of an emperor of yore: a man who holds absolute power over his subjects, who knows all and from whom all wealth flows; a man who cannot be wrong, whose servants must bear the blame for all disasters and therefore hide them from his view. Rose then reveals that this fairy-tale figure is in fact Haile Selassie as he is portrayed in Kapuściński’s book. The same reviewer found three other interpretative possibilities for the book: as a well-observed account of the Ethiopian revolution and Haile Selassie’s downfall; as an allegory for all structures in which power is centralized in the hands of one person, such as Gierek’s Poland; and finally as an examination of a medieval view of sacred royal power that persists in the present day. Rose draws parallels between the Germanic community in Anglo-Saxon Britain and what Kapuściński found in Ethiopia. In both, dignitaries’ reverence went hand in hand with conspiracy, corruption necessitated the coexistence of great wealth and great poverty, and peasants were seen as less than human. The Emperor thus became a universal metaphor for absolute power. That interpretation is in fact consistent with Kapuściński’s intention. In an interview, he once said: I wrote a book against a certain model of power, polemical, and that’s how it was read. I spoke out against the absolutist, corrupt,

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depraved, ineffective power. I was interested in the mechanisms of power, and the Ethiopian realities served as a screen. Today, The Emperor is published in many languages, and every reader will receive what is universal or what is present in his country.14 The book about the “king of kings” still enjoys an international career, even though, since 1983, when the West met The Emperor, the world has changed beyond recognition. What’s more, it has never changed so quickly. Apart from the fact that its bipartite division has become obsolete, the literary tastes of audiences have changed, as has literature. The book, once read mainly in political/historical contexts, has gained new meanings. It has been found to be an excellent diagnosis of relations in large institutions. It is sometimes said that the book about the Lion of Judah became favourite reading for the Swiss because in it they encountered much the same mechanisms as in the large corporations for which they worked.15 Twenty-three years after its successful debut in the West, The Emperor as translated by the Brands was published by Penguin Books in the prestigious Modern Classics series, thus making it the only book in that series by a Polish author. After the success of The Emperor, Western publishers decided to ride the wave. Two years later, in 1985, Shah of Shahs16 was published in the West. This time, the reviews were accompanied not by astonishment but rather by the conviction that it was a good thing it was a Pole – Kapuściński – who had decided to describe the Shah’s regime in decline. First, because it was the twenty-seventh revolution he had experienced, which enabled him to create a completely unique book about certain universal processes and behaviours and how they repeat themselves. Second, because he alone had managed to capture the essence of that revolution: the role played by a strong religious movement. Thus, the reviewer in the London Review of Books (4 July 1985) wondered: Who, before 1978, had heard of the Ayatollah Khomeini or even knew what an ayatollah was? But more remarkable than the personalities of the leaders was the fact that this revolution – the first since the 17th century – was religious in inspiration and used the language of religion to articulate its aspirations. The goals of liberation and brotherhood, which are common to all revolutions, were subsumed under the rubric – strange and anachronistic to Western ears … How did this seeming reversal of history come about? As an East European, a foreign correspondent attached to the official

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Polish news agency who has covered Third World revolts … and the employee of a state formally committed to the doctrine that revolutions are the inevitable concomitants of Progress, Ryszard Kapuściński is unusually qualified to provide us with an answer.17 It is true. For Kapuściński, a Pole, it was clear from the very beginning that a strong religious movement was behind the Iranian Revolution and not – as so often thought in the West – a powerful organization that sponsored and organized everything. His Polish experience helped him correctly diagnose the situation. He recalled: “Upon arriving in Iran, I noticed crowds gathering in mosques. They came out after the service to demonstrate, and that reminded me exactly of the Polish situation. I felt at home. I used to go to mosques to collect material, knowing that the centre of the revolution was there. My Western European colleagues, although very good journalists, did not have this type of experience.”18 So perhaps it is hardly surprising – if Kapuściński is right – that in many Western reports on the Iranian Revolution, not a single word appeared about the Shi‘ite movement and Khomeini. Two years later, a unique development occurred in the foreign reception of these books. In March, Michael Hastings and Jonathan Miller premiered The Emperor at the Royal Court Theatre in London. Kapuściński later wrote about the background to this stage adaptation: I met Miller in the spring of 1986 in Oxford during a party hosted by English poet James Fenton for the publication of his new book. A tall, smiling man pushed his way through the crowd of guests, introduced himself and announced that Susan Sontag had suggested that he make The Emperor a drama. He also said that he had read the book and was very fond of the thought. I knew about Miller, that he was one of the greatest British directors (next to Peter Brook), so I replied that I would be very glad if it would happen. There was one problem: Miller, who directs all over the world, doesn’t have his own theatre.19 It soon turned out that the great English playwright Michael Hastings was also going to prepare an adaptation of The Emperor. He would recount later that even as he read the book, he knew he wanted to adapt it.20 It was then that the artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre, Max Stafford-Clark, offered him a collaboration with Jonathan

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Miller.21 The first was to undertake the stage adaptation, the second to assemble a team of artists and direct. Ultimately, they both watched over the whole thing. Thus began The Emperor’s second life. The book, published in the West in 1983, was already well-established in Great Britain, where it was considered a classic study of power. It is hardly surprising that Kapuściński went to the London premiere suffering from stage fright. He wrote: “A bad book dies silently, discreetly slips out of sight, is lost somewhere. The defeat of a play is visible, loud, spectacular.”22 The organizers were probably also not certain that the story of the ruler of distant Ethiopia, who had been overthrown several years earlier, would attract an audience. So, a cautious decision was made to show the performance first on a small stage (the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs). However, the British Emperor turned out to be a bullseye. Tickets were sold out for the first two performances.23 In light of the unflagging interest of the audience, the play was quickly shifted to the main stage. Soon after, the broadcasting rights were purchased by bbc Television, and the London press gave the creators an enthusiastic reception. The Emperor was called “a fascinating story – wonderfully adapted and directed … Miller’s directorial artistry has never achieved such a gripping and moving effect.”24 Reviewers competed in their praise: “Hypnotic” (London Daily News), “Surprisingly entertaining” (Time Out), “Indisputably brilliant” (The Independent).25 The London performance of The Emperor was considered by critics to be a “faultless production,”26 one that owed its success to three individuals: a journalist who specialized in the Third World, a writer interested in African cultural history,27 and a director passionate about the theme of power.28 The success of the performance was also guaranteed by a coherent dramaturgical concept based on coupling a clear and universal interpretation (a metaphor of power based on fear) with supremely welljudged stagecraft. The set was claustrophobic, stuffy, suggesting a shifting labyrinth (designed by Richard Hudson, lighting by Ace McCarron). The space was then filled with grotesque, nameless characters, who were assigned exotic names – Und, Fost, Hulet, Arat and Amset (Amharic for the numbers one to five). The effect of those names was surprising: actors unattached to specific characters, expressing questions belonging to various characters, became an embodiment of stylelessness, which was the safest mask for Abyssinian courtiers. The best cover is behind an anonymous mask. Anonymity is also a significant feature of the literary prototype. After all, it is heroes hidden behind unspeakable initials who

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speak to us from the pages of the book. In this way, actors dressed in grey, clerical suits became the epitome of an anonymous “labyrinth of bureaucracy” surrounding the ruler. The play’s artistic achievement largely explains its phenomenal reception in England. But there were other reasons besides. The first performances were accompanied by an atmosphere of high tension: during the premiere, the theatre was surrounded by a police cordon, and the audience left it under escort. These extraordinary precautions had been taken because of the situation outside the building: an Ethiopian monarchist group and Rastafarians29 were demanding the heads of the author, the playwright, and the director. Kapuściński recalled: “They cried out for death, death, death! Death to Miller! Death to Kapuściński! Death, death, death! The atmosphere was very tense. They threatened a bomb attack. During the performance, cries from the street were heard in the audience. It created a special atmosphere during the performance.”30 The demonstrators wrote appeals, handed out leaflets, and demanded a photograph of the performance and a media confrontation with the authors. In the leaflets, they praised “a great leader in a time of war and peace, under whose rule Ethiopia quickly, for the Third World, passed from feudalism to the modern era.”31 The emperor was held up alongside Gandhi, de Gaulle, Churchill, and Kennedy. The play was disparaged as grotesque propaganda cooked up by the Red Kremlin. The book was accused of lack of authority – how, the protesters demanded, could a serious biography of the “king of kings” possibly begin with words about the imperial dog peeing on dignitaries’ shoes? Those who reviewed the play were not indifferent to the controversy surrounding it.32 They countered that art should be understood more universally and that the play was in fact an allegory of totalitarian power when it ossifies in the hands of an old man. Thus, the title character was identified with Mao, Brezhnev, Franco, Salazar, Husák, Reagan, and Khomeini.33 Michael Billington of The Guardian wrote that the monarchists’ accusations were flawed; the play was not Kremlin propaganda. In fact, it was “a moving, detailed, occasionally comic and strangely compassionate account of the ritualism of autocracy and the melancholy of power.”34 That same year, a few months after The Emperor’s London premiere, an English translation of Another Day of Life was published. This book – like the previous ones – achieved great literary renown. Kapuściński was placed alongside Camus, Conrad, Greene, Orwell, Hemingway,

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and Naipaul, and his literary talent was subjected to significant analysis. For example, Lorenzo W. Milam wrote: “A great journalist must have Shakespeare’s insight into the heart. He must have the narrative flow of Dickens. He must have the existential distance of Camus. And he must have the simple visionary style of Edward R. Murrow, George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway, Ernie Pyle. Ryszard Kapuściński is just that – a journalist’s journalist.”35 The most important review of Another Day of Life was by Salman Rushdie and appeared in The Guardian: In his books about Haile Selassie and the Shah, and now in Another Day of Life, his description – no, his responses – do what only art can manage; that is, they fire our own imaginations. One Kapuściński is worth a thousand grizzled journofantasists; and through his astonishing blend of reportage and artistry, we get as close to what he calls the incommunicable image of war.36 Rushdie found this combination of reportage and art in a perfectly refined metaphor of the dying city. His ode to the wooden Luanda is perhaps a shade too long, but it’s still a little bit of genius. Of all those who wrote about Luanda, only Kapuściński saw the wooden city. It was there under everybody’s noses, but it still needed eyes to see. Other reviewers, used to the Anglo-Saxon concept of journalism, were somewhat amazed at some of Kapuściński’s declarations. His statement “I do not understand it,” following a description of the weekend relaxation that soldiers fighting on both sides all indulged in, evoked this reflection from one critic: Would our correspondents … have said “I can’t explain it.” Would Ernie Pyle have said “I can’t explain it.” Maybe that is what makes Kapuściński so inviting: he’s honest and human and we come to know him, know his angers and fears and feelings. Sort of. I mean he isn’t telling us about the depression he must feel at the downhome stupidity of killing and wars. But he is still there, in the way that Orwell was there, describing what it is like to be with the Republicans who are dying on the fields, the malfunctioning guns, the cold, the bitter cold of the trenches.

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Like Orwell, Kapuściński misses nothing – the shabbiness, the stink, the bodies, the nightly radio transmission difficulties with Poland, the beautiful lady commando.37 Western perceptions of this book were fundamentally different from those written eleven years earlier by Polish critics. The latter took the text at surface value, emphasizing its ideological content. In the Polish reception, there were no in-depth critiques seeking evidence of literariness. It appeared that critics were not yet bold enough to appreciate the book’s philosophical aspects. Where did this difference come from? Of course, this is not for lack of exceptional interpreters among Polish literary critics. It is important to acknowledge that at the time, Kapuścinski’s work was reviewed mainly by his colleagues, not by literary critics. Also, Western critics had a slightly easier task – they were given access to Another Day of Life after having read The Emperor and Shah of Shahs. It is no surprise, then, that they read this book as another literary work – they easily noticed its universalism, philosophical background, and, above all, its literary value. It was similar in 1990 with the publication of The Soccer War.38 By the time that book reached the Western markets, its author had already been recognized in the West as a legendary foreign correspondent.39 In the reception of this book, however, setting aside the enthusiastic reactions of critics, a new thread appeared. Reviewers trying to describe The Soccer War reached for the icons of mass culture. Kapuściński was now being compared to James Bond,40 Indiana Jones,41 or film heroes played by Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum.42 But he was also referred to as a philosopher and poet writing prose.43 In Traveller magazine Manuela Hoelterhoff emphasized the uniqueness of his writing, describing the author of The Soccer War as a writer whose strengths and abilities come along just once in a generation.44 In the Wall Street Journal, it was even declared that Kapuściński’s texts, in the Brands’ excellent translations, were simply perfect. Reviewer Joe Queenan concluded that Kapuściński’s words translated into English were more charming and intelligent than those of most English writers.45 The Brands’ superlative work had unforeseen consequences. For example, their translation of The Emperor was graded so highly that for a long time it was treated as the original text for subsequent translations. The publishers completely ignored the fact that Kapuściński was a Pole. Polish being a lesser-known language, Paul Nathan wrote in Publishers Weekly, few Polish books were published in translation.

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He asserted that the Harcourt Brace Jovanovich edition provided an easier source from which six European publishers were able to prepare their own translations.46 Kapuściński – who was just now making his debut in the West – had to agree that translators could use the English version of the text, which was more convenient for them. In the case of The Emperor, however, this hard rule of the Western publishing market was especially harsh: I was very worried about this because language is very important, particularly in this book. The Brazilian edition, however, was a complete comedy; first, it was translated from English into Italian, then from Italian into Portuguese. These were combinations stacked one upon the other, and then the language was completely lost in The Emperor. But in this manner, the path to more books was opened. It was only when my position was strengthened that I could say: “Listen up my friends – I am a Polish writer, the original text is in Polish, so I would like my books to be translated from Polish.”47 Sometimes the translators themselves struggled with this questionable publishing strategy.48 Then one day the Austrian journalist Erika Fischer, who collaborated with the publishing house Kiepenheuer & Witsch, was offered the opportunity to translate from English a book by a certain writer who was tremendously successful in the world. That book was The Emperor. The translator was delighted with the book, but she was puzzled by the author’s name. She quickly realized that she was holding a brilliant translation, not the original text. In her view, it was unacceptable not to work with the original language, so she proposed that the publishing house entrust this task to Martin Pollack, a longtime correspondent for Der Spiegel from Poland. That was only the beginning of Kapuściński’s struggles with the German market. Pollack, who would go on to translate all of his most important books, noted later in Literatura na Świecie that they all encountered various publishing problems.49 The first book translated into German (König der Könige. Eine Parabel der Macht, 1984) was very well received by critics. In reviews published in Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Die Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Kapuściński was compared to the legendary reporter Egon Erwin Kisch, and the quality of the translation was admired. Yet the critics’ enthusiasm did not translate into commercial success. By this time, Kapuściński was already revered in Great Britain, France, and Italy.

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But in Germany? While recognized as a first-rate reporter, he somehow couldn’t break through there. Why not? Martin Pollack felt that some past resentment against Eastern European literature may have been the cause, contending that authors from the Eastern Bloc could be especially difficult to promote: “The concept of ‘Eastern Europe’ was associated with the bitter aftertaste of captivity, with the stench of fear, it evoked the grim image of a limping economy, central planning, omnipresent censorship … The whole attitude was not conducive to understanding these countries, their people and their literature.” In the end, Kapuściński did finally manage to capture German readers. After the second edition of The Emperor, two editions of Shah of Shahs (Schah-in-Schah, 1986, 1988) were released. His next book, Der Fußballkrieg: Berichte aus der Dritten Welt – published in 1990 by Eichborn50 – became a commercial success. Its print run was quickly exhausted, and a year later, a second edition appeared. Imperium, published two years after that, in 1993, came out almost simultaneously in Poland and Germany. Kapuściński’s books were slow to gain a hold in the Scandinavian market.51 The wave of interest in this work, which had spread over much of the world in the 1980s, did reach northern Europe, but not for long, and not so widely. In Norway, The Emperor was published in 1986 by Det Norske Samlaget, a small press, but in Nynorsk, a dialect spoken by only 10 percent of Norwegians. After very positive reviews, and after joining the publishing house’s reader’s club, it achieved high circulation. Yet its success did not translate into success for Shah of Shahs, published two years later by the same publisher and translated by the same excellent Ole Michael Selberg. That book sold so badly that after a year, the publisher halted plans to publish Another Day of Life, even though it had already been translated. The second wave of interest in Norway in Kapuściński’s work arrived a few years later, and this time it brought lasting results. In 1992, The Soccer War, translated by Jan Brodal, was published by one of the largest Norwegian houses – Aschehoug – and this time it was translated into bokmål/riksmål, the literary language of about 90 percent of Norwegians. More books by Kapuściński followed, translated by Selberg again soon after their Polish premieres – Imperium (1994), The Shadow of the Sun (2001), and Travels with Herodotus (2006). In 2008, Aschehoug finally published Another Day of Life (Atter ein dag), which Selberg had translated twenty years earlier. The first translations of Kapuściński’s books into Swedish appeared in the mid-1980s, when Alba published The Emperor, Shah of Shahs,

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and Another Day of Life. The books were popular, but the real breakthrough came after the Bonniers purchased Alba. Translations from Polish were then ordered from a respected translator – Anders Bodegård. Success was achieved for Imperium, released in Swedish in 1993, as well as for those that followed – The Soccer War, The Shadow of the Sun, and Travels with Herodotus. Finland missed the wave of Kapuściński’s popularity in the 1980s. It was only Imperium that broke through. That was the first book translated into Finnish, published by Like, a small but thriving house. It met with success, enjoying three editions.52 This paved the way for two editions of The Shadow of the Sun and subsequent translations of Polish reportage (Hanna Krall, Wojciech Tochman). The 1980s marked the beginning of Kapuściński’s great international career. Translations of The Emperor came out in Italian (1983); in German, French, Dutch, and Danish (1985); in Swedish, Norwegian, and Japanese (1986); in Russian (1987); in Persian (1988); and in Hebrew (1989). By the end of the 1980s, it had also been published in Spanish, Hungarian, and Serbo-Croat, among others. After 1983, the year The Emperor was published, Kapuściński’s professional life changed significantly: he was suddenly hugely popular in the West. From then on, his works were prominently placed on bookstore shelves, he was invited to important conferences about the problems of the modern world, documentaries were prepared about him, he was honoured with prizes and awards, promotional events were organized around him, and he was constantly present in the world’s most influential magazines and, more generally, in the media. His travels now consisted largely of promotional tours. The reporter who, as he himself said, felt most comfortable in the world’s poorest places, was now travelling to the centres of world civilization – to the United States, Great Britain, and Western Europe. A man who enjoyed meeting simple people quickly became a member of the world’s intellectual elite – he met Salman Rushdie, Heidi and Alvin Toffler, Susan Sontag, Gabriel García Márquez, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and many others. And in Poland? Well – his publishing paralysis turned out to be stronger than his stunning successes in the West. In 1986, he published a book of poems titled Notes (Notebook), but Lapidarium – his only new book – would remain pigeonholed at Czytelnik until the early 1990s, although the British publishing house Granta had already published fragments of it in 1985.53 Kapuściński remembered a publishing house employee lamenting, “Mr Ryszard, how long are these Lapidaria

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going to lie!”54 Ryszard Marek Groński tried to break the publishers’ silence, lamenting in the pages of Polityka that Poles were unable to manage their literary assets. He demanded that Kapuściński’s books be returned to readers: “After his success [in the West], the savvy publisher would even publish his Middle School papers from Pińsk. And in our country? Ask about either The Emperor or Shah of Shahs or about The Polish Bush and Christ with a Rifle on His Shoulder in any bookstore … As you know, there are problems with paper.”55 Echoes of his popularity in the West were now reaching Poland. Various magazines, especially Literatura na Świecie, reprinted the most important reviews from the Western press.56 Journalists living in Poland and those abroad reached for their pens. In long articles, Adam Krzemiński, Andrzej W. Pawluczuk, Jacek Waloch, and Elżbieta Sajenczuk tried to explain why the world was reading The Emperor.57 From across the ocean, Andrzej Brycht reported: Many compatriots fail to realize who this Kapuściński is on the global stage. It seems rather unbelievable that a Polish reporter could have achieved such an unusual worldwide status, and yet it is true. In both America and Canada, The Emperor is regarded as a classic example of “literature of fact.” Furthermore, they teach about Kapuściński at universities and during writing courses. I have taken part in several serious meetings in Canada with writers penetrating the world of today, and they were people with great success. In their opinion, Kapuściński constitutes a role model, a true phenomenon that combines documentary with top-tier literature. Only extremely talented people succeed in creating such excellent art.58 Yet just a few months earlier, in Szpilki, Jerzy Urban had sneered: According to the Vistula’s modest measure, the writer and reporter Kapuściński made an international career. His three books are published in Western languages. Here and there, some non-Polish theatre is staging an adaptation of The Emperor. He is the only Pole greeted with respect during Pen Club congresses. Such arrangement of things is promising for Kapuściński, but anyone who writes in Polish has a poor chance of being recognized among the world’s leading writers. A Pole will always retain the status of a kind of monkey that plays the violin. It is, of course, a great revelation for fans of the game, but merely belongs to the category of natural wonders.59

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Kapuściński’s international fame seemed to have become an obsession for one government spokesman of the time, for during a press conference he disparaged the author of The Soccer War, accusing him of suggesting to the Western media that he was being repressed by the system. Jerzy Urban referred to a renowned film about Kapuściński, which the bbc aired on 29 January 1988.60 It includes a scene in which the protagonist and the television crew are driving in a car near the Mostowski Palace, the headquarters of the Interior Ministry. For obvious reasons, the reporter asks the cameraman to stop filming. The government spokesman interpreted this request as follows: “This suggests to the British that filming Kapuściński is forbidden by the police and adds a heroic dimension to the work of British television producers. It is pure childishness. Kapuściński is neither a military object nor a state secret. He can be filmed in any place and in any way whatsoever. Making Poland a place of horror misleads the British audience.”61 The author of Shah of Shahs may well have shrugged off such slander. International success had given him independence and also meant that his reportage books were finally being recognized in Poland for their soaring literary merit. So it is hard to believe that just four years before The Emperor’s international success, the well-known columnist for Polityka Daniel Passent had questioned the book’s importance. In responding to a Polska Prasa questionnaire about (among other things) the best reportage of 1978, he wrote: “Ryszard Kapuściński’s reportages from Ethiopia published in Kultura also constituted an interesting event, but due to the fact that they were thematically distant from our affairs, and that the author took advantage of the attractive, long-lasting trips unavailable to many journalists – doubts are raised whether this volume is worth distinguishing.”62 The degree of interest enjoyed by Kapuściński’s books around the world at the end of the 1980s – and above all, the insightful, universalizing interpretations of his writing by Western masters – became a crushing argument in the dispute over whether the author of Shah of Shahs was a great writer or simply a talented journalist. The time had finally come to bring Kapuściński’s books back to the Polish reader. Previous editions had been printed in large runs yet had always been a scarce commodity in the country, quickly disappearing from bookstore shelves. The critics’ work sometimes resembled reviews of non-existent works written by Lem or Borges because the books were sold out before the reviews appeared in the press: “The ‘new’ Kapuściński appeared and disappeared like a meteor, and all

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the reviews are obviously late and do not serve to inform, because why bother with informing about a book that nobody will ever get anywhere else? It is probably even difficult to borrow it privately.”63 But 1988 finally saw the reprinting of eight of his most important works, in four volumes of two books each: The Polish Bush (supplementary edition), The Kirghiz Dismounts, Christ with a Rifle on His Shoulder, Another Day of Life, The Soccer War, The Emperor, Shah of Shahs, and Notes. The title of this series, Wrzenie świata (The Boiling of the World), was probably thought up by Marek Nowakowski.64 Coincidence made this name apt: the writings collected in these four volumes by the Czytelnik publishing house tried to convey the boiling, sometimes explosive nature of the world. They showed revolutions, coups, and collapses of old political systems. But Kapuściński would never return to that theme. Wrzenie świata – as we now know – was the author’s farewell to it.

9

“High time I started writing the next unwritten book”

The 1980s marked not only a breakthrough in Kapuściński’s career but also a transformation in his writing. Three important artistic events now occurred in his life: in 1986, he debuted his poetry with the volume Notes (Notebook); in 1988, he joined the Association of Polish Art Photographers; and two years later he published the first volume of his notes. What made the author of bestselling reportage, the legendary “virtuoso of war stories” – as he was called in the world – take the risk of a triple debut at the age of fifty-something? Yet the existence of these three spheres in the writer’s professional life is not surprising. After all, as a reporter he had long carried with him a notebook, a camera, and a poetic sensibility. What is amazing is the almost simultaneous articulation of these artistic possibilities, their clear crystallization and separation in the form of three different realizations. As if to prove the importance of this moment in the biography and creative life of the writer is its influence on his later writing, which cannot be overestimated. There was something significant in his decision to separate out his reporter’s tools. In doing so he would become aware of their individual integrity, communicative ability, and artistic potential. Kapuściński had taken thousands of photographs, which he brought back from his many international journeys over the course of more than four decades. At first, they served mainly to illustrate his newspaper reports. Later they sometimes found their way into books, and later still, into exhibitions and albums. We should seek the beginnings of his adventure with photography in his professional prehistory: he began to develop his passion for the medium as a twenty-year-old, on his first trip to India. That was when he purchased a Zorka compact camera and started learning photography under the supervision

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of an older editorial colleague, Janusz Zarzycki. Over time, his passion evolved into artistry, which was reflected in his growing creative awareness. We do not know exactly when this process began, but we know from reading his later texts that he was clearly evolving – as one might say after Flusser – “towards philosophy and photography.”1 He grew more and more fascinated by the medium’s epistemological possibilities, its unique ability to bring to life and annihilate new entities that were mere copies of reality, and he became more interested in the relationship between the camera and human than in the urgent registering of events. Some of his reflections on photography are included a review he wrote for a 1980 exhibition that documented the events of August. “Indeed,” he wondered, “is it possible for photography, which is the art of the concrete, the art of visible and tangible things, to convey a phenomenon that is so visually undefined, so devoid of optical literality, such as the climate, atmosphere, mood of the event?”2 He immediately answered his own question: photography not only can but must have this ability – only then can it penetrate the deep meaning of events, “overcome this contradiction between … the inner richness of human experience and the dry and impersonal abstractness of a graphic line intended to perpetuate this experience.” So, who should be its author? It is someone who “not only has the ability to determine the size of the aperture and the exposure time but also has the passion, sensitivity and heart that gives us some part of his personality in his photograms.” Kapuściński decided to unveil this part of the truth about himself, through photography, by presenting exhibitions of his photographs – first in various Polish cities, then around the world.3 They were especially popular in Italy, where – thanks to Magdalena Szymków, their curator – in a relatively short time, between 2003 and 2008, the reporter’s photos were exhibited at least eight times in various Italian cities (Milan, Genoa, Bologna, Bolzano, Rome, Catania, Riccione, and Venice), often accompanying major cultural events (such as the Milan International Film Festival and the opening of the European Library in Rome).4 Most of his Polish and Italian exhibitions were dominated by photographs from Africa (for example, in 2003, in Piccolo Teatro di Milano, From Africa: Images and Poetry of Reportage; in 2004, in Warsaw’s Green Gallery, Ryszard Kapuściński – Photographs from Africa; in 2006, in the European Library in Rome, Pictures from Africa; in 2007, People Whom I Met in Africa, at the Royal Castle in Warsaw).

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The lion’s share of these exhibitions were devoted to his travels. When we imagine the portfolio of a reporter like Kapuściński, we intuitively think about photos that record unique moments in “the boiling of the world,” that hold a humanitarian message, that are heartfelt images of the Other. And rightly so – the photographic archive of the creator of The Shadow of the Sun probably contains thousands of such photos. However, of Kapuściński’s numerous exhibitions, one, in particular, attracts attention: the series of photos, Furtki (Gates), showed nothing more and nothing less than old gates leading to allotments located in Pole Mokotowskie near the reporter’s house. What did Kapuściński notice in these objects that others passed with a shrug every day? What new face did this extraordinary exhibition reveal of the author of the Laws of Nature? It was presented for the first time in 1996 as “Vernissage of One Evening”5 at the advertising photography studio of Chris Niedenthal and Woody Ochnio Magic Media, on Noakowski Street in Warsaw. We asked one of the curators, Chris Niedenthal, about the circumstances surrounding the series: “The One Evening Vernissage” is a very simple text. Just a vernissage – and that’s it. Whoever wasn’t there, didn’t see it – and couldn’t see it anymore! We were showing the unknown art of famous people; that is, it didn’t matter what was shown, but who was showing it. We started with Czesław and Małgosia Niemen, then there was Beata Tyszkiewicz, Magda Umer, Pola Raksa, Wiesław Ochman, Janusz Gajos. And we invited Ryszard Kapuściński. We wanted to persuade him to exhibit his photographs, and Woody and I went to him with this shy proposition. Mr Kapuściński willingly agreed, but he told us that, unfortunately, there is no time to look for negatives or prints, so he doesn’t really know what we could show … It took us aback: it was good, but it was bad! At that moment, we looked at his desk, where there was one black and white film and a contact sheet (a set of photographic miniatures). Mr Kapuściński shyly told us that these are photographs of gates on plots near his house, where he lived a long time ago and where he often goes for walks. Woody and I looked at each other, and together we said that it was good – these gates are enough for us! We would take these negatives and make an exhibition. And so it happened – Iza Wojciechowska, then the head of the caf (Central Photographic Agency), made big enlargements for us – on paper for colour photos, so they came out a little blue. This

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blue colour didn’t bother us – it actually added to the charm of this quite amazing exhibition. Mr Kapuściński showed us how sensitive he is as a photographer because these are not ordinary photographs of the old gates on the plots. These were his photographs of gates. And these gates, although closed, tell us that there is something interesting behind them, that if we open them, we can get to know another world. Just like he had been doing for all his life.6 The exhibition Furtki (Gates) revealed the richness of Kapuściński’s artistic imagination. Using one plain, modest detail, the reporter revealed various qualities of reality – old gates not only function as a metaphor for the decay and erosion of the world but also attract with the promise of the unknown – they are an invitation to an encounter. Full of unforced simplicity, the exhibition reached the heart of Kapuściński’s artistic identity – it is a unique record of the constant work of his imagination, his subtle sensitivity, and the alertness of his senses, which needed no exotic surroundings to discover magic in daily life. The artistic event staged by Niedenthal and Ochnio is thus valuable testimony to the artistic awareness of the author of The Emperor and a weighty argument for his artistic consistency. Extracting a significant detail from everyday life, finding elements of magic in dilapidated gates, displaying his sensitive perception of reality, Kapuściński – just as in his reportages and poems – showed himself to be a true artist, one who left his unmistakable signature in his works. It unequivocally certifies that all his works came from the same hand. The year 2000 brought a new undertaking, incomparably more durable than fleeting vernissages. More than one hundred of his photos went into his first monograph, Z Afryki (From Africa). In one review of it, Roman Pawłowski wrote that “Z Afryki is not just Kapuściński’s photographic debut, it is first and foremost an excellent illustration to The Shadow of the Sun, a reportage portrait of Africa.”7 Exactly – or is it merely illustration? When asked in 1994 by Marek Miller what photography meant to him, Ryszard Kapuściński replied: Photography is a different way of seeing the world. Different from writing, from a reporter’s perspective. When I photograph, I don’t collect material for a piece of writing and vice versa. When I go hunting for photos, I leave the notebook and pencil aside. When collecting material for a book, I try to feel the mood, the image is then an image of synthesis. I see the whole street, the whole

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landscape, the whole mountains. Often I can’t see at all because my thought is so absorbed in some consideration. Photography, on the other hand, changes my view of reality. Because the moment I take the camera in my hand, I start to look at everything differently. Then I begin to explore, to penetrate the plasticity of reality. It becomes multidimensional.8 Kapuściński clearly distinguished between two ways of describing the world – through words, and through images. For him, photography was an independent tool, illuminating reality from a different side, bringing out its other aspects. However, when looking at the photos collected in the book, it is hard not to notice that they are, in a sense, an anticipation of The Shadow of the Sun. The monograph was published two years later, but it contains photos older than the book about Africa. And these very photos, like litmus paper, signal a change that would soon transform this writing. The images collected here almost ignore history. Shocking photos of armed young children are not an ordinary chronicle of war. Their message goes much deeper – they become an accusation against a world that forces a child to kill other children, a warning against trivializing evil. Sometimes one gets the impression that the collected photographs not only create a map of Africa but also paint a flickering panorama of humanity. From beneath the surface of the photographed African reality, an alternative emerges on the basis of contrast, constituting its reverse. This fascinating difference is revealed in the oppositions. Commenting on a number of photos showing people wearing huge vessels filled with goods on their heads, the author wrote: European fashion journals in the section: What do we wear on our heads? – they present various types of hats, berets and scarves. In Africa, the answer to this question will be different: we wear all of our belongings on our heads, everything with which we go to the market and with which we return from the market, everything we take with us when we have to flee from hunger, war, plague. (ZA, 81) No less surprising for a European is the procession of proudly marching tribal leaders, who hold umbrellas in their hands – which, according to Kapuściński, were symbols of “leadership, prestige, power.” In the African photos, the question about the attitude of the too-comfortable world to the problems of the African continent is subtly signalled.

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However, the monograph is first and foremost a story about everyday Africans – we meet them on their way to market, at work, and while studying in the shade of a tree. We are amazed at their cheerfulness – most of them look at the camera with confidence, dignity, and good humour. They look back at us and come alive; we can almost feel their emotions. The photographer has perfectly captured their characters. Here is a beautiful Somali couple from Hargeisa: a shouting, smiling girl and a focused young man: “He is always thoughtful, silent, she – ever-shining, a fiery activist” (ZA, 12) – so the author writes about them. On the facing page are photographs of three strikingly different women – in dress, age, nationality. Yet they clearly share the same attitude toward life: “How much peace in these faces, how much consent to their miserable fate” (ZA, 13), we read in the commentary. How has he come to understand them so well? Kapuściński reveals his secret to this in the introduction: “In my opinion, taking pictures … must be a joint activity, we create photos together – me, pressing the camera button, and the object in front of me. It is only from this agreement, from this community, that the picture I have in mind can be created” (6). Taking photographs is, for him, an encounter full of intimacy in which the protagonist reveals himself to the one who points the camera at him and trusts him with a part of himself. The relationship between photography and reportage is obvious. Kapuściński, however, drew attention to a relationship that was much less obvious but equally important to him – between photography and poetry: “Making a successful photograph is as much an effort and experience as writing a good poem. It requires the same concentration, perseverance, and imagination. Therefore, just as a poet will get to know his poems, so a photographer will get to know his photos” (ZA, 5). He would later confess: “Although later I took thousands and thousands of photos, it was rare for me to not recognize after many years if this photo was taken in my camera” (ZA, 5). Indeed, his photos have an intense and sometimes even poetic power. An excellent example of this contact between photography and poetry is a photograph depicting a group of emaciated Sudanese women clad in jute sacks left over from food supplied by humanitarian organizations. Their faces are turned toward the lens, and their eyes are both sad and indifferent. From the commentary, we learn that they have escaped from a cruel war into a refugee camp, where “they suffer hunger, live in terrible poverty, the exhausted and the sick die quickly” (ZA, 60). Now we clearly understand their determination – these women are not standing in front of the camera to capture

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themselves – they do not smile, do not flirt, do not try to draw attention to themselves. They are standing to give testimony, to move the world’s conscience and arouse a sense of responsibility toward those who are suffering. Magdalena Szymków, the curator of Kapuściński’s Italian photography exhibitions, who has excellent intuition, exhibited this same photo with a fragment of the poem “Cierpienie i wina” (Suffering and Guilt) from the volume Prawa natury: 9 Tylko okryci zgrzebnym płótnem potrafią przyjąć w siebie cierpienie drugiego podzielić jego ból ([… ] mówią: unikaj cierpiącego choćby niechcący wbije w ciebie cierń – poczucie winy (PN, 24)

Only those clad in sackcloth are able to take upon themselves the suffering of another to share his pain […] they say: beware the suffering one though unwillingly he will stick you with a thorn guilt (PN, 24)

How, then, does poetry position itself in relation to Kapuściński’s basic language of expression – reportage? “Prose is like shooting a target,” he told Marek Miller. “Here we shoot, there we shoot, here two, there six, here eight. Then a lot of arrows appear on the target, and they give us an image of prose. A good poem is one arrow that hits the bull’s eye. It hits the centre and vibrates.”10 To this, we can add this astonishing comment from the “journalist of the century,” who would confess in an interview with Francesco Cataluccio just before his death “that he would like to be remembered as a poet and author of aphorisms: someone who described the world in a few words.”11 Poetry was, for him, therefore, the noblest form of language, the most intense description of reality, but also – as he used to say – a rare luxury; for him it meant rest, a chance for the “raging reporter” to enjoy the fleeting moment, the richness of language, the ambiguity of the image. It was a shield against the fast-paced, out-of-breath world, invaluable to his search for his own identity and his own authenticity. Poetry did not require immediate expertise, explanations, or

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admonitions. It made it possible for him to write most honestly about what is intimate – about pain, disaffection, and the experience of death. For him, a clear counterpoint to great matters was the poetry in Prawa natury (The Laws of Nature) – primary and irrevocable laws that were not subject to the dictates of history.12 That is why, in these poems (as well as in the last volumes of the Lapidaria), he gave so much attention to the trifle, the concrete, and the inconsequential. The world’s minutiae offered him a chance to restore proportions to his own world: “Small may be beautiful,” wrote Tadeusz Sławek, “but, above all, small stands closer to what is ethical, and thus – a small man defends his dignity.”13 Kapuściński’s poetic output, collected in two slim volumes – Notes (Notebook, 1986) and Prawa natury (The Laws of Nature, 2006)14 – totals slightly over ninety works, dominated by miniatures. In an interesting study of these poems, Joanna Kisiel offers several significant insights.15 Her erudite and often virtuoso interpretations allow us to see Kapuściński’s poetry as an essential component of his writing world: “The poetry of the author of Prawa natury is a modest supplement, an addition, a kind of marginalia to the writer’s basic work, but also a marginalia that is difficult to overestimate, carefully prepared, mature and wise, which brings the promise of getting to know a different face of the author of Travels with Herodotus.” Kisiel delineates several “thematic paths” through this lyrical space: “uncertainty of words,” “transience of the world,” “mystery of the tree,” “flight and fall,” and “self-portrait with death in the background.” The very possibility of distinguishing such semantic fields points to the fundamental difference between the world of Kapuściński’s reportage and the space of his poems. These two artistic realizations are woven from different materials; one sometimes even gets the impression that they came from a different hand. The tireless chronicler of the “boiling of the world” describes its violent changes with strong, precise, and pictorial language. Yet in his poems, he reveals his doubts and even suspicions regarding the word. Metapoetic searches lead the author of Notes to a word that appears to be Janus-faced – on the one hand, it is the guardian of ethical values. Thus, “słowo czyste / które się nie spotwarzyło / nie doniosło / nie wzięło udziału w nagonce” (pure word / which didn’t slander / didn’t snitch / didn’t take part in a smear campaign) (“Znaleźć słowo trafne” [To locate the true word], N, 162). But on the other, it is deceptive in nature. Thus, “stawiają fałszywe drogowskazy / prowadzą w ślepe zaułki /

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wodzą na pokuszenie” (words / erect false signposts / lead one into dead ends / lead one into temptation) (“Może to największe …,” PN, 5). Such unstable, flimsy poetic words perfectly reflect the “fleeting world” in which “umykająca chwila’ i ‘liść / oderwany od gałęzi” (a fleeing moment and leaf / torn off the branch) (“Liść …,” PN, 18) weigh more than “twardy rdzeń zdarzeń” (the hard core of events). In Kapuściński’s poetry, this precious elusiveness has yet another face – the indelible stigma of loss: “Dlaczego / świat / przeleciał obok mnie / tak szybko […] / pognał / znikający punkt / w ogniu i dymie (Why / the world / fly past me / so quickly […] / it pursued / vanishing point / in fire and smoke) (“Dlaczego …,” N, 163). The bipolarity of the moment marks the lyrical work of the author of the Laws of Nature with a pessimistic meaning: “Humanity’s contact with the world happens in the blink of an eye and is painfully marked by loss.” In Kapuściński’s poetic reflection, “the fleeting moment” has strong opposition – it is balanced by the “mystery of the tree”: sensual lightness is opposed to the metaphor of hardness, the ethereal flight of the leaf corresponds to the arduous penetration of the roots. The tree is one of the most expressive elements of this world, and – importantly – it is also bivalent. On the one hand, a tree is a metaphor for refuge: “Potem będą tam w cieniu drzewa / Adam i Ewa” (Whereupon in the shade of the tree / Adam and Eve) (“Marzec drzewa czekają na soki liście …,” PN, 58), but there is also a picture of the cruel history of the world: “drzazgi / wbijane pod paznokieć / ziemi” (pegs / jammed under the nail / of the earth) (“kiedy obmyślają …,” N, 134). From this significant dichotomy, the following conclusion can be drawn: “The experience of Eve’s children is determined by the tormenting duality and ambiguity of a divided world that has long ceased to be a garden.” However, the tree in Kapuściński’s poetic world is by nature much more impenetrable. Testimony to this is the astonishing adventure of a sculptor from Ashantiland, who painstakingly tears off successive layers of hard teak wood to see a pair of eyes staring at him at the end of his struggle. Thus, a tree is an unfathomable mystery, stubborn matter, a reality that is terrifying to know. The author of the study argues, however, that the Ashanti sculptor did not fail: “The creative and cognitive activities of the African sculptor, his stubbornly repeated efforts, somewhat reminiscent of the toil of the adamant protagonists of Bolesław Leśmian’s ‘Dziewczyna,’ are a lesson in existential heroism, without promise, without consolation, without reward.” The same value of heroic existence is encoded by the author, using the

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metaphor of roots that live truly only when they drill, penetrate into the depths, “thrown to the surface / idle / wither” (“Korzenie mają kierunek pionowy …,” PN, 22). The poetic image gains the weight of the message: “life comes from penetrating the depths.” In the world of Kapuściński’s lyrics, however, there is no room for final conclusions. So this strong statement will soon find its counterbalance: “While the duty of life is to ‘penetrate into the depths,’” writes Kisiel, “the essence of his happy moments cannot forget about the flight. The experience of the root and the experience of the wings in Ryszard Kapuściński’s poetry complement each other.” The eternal dream of flight also reveals its reverse here; it is at the same time a story of a fall and of a constant tension between the two (“Profesor Kant …,” N, 156). Another existential metaphor is born of the dynamics of this feedback, artfully coded in the image of the bow. This one is derived – as the author of the study reminds us – from the same root as the word “life,” bios (“Po dwóch stronach oceanu,” PN, 9). After all, the line of the arc always coincides with the line of human life, which emerges from infinity and returns to it. Kapuściński’s poetry reveals its internal dynamics through its internal differentiation and suggestively contrasted images. The stubborn attempts to subdue reality – whether by faithfulness to the moment or by laborious attempts to break through to the essence – come to nothing. Kisiel writes: “Each time the world remains an elusive and impenetrable opponent … However, the mystery of reality remains beyond … reach. In Kapuściński’s poems, unlike his prose, a dramatic capitulation to the unknowable and impenetrable world takes place. A master of reportage, a precise chronicler of events, endowed with the rare ability to clearly explain the world, he expresses his helplessness toward it in his lyrics.” Kapuściński’s poems thus reveal a new face of the daring reporter, new – which should be emphasized – even for himself. The writer once confessed to Jarosław Mikołajewski: “Writing a poem, we discover a difference in ourselves that we did not suspect ourselves of before we sat down in front of the page. Because writing a poem is a surprisingly valuable type of discovery – in itself and of yourself. It is a strange and beautiful feeling.”16 The poem that ends Prawa natury is a record of this amazement with himself – it is a reporter’s volume, which was published in Poland exactly twenty years after the publication of his poetic debut in Notes.17

“The next unwritten book”

Odszedłem tak daleko od siebie że już nie umiem nic powiedzieć na swój temat ani co czuję kiedy moknę na deszczu ani kiedy zamieniam się w źdźbło suchej trawy wypalonej słońcem nie umiem odnaleźć samego siebie opisać tej postaci nazwać jej zapewnić że istnieje (PN, 63)

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I withdrew so far from myself that I am no longer able to speak about myself or what I feel when I get wet in the rain or when I transform myself into a blade of dry grass burnt by the sun I am unable to disclose myself describe this figure name it be certain it exists

A specific arrangement of the lines may resemble a fragment of an hourglass. The clear shape of the object is disrupted by a single word that has been thrown outside the outline of the hourglass, spoken after a long pause, as if with hesitation: “exists.” The graphically distinguished verb, shifted by inflexion to the third person singular, is thus twice abstracted – it creates the appearance of alienation, incompatibility; it seems to come from a different order. And the hourglass itself? Deprived of its lower part, it radically changes its property – the sand escaping from its upper part will not steadily hit the hard ground, will not fall into the clearly outlined contour of the glass bubble, the clock will no longer be able to be turned back. The movement of sand is thus one-directional, irreversible, final. Toward nothingness? In this confusion, the lyrical “I” gets lost somewhere – sucked in by a powerful centripetal force, together with other grains, it inevitably heads for the exit. The words “I am unable to disclose / my self ” are the last, despairing voice of a creature still aware of its identity (“Odszedłem tak daleko …,” PN, 63). The next line, however, invalidates that one certainty. When the lyrical “I” exists again, it will be deprived of its own subjectivity – it will come back as an alien, objectified “character,” requiring reassurance that … it exists. In the study, Ja – Inny … (I – the Other … ), Joanna Kisiel offers some interesting interpretative suggestions for this piece, while admitting the possibility of a reading that annexes biographical experiences.

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In that regard, the poem can be read as a surprising counterpoint to wide-ranging attempts found in prose to explain the world’s complex transformations. A gesture of helplessness in the face of the question of: “what do I feel / when I am getting wet in the rain,” seen from the perspective of a reporter’s passion for exploring and describing reality, acquires special significance. A suspicion that this loss of self occurs in pursuit of the world and the word chasing after it is worthy of interpretative reflection. A passionate love affair with a complex and diverse reality probably comes at a price. The “I” scattered in the journey – like the “other” – distant and impenetrable, becomes more exotic than the most distant, overseas lands. The surprising conclusions drawn from reading this poem leave no doubt that poetry, while quantitatively a modest complement to his prose works, is, even so, a space to which an attentive reader cannot remain indifferent. This poetic link would turn out to be highly significant for Kapuściński’s biography and work, not only as a writer’s initiation but also as an important feature of his personality, which, together with the truly lyrical cult of the word, resulted in a new type of reportage.18 •

Kapuściński’s third new artistic direction in the 1980s was Lapidarium. When released in 1990, it was meant to be to be a one-off supplement to his serious reportage. Today, we know that this volume led to a series of six books written over sixteen years. The first volume was received with as much surprise as his first volume of poems. This new work was again strikingly different from anything he had written to date. Instead of a synthesis, the book offered fragments; instead of rapid narration, a commentary; instead of moving stories, sparkling thoughts and scraps of conversation. Kapuściński was of course aware that by abandoning narrative for a rough gloss, again to paraphrase Krzysztof Karasek’s comment about Notes, he was putting his reputation at risk and making yet another debut.19 In publishing his notes, the author was taking up a broader trend in writing, following the trail of Przyboś, Kuncewiczowa, Bobkowski, Breza, Stempowski, Irzykowski, Herling-Grudziński, and Miłosz.

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“What genre is it?,” he asks in the pages of Lapidarium. “Reportage? Essay? Both, but also something more. This is new literature. It is about building reflections, moods, scenes instead of creating characters and intrigue. Building great (important, new) characters is getting harder today. But whether this new literature is something instead of or just something alongside – time will tell” (L, 88). In an interview with Stanisław Bereś, he added: “I don’t think about what genre it will be. I just want to write a text that, in my opinion and experience, is the closest and most faithful to what is around me. And how it will be qualified and named is a matter for critics and researchers, not for me.”20 Questions about the form of Lapidarium divided the critics, probably as never before. Up to this point they had been nearly unanimous in their approval of Kapuściński’s work. And although their disputes must remain unresolved – for they reflect individual reading preferences and literary expectations – it is worth quoting at least a few critics’ positions on Lapidarium, given how polarized they are. Some said that this form testified to the author’s helplessness as he tried to grasp the fragmented world;21 others said his resort to collage techniques rather than generalizing judgments was the only credible approach to describing this “non-transparent world” (Tadeusz Szkołut).22 Some viewed Lapidarium as a “folder of half-done jobs” (Wiesław Kot);23 others opined that “‘gloss’ prose found a virtuoso in Kapuściński” (Leszek Żuliński).24 Some accused the book of clumsiness and posing (Marek Zaleski: “A thought pretends to be an aphorism, a description pretends to be a metaphor, an episode to be a parable, and the narration of the quasi-diary to be prose”25); others (Zbigniew Bauer) saw in it “the philosophy of an excerpt. The philosophy of a lapidarium, in which a randomly discovered piece contains a vision of a building.”26 The reviews included opinions about the banality of some of the volume’s theses.27 Kapuściński, as if anticipating this, offered a significant definition of that term in his book: “The concept of banality. ‘A saying that does not have any deeper content, is well known, a phrase that is worn out, hackneyed, banal; cliche, platitude, slogan’” (Słownik języka polskiego, vol. 1). Two reservations arise in relation to that definition. “First of all, who is to be the judge here? To whom shall we give the right and the power to adjudicate? Secondly, whether a given statement is banal depends on the context and the situation” (L, 241). The validity of these words is confirmed by reviews in which the same fragments of Lapidarium constitute a discovery for some, a tidy thought worth writing down,

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a valuable aphorism, but for others, only banality. Thus, for example, the statement “Today there is no left or right, there are only people with an open, liberal, absorbant mentality, oriented towards the future, and people with a closed, sectarian, narrow mentality, turned to the past” (L, 246–7) is a “separate brick” for Tomasz Jastrun: “Kapuściński’s geography of offences and frights is identical to mine.”28 It is worth pausing on this thought, reflecting on it, developing it, raising reservations. Yet for Paweł Rodak, the very same remark about human mentality is one of the “banal and stereotypical annotations, which in a high school student’s album could play the role of golden thoughts, but in the diary of an eminent writer – they are only boring.”29 Janusz Drzewucki30 contended that the presence of banality in the book was justified, indeed necessary, for banality is a constitutive component of the world, which is an amalgam of greatness and smallness, eminence and mediocrity, sublime beauty and common ugliness. Hence the Lapidarium – intended as an attempt to describe the nature of the world – could not have been without banality. And Drzewucki’s opinion probably comes near the author’s actual intention. More than once, Kapuściński wrote that a book composed solely of bold statements would be as indigestible as a cake consisting solely of dried fruits and nuts: “Overly concentrated prose is boring and tiring. No mind can stay at the heights forever. All good prose needs worse moments, it even needs some kitsch to let the reader relax, rest, stop paying attention, walk around some flat and mild terrain” (L IV, 85–6). Kapuściński was unswayed by the relatively critical reception of the series and continued writing his Lapidaria for more than twenty years. They were undoubtedly his longest-lasting project. He had begun them as random notes, out of necessity, once his years of intensive journeys funded by pap ended, and over time, these jottings became a habit. Even a glance at these six volumes makes clear that they are a record of important turns in the writer’s professional life. The first volume starts out like a typical journalistic notebook. It is a description of his Mexican experiences in 1972, when he was still working in Latin America as a full-time employee of pap . The notes that record these agency journeys around Mexico indicate clearly that in the early 1970s, he was already experimenting with the “lapidarium” form. But who can know? Perhaps this first chapter of Lapidarium was an attempt to describe the rich, glimmering nature of Latin America using a formula he would apply several years later to describe the world. Similarly, the second fragment in the volume, titled “Z Gdańska 1980” (From

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Gdańsk 1980) is also the work of a full-time reporter, an envoy of Kultura to the shipyard strike. These notes, comprising the second part of the collection, are from a reporter who has already become legendary, published in the thirty-seventh issue of the weekly just after the August ’80 events. However, subsequent parts of Lapidarium, written after 1982, are most often descriptions of current events, supported by the author’s reflections. Kapuściński had adopted “current topicality” as a criterion for selecting material for the book. Thus, the text is organized in terms of time and place (“From Warsaw 1982,” “From New York 1983,” etc.). Such a method can easily be explained by his professional situation – we can assume that he kept his notes mainly to stay in the game, so that his “workshop is active.”31 This was probably the original purpose of his work on Lapidarium. Thus, the first volume amounts to things he wrote “instead of …” The following parts, however, bring a distinct compositional change: they are no longer notes of his observations locked into a place and time. Some of them are dated and named after a place, but this apparent inconsistency is, in fact, a deliberate creative act intended to give the impression of a raw, untreated style.32 By the second volume of Lapidarium, Kapuściński has adopted a different strategy: in organizing his notes, he has adopted thematic criteria – they are now reflections on nature, creativity, art, politics, and so on. And another difference is not difficult to notice – the second volume, published in 1995, was written almost in tandem with Imperium (1993), and subsequent volumes accompany The Shadow of the Sun and Travels with Herodotus. He is writing them not “instead of ” but rather “as well as.” They often constitute the thematic background to these books; so to speak, they are their stylistic training ground. The Lapidaria consist of thoughts, sketches, and quotes written as if in the margins of reports about Asia and Africa. But if in those reports they are saturated with colours, here they shine with their inner light, so that, for example, a banal description of the sky becomes a vision. Such probable fluctuations are noted by Zbigniew Bauer,33 who put together the following passages: Lapidarium: The sky, when I’m flying somewhere (but when and where?), is navy blue at the bottom, above that blue, above that, still higher – orange, then pink, and brick red at the top, after a while to then turn into a dark grey, finally, to become denser, and finally, ultimately, it closes up and falls into darkness. (L, 194)34

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The same observation gains a completely different stylistic setting in Imperium: When a plane reaches several thousand metres, it suddenly flies into the backstage of some huge cosmic theatre. We cannot see the stage, which is plunged in darkness underneath. We can only see shining curtains hung in the sky. These are light and pastel-coloured curtains, several hundred kilometres high, with a yellow and green shade. These curtains radiate with pulsing and vibrating light. The plane seems to be lost in these bright and colourful draperies, as if it lost its way, got disoriented and started uneasily circling around colourful and wrinkled pieces of fabric hung in the sky. (I, 150) The value of Lapidarium, however, is not exhausted by its function in relation to long, important texts, such as Imperium and The Shadow of the Sun. This book, as it happened, was indispensable in Kapuściński’s creative evolution. It is plain to see that the author himself is being transformed: as the series continues, his perspective is changing, from that of a witness to current events to that of a commentator, a social diagnostician, a philosopher. One could even say that Imperium, The Shadow of the Sun, and Travels with Herodotus are written in such a clear reflective voice because they were preceded by his work on the Lapidaria. This important distinction is quite noticeable in the rhythm of writing – the texts now clearly lean toward the essay, generalized reflections, embracing a wide thematic panorama. In his earlier books, Kapuściński had declared his interest in individual continents, regions, states; by the time of writing the Lapidaria, he had become concerned with the world’s problems. In the first pages of the second volume, he reveals his great unfulfilled dream, a gigantic undertaking: to describe “One Day of the World”: The sun is rising over Tibet, the Sahara, Florence and Lima … the smell of coffee, tea, scrambled eggs, the blood of a freshly slaughtered hen or cassava is spreading everywhere … They are beating manioc, digging up potatoes, steering a ship and flying a plane … Fires are being made, lights in the windows, lighthouses and neon signs are being turned on, the abdomina of common glow-worms and the eyes of boa constrictors are lighting up. (L, 193–4)

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It might be interesting to observe how this need to comprehend the world grew in Kapuściński’s work. Here, in the reportage “Zbiórka wśród drzew” (Collection among the Trees), written by the twentysomething-year-old, the author writes about the common soldier’s fate: It is us, the privates of this world, who get up at the same hour, exercise at all latitudes, shoot figures, nailing it or missing the target, keep marching even though we do not know where to and what for, make the beds so that they are tip-top, clean latrines, long for passes, answer “Yes, sir!,” and salute others in accordance with regulations written in all kinds of languages. (B, 117) Yet over time, there is a clear change of perspective in Kapuściński’s writing. The young reporter may still hope he will manage to embrace “all the privates of the world,” whereas the author of Lapidarium already knows that the dream of describing one day of the world will never come true. “To get to know and embrace our planet today is beyond human capabilities” (L, 307). So he takes a different approach. The image of our globe that he dreams of creating evolves into a collage that takes up various fragments of reality: natural phenomena, readings, diagnoses of contemporary culture, the crisis of philosophy, the evolution of art, reporter’s craftsmanship, everyday life. Kapuściński tries various tools in his efforts to examine the reality available to him. Over time he builds its image out of crumbs of thought. Thus, for example, he presents three different visions of the homeland – each one honest and credible, although ultimately boiling down to different definitions: “Genet: ‘My homeland is two or three acquaintances.’ Camus: ‘Yes, I have a motherland: French.’ Tuareg: ‘My homeland is where it rains’” (L, 256). At other times, he reaches for scraps of sensations that, if properly polished, may shine with the light of metaphor. You can imagine such potential in the image of once elegant Oxford Street, which had turned into a noisy kitsch market (see L, 88–9). But in Lapidarium, the reporter’s other passion is also revealed: explaining the present day. The author diagnoses the current world crises, names their immediate consequences, and forms hypotheses about the future of our world. Where did this need to translate the laws of the world come from? Kapuściński recalled a conversation with the philosopher Jerzy Łoziński: “We have agreed that if we cannot change the world, we should at least observe it and try to name it, create a language, coin

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terms for phenomena that did not exist in the past and were not defined. We can only rationally navigate, understand and affect the shape and order of a world that is definable and defined” (L VI, 54). Jerzy Pilch wrote that in his later years, Kapuściński abandoned the Great Metaphor for the Great Explanation.35 Indeed, in this regard, his Lapidaria are an exemplar. In them, reality is presented in a discursive and rational way, underpinned by strong erudition. However, this image composed of atoms does not give the impression of a disorderly collection. The glue connecting individual fragments, shards, and crumbs is a clearly accented subjective perspective. The Lapidaria, in fact, amount to the story of his personal experience of reality through his own readings, encounters, travels, and reflections; they are an account of his personal contact with the world, an examination of its nature as it has been revealed to him and as he perceived it. Because this is so, this record acquires a significant value. It may not be objective, but clearly, it is authentic.36 It is difficult to overestimate the value of his generously scattered self-referential remarks in Lapidaria. Kapuściński happily reveals the secrets of the profession; he writes about the necessary reading preparation, the acquiring of material, the stylistic processing of texts, and above all, reporters’ responsibility. He calls the work of a war correspondent a mission; he considers sympathy for people to be indispensable to that work, and the ability to sacrifice – to consent to suffering, hunger, arrest, beatings – to be a necessity. In the Italian translation of his text “This Is Not a Profession for Cynics,” we find the essence of his reporter’s mission. “The ‘emperor of reportage,’ as journalists around the world like to call him – in Lapidaria, he clearly specified the basic sense of his work: ‘My main theme is the life of the poor’” (L, 306). The opposite of these remarks about journalism understood as a mission are his opinions about contemporary media, which are generously scattered throughout Lapidaria, and which – according to him – are today dominated by “media workers” – technical teams more interested in finding an electrical plug than in actually meeting their subjects. Contemporary journalists, attached as they are to their gadgets, often lose contact with the reality they are there to describe and do not have the opportunity (or even the desire!) to properly investigate their subjects. They lack the time for proper preparation, reading, or prolonged association with their heroes. It is enough to be fast and loud! As a result, the breathless media rushing on in the never-ending race for “news” give their viewers a load of nonsense.

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For their part, viewers are bewildered by the sheer multitude of possibilities, mindlessly surfing endless oceans of stupidity and kitsch, safely drifting off to another channel when they hit an ominous depth that requires them to engage in thinking. In this Brave New World, the viewer becomes a voyeur who accepts the world without obligations, without responsibility, barely touching the surface of meanings. Yet choosing such an existence has serious ethical consequences. Kapuściński wrote directly about the threats posed by the media, which inure us to the suffering of others. “This characteristic of human nature was brilliantly recognized by Bolesław Miciński, who condemned the attitude that boils down to ‘That’s interesting!’ If our reaction to evil is ‘That’s interesting!,’ then in his opinion, we commit an ethical wrongdoing because we reduce everything to a show, a theatre” (L, 349). The modern media are a mass phenomenon in which it is difficult to find an old-fashioned reporter. Moreover, it is impractical to have an individual “who travels around the world, to distant countries: he writes about those who do not read him, for those who are little interested in his heroes” (L, 405). Meanwhile, the media that could mediate interpersonal communication at best encounter a kind of indifference toward Others. The media care about one thing – how to tempt viewers with goods. In a world without values, there is no place for the sacrum. The banks have become modern temples – the only places where there is no hustle and bustle; instead there is silence, discretion, and elegance. Consumption has become the most important religion, and its neon gods shimmer with colours – “c&a kaufhalle hansen boecker pariscop malkowsky foto quelle ” (L, 78). Contemporary humans are drowning in the very idea of consumption: “From morning to night in cafes, bars, clubs, restaurants – they eat. Conversation topics: where will we eat, what will we eat, what we chose from the menu, what they served, how it was … They conclude – we eat too much” (L, 63). At which point they are occupied by one thing – how to lose a few extra kilos. Then “some decide to run. Others are studying weight loss magazines” (L, 63). Over and over again. It is hardly surprising that when they hear about happy people crossing the jungle, the desert, or high mountains with a stick in their hand and a little water in a wineskin, they tap their heads. The Lapidaria take note of an important mass media paradox – the tools designed to facilitate communication are causing our species to split into two completely alien evolutionary branches: Homo informaticus and poor human.

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In his writings, Kapuściński contends that the crisis of the media is simply a reflection of a much more serious disease plaguing our civilization. Its symptoms are being in a constant rush, the dictates of shoddiness and kitsch, the philosophy of excess, immoderate consumption, stunted spirituality, the reign of pseudo-knowledge, and the crisis of words. In the Lapidaria, he posits that the counterpoint to these global diseases is images of nature, yet the nature he describes is poor, unimposing, flaccid: “Sunny. Bright sky. It’s already green, but the green is still shy, weak, transparent, on thin legs” (L VI, 55). The author is not interested in towering mountains, which fill him with dread. In the world of nature, he is fascinated by simplicity, silence, meekness, peace, which constitute a counterbalance (albeit meagre) to the momentum of a world ruled by strength, excess, and noise. Kapuściński found another antidote to the diseases of our civilization in his persistent attempts to establish a dialogue with the Other. He argued tirelessly that in a depersonalized and indifferent reality, a friendly conversation is better than a solitary existence. This idealistic attitude had a very personal dimension for him: “I need the presence of another human being because I need the energy radiating from him, which makes me stronger; closeness to another person makes me stronger.” The importance of this message is strengthened by the last thought he records in Lapidarium VI, a kind of memento for his readers: “Smiling is a necessity of life. A person smiling to us gives us strength and optimism, enhancing our sense of safety. When we meet a stranger, we are grateful when they smile to us. This smiling face gives us so much pleasure and satisfaction.” What was he trying to tell us by closing his last book in this way? Perhaps he wanted to give at the end – as Kołakowski said – a fragile anticipation of a more endurable life on this ship of madmen.37 Indeed, Lapidarium, a record of an original biography, is above all a history of many encounters. The book records Kapuściński’s contacts with the intellectual beau monde (Susan Sontag, Francis Fukuyama, Gabriel García Márquez, Heidi and Alvin Toffler, Salman Rushdie, Joseph Brodsky, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Neal Ascherson, Allen Ginsberg, Zbigniew Brzeziński). However, the intellectual contacts in these volumes function on an equal footing with the ordinary conversations he has on a daily basis. It is enough to recall, for example, the discussion with his neighbour, Mrs Rogowska, who is over ninety years old and in a hurry to meet her friends waiting for her in the next world. The Lapidarium is not a collection of encounters with

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outstanding personalities – Kapuściński only mentions them when they are important to him for some reason, when they make him aware of something, enchant him with something, intrigue him. The same principle applies to the events he registers. At times, his days are filled with subtle intellectual debates at the world’s most important universities. At other times, his days are idle, hopeless, wasted. He simultaneously admires a soaring Gothic cathedral and a girl resting nearby – his attention is drawn to her firm thigh, now unceremoniously blocking his view of a brilliant achievement of the medieval builders (L, 88). Lapidarium offers a vision of the world as a diverse, rich space in which great, important, and momentous matters coexist on equal footing with ordinary life. We gradually gain the impression that everyday life has become the author’s greatest fascination. In the Lapidaria, we find these significant notes: “discover the sacrum hidden in ordinariness” (L VI, 123); “The greatest joy is discovering the extraordinary in the most ordinary things” (L, 353); “I used to be fascinated by the front … Now I am increasingly interested in another aspect of every conflict, namely normality amid abnormality, as well as a persistent pursuit of normality in an abnormal situation, which is almost instinctive but also full of initiative, inventiveness, and determination” (L, 231). This enchantment with everyday life was likely the result of a different perspective on the world. By now, Kapuściński was leading an intense professional life, yet he was no longer working as a correspondent. He was now an insightful explorer of everyday life, experiencing it with all his senses. He visited art galleries, recording his daily insights and the disappointments that accompanied them. Even the air tasted good: “Air has not only density and smell, but also taste. It can be sweet, salty, sour, etc.” (L, 440). A detailed record of everyday life as he experienced it gives us an idea of the vectors of his interests at the time, sometimes arranged in clear sequences, such as, for example, philosophy, politics, literature, art, nature. The traces of this intense communion with everyday life comprise a flickering image of his private mappa mundi. But these are not all the pebbles the author used to painstakingly create his image of the world. Being a faithful disciple of his master Herodotus, he knew that dreams must not be ignored. In Lapidarium IV, he writes: “Reading Herodotus: dreams, prophecies, fortune-telling – that is what his heroes are guided by in their choices and decisions. Thus, according to Herodotus, history is made up of what is accidental, unclear and irrational” (L IV, 76). Following this path, Kapuściński

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noted down his dreams, and again – on the basis of equivalence – he placed them next to real events. It is interesting to observe the mutual connections between the world of dreams and the real world. Here, in the short chapter that ends the second volume of Lapidarium, which is devoted to fundamental issues and – generally – the idea of passing away, the author describes his surreal dream, as if transferred from the 1931 painting by Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory (also known as The Soft Watches). “I had a dream: I’m holding a watch in my hand. Suddenly, the numbers disappear from its dial, the hands disappear. The dial lengthens, turns white. From the inside of the watch, circles, springs and plates are pouring out onto my hand.” It is worth adding that several dozen pages earlier, the author wrote twice about his impressions of exhibitions of Salvador Dalí’s works. Recalling one of these in Spandau Citadel in Berlin, he reflected on young people’s reception of the astonishing world depicted in these paintings. He observed their reactions to the complete osmosis between the real and surreal worlds, for example, “the sculpted horse whose leg is replaced with a wheel and whose wings (because it is Pegasus) are replaced with a gold plated fender” (L, 234). Young people were not shocked by the eccentric world of the Catalan artist, because “Dalí – is part of their imagination today, their way of seeing and understanding the world … The world today is simply full of such oddities and wonders” (L, 234–5). How does this manifest itself in dreams? As was suggested earlier, it may have to do with how we perceive fundamental issues. Twenty-first-century Homo sapiens finds himself lost and bewildered by the excess of impressions that contemporary culture provides him, and more and more distant from the reality accessible to his senses. The author of the Lapidaria noticed the advantages of mutual penetration of these different worlds. He was able to connect them coherently, thus achieving a rich, flickering, sensual image of reality. But where is the border between waking and dreaming – that is, between fact and fiction? Establishing this was a fundamental question for Kapuściński. As it turns out, for him, the notion of fact did not have to be overly narrow. With regard to facts, it was possible to attach areas not commonly identified with objectivity and verifiability, such as moods, dreams, impressions. And from there, it was only another step to magic realism. This somewhat paradoxical convergence between the reportage by the author of The Emperor and the works of the masters of Latin American prose had been noted earlier by both Polish and foreign reviewers. Perhaps it was John le Carré who first pointed to the

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magical quality of Kapuściński’s writing: “Just like Márquez is a great wizard of the contemporary novel, Kapuściński is an extraordinary wizard of reportage. The Soccer War is a perfect example of his writing magic.”38 A little later, in the pages of the New York Review of Books, an extensive review of Imperium appeared in which Adam Hochschild described this work as “magical journalism”: The Chicago Tribune recognized Kapuściński as “the ‘reporter’s reporter’ … the best in the business.” Corriere della Sera calls him “the greatest living war correspondent.” But if a reporter means someone who accurately presents facts normally thought important (“The President’s press secretary announced today that”), Kapuscinski is anything but one. He takes few notes. His dispatches from odd corners of the world often ignore the main political events. If the work of contemporary Latin American novelists, sprinkled with trees that move and birds that talk, is magic realism, Kapuscinski, a Pole, has created a kind of magic journalism.39 Looking more closely at the Lapidaria, it is possible to glean a link to the stories of Jorge Luis Borges. Kapuściński reminds us of Borges’s hero, who wanted to find his Alef – a point “from which you can see the whole universe”: “the populous sea, dawn and dusk, the multitudes of the Americas, a silver cobweb in the center of a black pyramid, a broken labyrinth that was London … bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, veins of metal, steam … and simultaneously every letter on every page … a terraqueous globe placed between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly in a study in Alkmaar.”40 Similarly, in Kapuściński’s work we can find the motif of a labyrinth, which is Borges’s favourite spatial figure. We see it in the repetition of certain themes, threads, reflections – present especially in the Lapidaria but also spread across the reporter’s entire work. For – as Zbigniew Bauer argues – “Kapuściński’s writing creates a peculiar system of complementary and developing images, scenes, thoughts and observations that enter into various dialogues.”41 The reflections and duplications eagerly cited by the author of The Emperor also found fertile ground in the field of stylistics. Małgorzata Czermińska rightly points out that enumeration is Kapuściński’s favourite stylistic device. Especially in the Lapidaria, he uses “stylistic fireworks, wonderful parades of words, the meanings of which complement each other, graduate a phenomenon or contrast with each other. The writer plays with language games

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on the border of pure nonsense, arranges sequences of several rhyming nouns, frames them in the framework of syntactic parallelisms.”42 The world described by an ingenious labyrinth of words became a fascinating mirror of reality, the Library of Babel, which “promises infinity.” The essential convergence between Kapuściński’s world and – let’s say – that of Borges also lies in the privileged position of the book. In the genealogical sense, Lapidaria may resemble a cento – a collection of quotations, a kind of book of books.43 The six volumes of notes can also be read as “sequels” to the many unwritten books whose promising beginnings had already appeared in The Soccer War. In the plan of his creative biography, they constitute a sum of other possible “reading entities” – collections not written yet strongly present in the reflection undertaken by the creator of The Emperor – about the reporter’s craft, the problems of globalism, the media, Poland, Pińsk. The Lapidaria are also the most important items in Kapuściński’s output if we want to ascertain what role books played in his life and work. Reading this series offers a unique opportunity to reconstruct his infatuation with their world, makes it possible to trace the reporter’s reading fascinations, and also testifies to his image of himself among books. Reading the notes, one gets the impression that books were a kind of obsession for him. He told Barbara Łopieńska flat out that he was crazy about them.44 He also said he had had one idea over the years – to collect as many of them as possible. When, after several years in Africa, he finally returned to Poland, the customs officer at the Gdańsk railway station queried him about his luggage because only a box of books, a frying pan, and jeans had arrived. The reporter would collect his reading trophies in his home archive or deliver them around the world (including Lagos, Mexico, the US, and Britain), where, as he said, he had established his private libraries: “I carry around books on a given country, appropriate dictionaries, and also Polish books from the perspective of language, for example, Pan Tadeusz, Beniowski, Nałkowska. Then there’s the problem of coming back, so I leave some of the books with someone in the hope of going back to them someday. Sometimes I return and sometimes I never go there again. It varies.” But it is precisely the Lapidaria that testify that this had not always been so. His childhood and early adolescence – the period of his liveliest fascination with reading – passed at a time when reading was a rare luxury. Let us recall: as noted in Imperium, he first learned the alphabet from the letter “s” because that letter was the beginning of the surname taken by Stalin, the author of the only book from which his class was

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taught at the time: Problems of Leninism. In 1940, at the age of eight, he escaped with his mother and younger sister from being deported from the Borderlands. They headed toward the capital as refugees, taking with them only what was most necessary, and were often robbed. They found Warsaw in ruins: there were no apartments, and even less so were there libraries. He recorded regretfully in Lapidarium: “James Joyce, at the age of twelve, wrote remarkable letters; I was running after cows in the field at the same age and hadn’t read a single book yet” (L, 222). In the postwar years, the situation changed only slightly: for the entire class Kapuściński attended, there was only one old, torn copy of a prewar history textbook. “The learning was based on this,” he explained, “that at the beginning of the lesson, professor Markowski ordered our friend, a certain Kubiak, to read a fragment of the book, and then questioning took place. It was about telling in your own words what you have just read” (L, 279). This is how the author summed up the sad experience of the war generation: We, born around 1930 in the deep and poor Polish province, in the countryside or in small towns, in peasant families or in the ordinary intelligentsia, were characterized in the postwar period, above all, by a very low level of knowledge, complete lack of reading, knowledge of literature, history, and the world, complete lack of good education (my pathetically miserable readings of those years: Antonina Domańska’s Historia żółtej ciżemki, published in 1913, and Wiktor Gomulicki’s Wspomnienia niebieskiego mundurka, published in 1906). (L, 279) He associated his early student years with a lack of books: “I began studying history in 1951, and since all history was denied by the Stalinist authorities as bourgeois, we only used Soviet textbooks translated into Polish. Some had not yet been published; they were often in typescript. We sat in the whole group, someone read, and the rest took notes.”45 It also happened that for the two hundred students taking the modern history exam, there was only one textbook, and it was in Russian. Thus, his first years of professional activity were marked by catching up with reading. When the young journalist was offered a trip to India, he felt dizzy and then panicked. After all, he knew nothing about India. And what was worse, he didn’t know where to acquire this knowledge. He started his search with a conversation with an expert on the subject, editor Brodzki. “I approached him shyly,” he confessed

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later, “because he had a famous name and I was a beginner: ‘Could you tell me something about India?’ He got lost in his thoughts: ‘Oh, India,’ he said, ‘Whoah, that’s a huge country.’ And he said no more. That’s what my professional training was like. In fact, I learnt this profession on my own, trying to stand out.”46 If Kapuściński is to be believed, he learned English by reading Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls with an English–Polish pocket dictionary by his side. Thus, books quickly began to play a significant role in his life, and he soon began to create his own library. He now discovered that reading could be the best school for learning the craft of reportage. Thus, he learned reportage from the father of history – Herodotus – and from the writings of the renowned Polish-born anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski. Over time, books began to play a special role in his life – they became a faithful companion on his exotic journeys: For me, it was an extremely important and close companion. A companion on whom you can impose your presence whenever you want, at any time, regardless of the mood. A human companion can fuss, have whims, etc. You can argue or break up, whereas a book is so submissive and helpful. It wants to be with us, focus, make friends, it wants to be treated like a close friend, the closest.47 He admitted that in his case, he read especially intensely in his last two or three decades. In books, he looked for knowledge, inspiration, and style: I read a lot. I study history. Great historians like Gibbon, Mommsen, Ranke, Michelet, Burckhardt, and Toynbee are important to me. Then there is philosophy, my passion. Existentialism is very close to me. At the same time, two kinds of writers are of great importance to me. On the one hand, the romantic tradition of Hemingway and Saint-Exupéry, Chekhov and Conrad. On the other hand, authors such as Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust, who came close to the border where it becomes difficult to distinguish between philosophy and fiction. (L, 218) Kapuściński reached for books when he felt helpless in the face of the world, when he was looking for answers to problems that troubled him,48 but also when his writing became blocked: “When I write, I read a lot … I walk between the shelves and take whatever catches my

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eye … I need this library because it is multi-voiced. If the writing isn’t working for me, I take a second book and if there’s nothing there for me, take another one until something inspires me” (A, 94). Kapuściński’s library was, of course, not as infinite and magical as Borges’s Library of Babel. Even so, it had its magic: his books moved – his current reading went up the stairs to the mezzanine, and during intensive work, the floor was almost entirely covered with pyramids of papers, newspapers, and multilingual texts. The author even used military imagery to describe the moment of tidying up his desk – at such times, it looked like “a lofty wooden fortress besieged by columns of books waiting on the floor to climb to the top again” (L VI, 13–14). Kapuściński’s workspace had a “beyond time” appearance. There was no tv or telephone, but by the entrance there were wicker slippers from Polesie. It was a very photogenic place, but at the same time quiet, discreet, intimate: “Outside the window, there is darkness, wind, a cloudy sky, rain, cold, mud and fallen leaves, and here, in the studio, warmth, light, silence and books, seclusion, mood, my corner, my niche, my tao” (L VI, 70). The Lapidaria, to recall Marek Miller’s formula again, were a reportage laboratorium. In them, Kapuściński somehow shows us his writing from backstage. One even gets the impression that he is showing us around his private library; he takes out a book, quotes a fragment of it, reflects on it. At the same time, he tells us the secrets of his craft, recounts facts from his life, talks about what fascinates him and what irritates him. At one point, he leads us to a wooden pillar supporting the room’s roof and, pressing a pin against a photograph, begins a fascinating story, then goes to a string stretched between two beams and reads more quotes, maxims, reflections written on small pieces of paper artfully pinned with clothes pegs. The Lapidaria suspended in the spaces in his private library become an opportunity for a unique encounter with the reader. The author invites him to chat, inspires him, leaves an empty space for him between fragments of texts, doesn’t push … He perfectly understands that the reflection triggered by the reader is an indispensable element of their common puzzle. The Lapidaria are ongoing, by definition unfinished, they constitute a collage in statu nascendi. They are surprising and constantly re-created images fused with thoughts offered by the author, commented on by the reader, combined into one because they spark tensions on many levels – between the participants in the game, between them and the text, between reality and its interpretation. Thanks to the meeting of

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different individuals, we acquire a unique mappa mundi, existing in an infinite number of combinations. The way in which the author interacted with the world changed over time. Thus, we can adopt the following interpretative strategy: he started with a grandiose dream to describe the whole world (or at least one day), moved on to an attempt to capture reality precisely as it revealed itself to the author, and finally became an opportunity for a closer encounter with himself, thus turning into a description of intimate experiences. At this point, the aphoristic Lapidaria clearly meet Kapuściński’s poetry – they are filled with lyrical turns of phrase, artful metaphors, thoughts that, written into lines, could enter one of the reporter’s volumes. For example, the fragment “I feel the animal’s breath chasing me. It is chasing time, an enraged predator. I can feel it coming, getting ready to attack, it wants to deliver the killer blow” (L VI, 119) is probably a close echo of one of his poetic miniatures: Mój ból ciągle szykuje na mnie swój nóż ciągle go ostrzy

My pain Constantly readies its knife Constantly sharpens it

gdzie go wbije?

where to stab it?

od razu w serce?

straight in the heart? (PN, 47)

The contact between poetry and rough gloss is indeed significant. In his last texts, this invaluable translator of the world and expert on the Other turned toward himself. Ryszard Kapuściński was simultaneously a bravura war reporter, a versatile master holding the key to many of the world’s mysteries, and a sensitive poet who questioned his own existence – all three reflecting complementary aspects of a rich personality.

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The second volume of Lapidaria, setting aside its autonomous goals, would now also serve as a notebook of ideas and reflections for subsequent book ventures. It opens with a reflection that may herald the end of the writer’s pursuit of living, breathing history, as well as his new awareness that it is impossible to keep up with it: “It is difficult to write in a world of such violent and profound transformation. Everything slips from beneath our feet, symbols change, signs are rearranged, landmarks no longer have permanent places. The writer’s gaze wanders over new and unknown landscapes, and his voice is lost in the roar of the rushing avalanche of history” (L, 195). In the 1990s and the first years of the new century, he would express this discouragement by taking still more journeys, but these would be through time, in various ways, and not within the space of current events. Especially in Travels with Herodotus (2004), the Histories of the ancient historian and traveller – inseparable reading in his youth – would serve him as an extraordinary time machine that allowed him to return both to the early stages of his own biography and to the sources of European culture. The earlier Shadow of the Sun (1998), read anew, was now a journey to the sources of culture, to what is most elementary, necessary, and therefore universal in it, a journey along a path of personal initiation. Kapuściński did not succeed in realizing his plan to travel to the sources of contemporary anthropological thought, to the sources of respect for other cultures and the attitude of “dialogue with the Other,” which at that time he saw in the works of Malinowski and which he wanted to “touch” at the site of his field research in the Trobriand Islands, but he wrote and said a great deal about it.

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We cannot of course say that Kapuściński lost interest in current history – that would have been impossible. What matters here is that he stopped showing his interest in it by writing books. Nor did he return to journalism – by the 1990s, he had completely abandoned both general journalism and newspaper reportage (though he would publish his books in instalments in Gazeta Wyborcza). His interests now found an outlet in other forms – in the Lapidaria, readings, and lectures, and especially in longer and more and more frequent interviews printed in prestigious Polish and foreign press titles, in which there was always plenty of discussion of current history. But in these, he presented himself as a commentator, an expert, and steered away from autobiographical accounts of his many past journeys. This, incidentally, would make it easier in the 1990s than ever before for him to distinguish between writing “for himself ” and other kinds of writing. Limiting himself to the role of expert commentator did not limit his media presence in any way. On the contrary, his voice was heard more and more often and seemed even more indispensable. It is just that it turned out that he was an authority on multiple aspects of life, so it was worth asking his opinion on many important matters and to line him up for speeches, lectures, and extensive interviews. The experience he had gathered over his many years as a globe-trotting journalist complemented by his reading of countless books in several languages, his gift for foreseeing and explaining events, and his deep reflections on philosophy and the philosophy of history had made him one of the greatest authorities on global modernity. For the media, he was now an object of interest, not just as an author of brilliant works and a commentator on the world’s transformations but also as a uniquely fascinating person in all respects. His opinions were now being sought out to an extent that significantly exceeded what he could provide. In this way, in addition to the books he had written or had not written, a book the author himself called “spoken” had begun to develop. Contemporary readers now had the opportunity to read parts of this unusual work without seeking old back issues of magazines. For several years now, excerpts compiled by Krystyna Strączek from several dozen of his interviews have been circulating among readers. Autoportret reportera (A Reporter’s Self-Portrait),1 in five chapters approved by Kapuściński himself, amounts to a self-commentary facilitating access to the master’s more complex works. Many readers have selected it as their introduction to Kapuściński. We can hope that a similar role – this time in relation to Kapuściński’s area of interest – will be played by

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the publication that has since followed it, Rwący nurt historii: Zapiski o XX i XXI wieku (The Torrent of History: Notes on the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries), again compiled by Strączek.2 It was published after the writer’s death but was almost approved by him almost in its entirety before he passed away. A mere review of the chapter titles makes it possible to ascertain what issues in contemporary history fascinated him in the last dozen or so years of his life: memory and its record; the Third World after decolonization; Africa, Latin America, and the Islamic world; Russia and the Pacific; relations between Europe and the rest of the world; and the emancipation of old cultures in the face of the globalization’s challenges. Several interviews with Kapuściński, most of them published in Tygodnik Powszechny or in its supplement Apocryf, have been compiled in Kapuściński: nie ogarniam świata,3 conceived as a reconstruction of meetings between the writer and Witold Bereś and Krzysztof Burnetko. Among them is an excellent conversation, probably the longest of all of the ones conducted with Kapuściński about Africa (it is a pity that it has been cut and rearranged). Others include several forward-looking conversations devoted to Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the future of globalism, Poland after Solidarity, and the media’s role in shaping both the image of the world order and its future. From the point of view of Kapuściński’s greatest interests at that time – recorded, for example, in “Rwący nurt historii” (The Torrent of History) – it is, alas, a fragmentary book. His greatest passions at the time were realized not in interviews but in The Shadow of the Sun, Travels with Herodotus, and Imperium. Imperium, Kapuściński’s return to great writing after a ten-year break, holds a special place in the transformation of his writing in the 1990s. The book, the fruit of several visits to Russia during the perestroika years, was conceived as a work about great historical change; however, a much more elementary journey to sources unexpectedly emerged from it, one that included a return to the place of his birth, to Pińsk in Polesie (in the first and last chapters), which, as we know from the writer’s various enunciations, was to be continued in his writing as a journey deep into his prewar childhood. The book about the collapse of the Soviet Union eventually becomes an autobiographical story about his exile from and return to the family home. It can thus be said that in this books he confronts the possibility of fully returning to present history with the temptation to return to his sources. Yet this confrontation had started much earlier. A return to his birthplace, which he was forced to leave at the age of eight to escape

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deportation, was in fact one of his earliest creative intentions. He was already thinking about it at the end of the 1970s, and perhaps it was close to being part of the then-popular trend toward nostalgic literature about the Borderlands. The idea of a book about his childhood was probably born after his first postwar journey to Pińsk in 1979, shortly after he finished writing The Soccer War (1978). That was the first collection of reportages built on the principle of journalistic diaries, and it probably prompted his questions regarding his own earliest years. In 1976, around the time he was finishing The Soccer War, we come across a puzzling quote from Melville’s Moby Dick that would be echoed later in his description of the book about his Pińsk childhood as “closing the circle”:4 “Around the world! There is something in these words that can make you feel proud, but where does this journey go? It leads, through innumerable dangers, precisely to the same point from which we set out; where those we left behind in safety were still the first before us all the time” (W, 238).5 The question of the “starting point,” however, remained unanswered. Of course, it could have encountered various obstacles, the most important of which was probably the entanglement of this return to Pińsk in the age-old topos of returning to the family home after the end of the war, and regaining his place in it after the broken world order had been restored. In 1988, he published a text (abundantly quoted in the first chapter) under the title “Ćwiczenia pamięci” (Memory Exercises) in which, let us recall, for the second time he used the metaphor of rewriting “a book never written.” We read in it: “Because in a certain but important sense, the war didn’t end for me either in 1945 or soon after. In various ways, part of it continued, and it continues even to this day … I still didn’t have a home. Returning home from the front is the most felt symbol of the end of the war. Tutti a casa! But I couldn’t go home, now my home was abroad, in another country” (B, 13–15). Today, the topos of returning from the war serves only to show that, for many reasons, such a return is impossible. Real and symbolic childhood homes have been destroyed or are now trapped behind newly drawn national borders (and nobody expects their former inhabitants there), and those who experienced the war have stopped thinking about returning. Given how long Kapuściński’s return took, one might think that he too had come to terms with this impossibility. Yet after reading the quoted text, another hypothesis seems more probable: he did not take up the topic of his return to Pińsk because for him, the war was not really over yet.

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The “end of the war,” understood in this way, happened – as we now know, and not only according to Kapuściński – at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, which was also the end of that “shortest of centuries,” which began with the first war, abounded in revolutions, coups, and bloody conflicts, and found its culmination in the Second World War and its decades-long consequences. So it was also, in a sense, the “end of history,” according to Francis Fukuyama, who gave his famous book that title. Kapuściński never embraced this formula. He often argued with Fukuyama, viewing the transition between the two centuries in a more nuanced way: “The years 1989–1991,” he wrote in 2002, “changed everything, but the end of the East–West conflict was mistaken for a global and final victory for liberal democracy. In the 1990s there was a ‘tenyear holiday from history’ … which ended abruptly on 11 September.”6 However, when we ask ourselves whether we have returned to the same old historical reality since this holiday, we find, of course, that we haven’t. The world today is ruled by different driving forces, which perhaps were not identified and defined earlier because of our focus on the European consequences of the Second World War, which itself was a consequence of the cataclysmic events launched by the First World War in Europe. The writer never believed that a world without conflict was possible. He also believed that we cannot understand today’s dramatic events without taking careful account of processes involving entire civilizational formations. Readers of Kapuściński’s opinions and interviews from his later years know that he believed that the “dethronement of Europe” and the rise to prominence of other great cultural formations would drive the future of our world. The 9/11 terrorist attack on America in the name of Islam revealed this new face of history not by itself (Kapuściński rejected the theory of a collision or war of civilizations), but rather because the group that carried it out (combining the mechanisms of sects and the mafia) was able to exploit – in a destructive way – Arabs’ awakened anti-Western sense of identity and cultural sovereignty. In any case, the twenty-first century was for Kapuściński the century of the rebirth of great old cultural formations (but also of ethnic and regional differences). Despite the traumatic circumstances of that rebirth, he welcomed it, for he hoped that dialogue would develop in an increasingly integrated and more closely connected world. By sharpening his diagnosis a little and using his formulation,7 we can say that, unlike the twentieth century, which was the century of

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unexpected cataclysms, this new century is the century of culture (which is the driving force of great civilizational formations). When we allow ourselves this simple thought, it is easier to notice what an extremely interesting and symptomatic literary transformation we are dealing with here. Kapuściński was one of those rare writers who were people of history for most of their creative life. Thus, as a reporter, he was an outstanding representative of those twentieth-century journalists who both witnessed and participated in history’s unfolding. He saw for himself the collapse of most of Africa’s new nations in the 1960s and 1970s; he was in South America during the intensification of guerrilla warfare and the efforts to topple criminal (especially military) regimes; he was on the front lines in the Soccer War between Honduran and El Salvador; he witnessed the Angolan Civil War and was in Ethiopia immediately after the military coup of 1974; he visited Iran during the Muslim Revolution; and, finally, he was in the Gdańsk Shipyard during the great strike. He was also a man of history – albeit one who preferred participating in current events to digging through archives and libraries – and his increasingly clear ambition was to decode the broader historical processes underpinning these events. It is no accident that three of his later books – Another Day of Life, The Emperor, and Shah of Shahs – while still reportage, tellings of specific events, were at the same time studies of the profound change that was destroying a vast historical formation. Perhaps most importantly, Kapuściński was a man of history because before he became a journalistic expert on the “boiling of the world” and a discoverer of the structures embedded deep in current events, he felt as if he himself was a co-author of history. He belonged to that postwar generation, remembered as the zwm or zmp generation, that had an extremely strong sense of participating in history because as children they had encountered it personally in the form of war, emerging from that experience convinced that the world’s future depended on them. As a journalist for Youth Banner, a newspaper that, along with the weekly Po prostu, co-created the intellectual atmosphere of Polish October, he had participated directly in the democratic revolution of 1956. Kapuściński’s participation in history, which encompassed a commitment to struggle as well as co-responsibility for the world’s future, was shaped during his heroic youth and came to define his literary and human identity. It also turned out to be extremely durable. This helps explain why his reportage from other continents amounted to a search for living history, why he was so passionate about participating

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in history around the world, and why as the “age of revolutions” faded, he felt it his mission to witness dramatic events, however self-sacrificing and however futile. He admitted in 1976: I needed movement, change. I like battlefront situations, conflict situations, I like to be with people who are fighting, I don’t want to stop at watching, I want to participate. In fact, I’m monothematic. I have extended the subject: I have moved from attitudes in conflict in my country to similar attitudes in the world. So it’s continuation … I look for certain situations, attitudes, people’s characteristics, places where the fight is open, political, economic, ideological, literal. That’s why I’m there. Europe is too stabilised for me, not very tangible.8 He added: There are no real puzzles in Europe. We are dealing here with an established balance of power, with a well-established tradition of political life embedded in two political systems … Such a state has been going on for a long time and has been evolving to a relatively low extent.9 Kapuściński had a profound sense of his own place in history, accompanied by a strong conviction that his perspective, as well as his thoughts and actions, flowed from his unique experience. So when there was no prospect for him to harness those experiences (and there wasn’t, let us remember, after the first months of martial law), he had nowhere to turn with that experience, and once and for all he freed himself from the need, indeed the compulsion, to participate in making history. He retreated into his writing, which, in the 1980s, could no longer tap the “outside.” Perhaps that is why it took a more personal form, so as to emancipate him from his role as a mouthpiece for his generation. As we know, he began to meticulously keep an intellectual notebook, from which the Lapidaria would be born; he also returned to poetry, the writing of which he had abandoned in his youth. In one of these new poems, we read: “And when we get stuck in the ruts of the Polish road / that is / when we get stuck for good in the sands of history / … / do not curse the sky or the earth / … / look / the bird flies / the forest rustles / … / life goes on / …” (Ekologia, N, 124). Kapuściński was seeking distance from history and from his own participation in it. Instead of continuing with his earlier attitude, he

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asked himself where it had come from. Around this time, he wrote an extremely important autobiographic text (now constantly quoted) about his childhood, “Ćwiczenia pamięci” (Memory Exercises), in which he identifies the desire to struggle against history as the sinister and also inescapable heritage of war. He asks in this text: But what does it mean to think using images of war? It means seeing everything exist in maximum tension, how everything breathes with cruelty and horror. Because the reality of war is a world of extreme, Manichaean reduction, which removes all intermediate, gentle and warm colours and limits everything to a sharp, aggressive counterpoint, to white and black, to the primal struggle of two forces – good and evil. Nobody else on the battlefield! Only good – and therefore us, and evil – that is, everything that stands in our way, that opposes us, and that we force in bulk into the sinister category of the enemy. (B, 13–14) Memories of the war had long accompanied Kapuściński as an important element of his historical education, as an experience that facilitated his understanding of the contemporary wartime experiences of others, besides giving him the right to write about them. Now the war had become an experience explaining to him his own postwar choices and attitudes, a legacy he must somehow find a way to surmount. Needless to say, this was a hugely challenging task. A large part of Kapuściński’s output had been forged in a Manichaean world in which he did not hesitate to take “the good side.” Yet the world now demanded a description from a new perspective – that of global cultural processes, which he had yet to examine and evaluate precisely because he had focused so strongly on the consequences of the war for Europe. Thus he faced the colossal task of reinterpreting and expanding on the image of reality he had spent so many decades creating. Since the mid-1950s he had been a prominent commentator on Asia, Africa, and South America as well as a fervent supporter of emancipation for those regions, yet when he started out, he could hardly consider himself a carrier of knowledge about the cultural “dethronement of Europe,” one who foresaw the growing importance of great non-European cultures. He did not immediately travel around the world to explore its cultural diversity. First he followed political events, seeking ideological and, put simply, human community with societies fighting for emancipation.

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He committed himself to risking his life, wanting to be a participant or a participant-witness, not just an observer of living history. Now, he would have to supplement all he had learned over those decades by deepening his anthropological knowledge. Two circumstances made this undertaking possible. As a journalist, Kapuściński could not “unsubscribe” from the forms he had long practised. He had begun as a poet, then turned to his early national incidental tales, collected in The Polish Bush (1962). After this, he had taken up the profession of a pap correspondent because it allowed him to spend many years in Africa and South America, which would otherwise have been impossible. Recall that for more than a decade, he had written mainly pap bulletins, reprinted or not by daily newspapers. Thanks to cooperation between Warsaw-based Kultura and the pap, in the 1970s he began travelling the world as a “special envoy,” and from then on, he was able to write fewer ad hoc reports. This was immediately reflected in the number and type of books he published at the turn of the 1970s and in the 1980s (Another Day of Life, The Soccer War, The Emperor, Shah of Shahs). For more than ten years, and probably later on as well, in his own words, he had “charged his batteries,” without having a way to discharge them. He had collected a store of adventures, impressions, experiences, and reflections, yet he had never tapped into them for his writing. Thus, when he finally revisited the past and adopted a different perspective, he had something to rely on and discover in himself. The second circumstance that predestined him to describe the world passing out of “the century of history” was his above-mentioned readiness to address the private legacy of that century, and perhaps something even more: the need to find or rebuild a new identity to replace the one he had exhausted in the 1980s. Kapuściński was open to re-evaluating the image of the world he had created because, for him, discovering himself and realizing himself in contact with the described reality also meant discovering other layers of himself. There is no doubt, in any case, that from the early 1990s, reflection on his own biography played an increasingly important role in his writing, so that one may even wonder to what extent it had already become a camouflaged autobiography. Of course, one should not think that this transformation of Kapuściński’s writing after 1989 was the result of some calculated intellectual operation, a consciously prepared and implemented plan. Rather, it happened spontaneously as he confronted his intentions and

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habits with new needs, guided by the unpredictable forces of writing compulsions and life necessities, which are so important in the case of a travelling writer, and about which we know almost nothing. As already mentioned, there are many indications that after his great ten-year break, when he set off for the Soviet Union at a time when it was engulfed by the perestroika reforms, he was consumed with the same hunger he had once felt for the making of a great new history. The collapse of the former Soviet Union had first been welcomed as a long-awaited complement to the democratization occurring around the world, marked by the collapse of successive authoritarian regimes, a sudden revival of the zeitgeist (“The noise of its flight we all hear …”), and the acceleration of history. But in Russia, on his journey to all four borders of the empire, he did not find a spirit of great historical change comparable to what he had described in Another Day of Life, The Emperor, or Shah of Shahs – that is, irreversible change, bringing an end to a certain historical formation. The multi-part Russian colossus is a highly diverse and “unfinished” place. Where history was happening most intensely, on the Asian border of the Soviet Union, he constantly came across phenomena that he had long ago observed, analyzed, and described in other parts of the world. He had seen this exodus of white colonizers elsewhere, and haphazardly equipped armies without uniforms – were they guerrillas or the government? He had already experienced how a language, until recently universal, could suddenly cease to be understood, and how dozens of radio and television stations and newspapers could suddenly become useless for European readers. On the territory of the Russian Federation, he perceived not so much a change as immutability – society’s inability or lack of preparedness to modify a way of life that had been upheld for decades, or even longer, through fear and terror. Kapuściński became highly sensitive to what was permanent in Russian civilization. In his book about this journey, we glean this on a number of occasions, starting with the moment we cross the border with him, when he introduces an elaborate metaphor of barbed wire to bring out the distinctive nature of a civilization based on prohibitions and limited freedom. The writer is looking for the determinants of this unchangeability in Russian geography, described in accordance with the traditional tropes of Polish and European travel literature, one of which is to sacralize the ruler, so that general secretaries have been able to take up the role of tsar. In the early 1990s, at a time of democratic turmoil, this led to a longing for a new Alexander, Ivan, or even

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Stalin. Kapuściński found a great metaphor for Russian civilization in the almost two-hundred-year history of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, which had taken many decades to build, only to be demolished on Stalin’s orders soon after it was completed. It was probably during his Russia journey that Kapuściński became convinced that what counted in the present day was the power of great, long-lived civilizational and cultural structures; in the case of Russia, that structure was characterized by imperial statehood. This strongly suggests why “existential” events, including the revolution itself and other dynamic moments of the recent past, occupied him relatively little. The unchanging elements of Russian civilization presented the author with writing challenges. How was he to describe this historical colossus in the course of its blurry, far from finished transformation, one that was playing out differently in different parts of the former empire? Kapuściński accepted soon enough that it was impossible. He reminded readers, as Europeans already well knew, that Russia is too big and mysterious to be described. Then he fell back on his personal observations, sharing with readers only the knowledge he had acquired first-hand through his encounters with various places and people. That is why Imperium, like no other book by Kapuściński, is filled with micro-stories, “little stories,” superb “pictures” from Armenia and Kolyma to Moscow and Saint Petersburg, Novgorod and Kyiv, Yakutsk and Vorkuta, as well as from crowded railway stations and airports where he wandered during countless unforeseen interruptions on his journey. This strong shift toward the landscape of the daily lives of the citizens of a decaying empire, and toward characters met at random, was a clear departure from his earlier syntheses of crucial historical events. It greatly disappointed many readers and commentators.10 But it could not have been any other way, given that he had decided to describe not change but stasis, not the new and different but the old and repetitious, as his principal method of interpreting Soviet and post-Soviet “Russianness.” After all, isn’t Russia’s permanence most sharply felt when he speaks about it in passing, through chance encounters with people and places? Of course, in Imperium there are no entirely incidental tales; many of them, in fact, are heavy with metaphor, plucked from reality or skilfully embedded in it, like that of ten-year-old Tania from Yakutsk – mentioned in almost all reviews – from the Założnaja district, which the writer compares with slum districts he remembered from South America. Tania teaches the writer to recognize a great

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freeze (a luminous fog appears in which we leave a corridor in the shape of our own figure), and he describes this moment in a way that signifies there is something worse than the famous Siberian frosts – the poverty, dirt, and mud of shoddily built old tenements. An encounter with a “babushka” takes on similar metaphorical weight; during it, the famous “dyszym” (we breathe) defined as “pride and determination and suffering and joy” (I, 185). He describes a meeting of rebellious miners that, as it turns out, must be led by someone from management, because they themselves are unable to lead it themselves. And there is an encounter with Anna Andrejewna, who complains harshly about the work she is compelled to do: “They made my hands like a man’s” (I, 299). And another with Aleksander Petrovich Grekow from Novgorod, who, together with a group of enthusiasts, has been trying for twenty-five years to restore what is left of a historic church fresco that had been destroyed during the war. These snapshots from daily life in the Soviet Union between 1989 to 1991 expressed the human dimension of the eternal empire: acceptance of fate, helplessness in the face of unchecked power, fear of others, the sense of being lost, and the impossibility of regaining authentic cultural traditions. This, however, was not enough to create a coherent whole; it provided no frame for assembling individual observations into a unified book. The book of wandering observations he ended up writing could have no tidy end. It is known that he did not use all the materials he had accumulated during his Soviet travels, including those from his stay in the three Baltic republics: Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. In part this was because he would have had to write further volumes to record all his observations, which would have been hard for him for health reasons. He closed the book not by adding more journeys in the current Russian space but by extending previous “encounters” with the empire, the first of which, as we know, had been in September 1939. A series of journeys from the late 1980s and early 1990s thus fit into the peculiar order of the author’s own life experiences. The book ultimately took the shape of a diary of these “encounters”; it even used large fragments from a 1967 report. A reader today can compare the image of today’s Russia with the empire that burst into the author’s native Pińsk in September 1939, then with the one through which he travelled by train from China in the winter of 1958, and finally with the one he visited in 1967, which led to The Kirghiz Dismounts. The intention of these compilations was not to draw attention to the changes taking place in the Soviet Union. It seems significant that he

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omitted from his encounters the Russia that was different from the eternal, imperial one – with the one that had been the illusory hope of a significant part of the postwar world. For example, he was indifferent to his participation in the Youth and Student Festival in Moscow in 1957 – a great event that gathered young people from all over the world – which at the time had been very important for the writer, for that is where he first met the fighters for African emancipation and became enthusiastic about their hopes. Instead, he offers an excellent description of a journey by the Trans-Siberian Railway from China in 1958, which fits well with the Polish romantic topos of Siberia. The reader can also read the book as a kind of autobiography hidden under a report and prepared in terms of his personal contact with Russia.11 This approach is all the more legitimate because except for its journalistic epilogue, it is laid out as an autobiography, specifically around his expulsion from his place of birth (“Pińsk,” 39) and his return there for the first time after fifty years (“Powrót do rodzinnego miasta” [Return to My Hometown]). He would continue to reinterpret his own biography, starting with “Ćwiczenia pamięci” (Memory Exercises). In the first chapter, we discussed in detail how, in a dozen or so pages of the chapter about his Pińsk childhood, one of the most beautiful and cruel passages in Kapuściński’s prose, he reconstructed the process of being driven by war from a stable existence and being appropriated by history as a child of war. The book ends with “Return …,” set in 1990, as if at the end of that “shortest of the centuries,” and thus acquires a symbolic sense of liberating oneself from the consequences of the war – including participation in the creation of postwar history, also on a personal level. This amounts to a late – and very roundabout – return from the war to the place of his birth – a return to normality. For a moment, it seemed that this substitute for returning to the family home, which was supposed to free the writer from the grip of history, would quickly be turned into something more real, of course – in the sense of a literary return to his prewar, “prehistoric” Pińsk childhood. Among the various ideas for a continuation of Imperium, this intention seemed for a time to be winning: “So I want to write a book about my childhood in Pińsk,” Kapuściński said in 1993. “It would be a closure of this circle because Imperium begins with the mention of my hometown.”12 For the time being, Kapuściński put this dream aside (it would shine through his other journeys to the sources) and returned to describing the world. He did this, however, in a completely different way from

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before. His way of travelling was also changing. The journeys he made in the 1990s and later, when they did not involve the promotion of new translations, lectures, journalistic workshops, and so on, were more of a research and anthropological character and focused more on refreshing, updating, or verifying knowledge he already possessed. We do not know much about them because we did not immediately learn their results or read reports about them, but we do know he was back in Africa for a long time, in South America every year, in Australia, and on the Indian subcontinent. After Imperium, his Africa book The Shadow of the Sun (1998) was the next result of this new way of travelling in search of the new – “dehistoricizing,” so to speak – “spirit” of great cultural formations, a new way of describing the world. It seems that what was a largely involuntary invention in Imperium, a child of necessity, was perfected by him in The Shadow of the Sun; it was now a purposeful method that allowed him to create an original synthesis of the continent. Africa is no easier to describe than Russia, but the author’s contact with it had been more intense – it lasted more than forty years, and he had lived there for a few of them. So he could have used the same method of describing a large historical formation: the method of reconstructing the personal cognitive process verifiable in subsequent encounters with the African continent, following the trail of “encounters” (with places and people) selected from a set of experiences that he had not yet described or that he had described from a different perspective. All he had to do was to trust this test of the validity of African affairs, which almost all of his journalistic life so far had provided him with, and above all to trust the natural logic of the development of his own interests and his own African intuitions. In this regard, he was experiencing an evolution in his interests: from the history of current politics and events, to great cultural formations, to that which is elementary and eternal at the same time, local and universal. Maintaining fidelity to this rhythm of change, he dehistoricized his image of Africa, discovering beneath the overlay of current history, while the reader watched, the spirit of African antiquity and uniqueness. The most noticeable effect of this strategy is a gradual and wellthought-out initiation into the world of Africa, step by step, so as to broaden the reader’s horizons. The first section is titled “Beginning, collision, Ghana ’58.” At first there is complete ignorance, the shock caused by a different climate, the sense of being in a different world,

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under different light, with different colours and smells. We witness his first step on African soil, both literally (he takes it in Accra, on the west coast), and figuratively, in that it was the place where modern Africa took its first step, when Ghana won its independence. And after this first step, his first excursion is a 500-kilometre bus journey inland, which serves him as an opportunity to familiarize readers with the African sense of time, which is different from the European one; with the clan structure, which is the necessary key to understanding how bureaucracy worked in the newly emerging countries; and with the phenomenon of magic. The next section – “1962, Tanganika Today” – is in some ways another introduction to Africa, one that expands on and modifies the first. This time, though, it is on the other side of the continent, at Dar es Salaam on the east coast. Tanganyika has already gained independence, and its neighbour Uganda is about to do the same; this calls for another journey into the continent, this time by an off-road vehicle, purchased for next to nothing from an Englishman leaving Africa in a hurry. This, in turn, opens a discussion about whites and blacks; European individualism and African collectivism; apartheid and racism on the east coast, which is different from on the west coast because of the presence of South Asians. The main purpose of this solo journey, however, is to experience – concurrently – the beauty of nature as well as some of its dangers. One can get lost in the savannah, or be trampled by a herd of buffalo, or get bitten by a cobra, or die of sunstroke, or come down with malaria and its dire consequence, tuberculosis. Awareness of these and other dangers serves as preparation for us to examine the individual and collective soul of those Africans who are forced to deal with these threats all the time. It also opens the way for an examination of Africans’ attitude toward history (in the European sense), which in their view is a dangerously mindless force. And an immediate test of this knowledge is a revolt for independence in Zanzibar, which allows the writer to demonstrate the truly desperate and often ill-thought-out methods he has used for gathering news about violent political transformations. We would probably be surprised if the next sections did not return us to the west coast, did not place us a little inland and a little higher on the spiral of knowledge. “Anatomy of a Coup d’État” is a journal written on the spot in Lagos, then the capital of Nigeria, in January 1966. It reminds us that the writer realized even at the time that the few brief years of naive, enthusiastic faith in the future of independent Africa were coming to an end. That outcome was presaged not only by the

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coup but also by the apathy of the Nigerian people themselves, among whom the author lived in a slum suburb, and whom he portrayed in detail for the first time. It is unclear whether it was from Nigeria that the writer wandered into the Mauritanian desert; there, he experienced the Sahara’s burning sands, halted at an oasis to wait for a truck capable of crossing the desert wilderness, and waited for rescue when it broke down. For most of the book, he seems to make a point of switching between the west and east coasts. Always, though, those journeys lead us deeper into the continent. After Nigeria in 1966 and 1967, we have central Ethiopia in 1975; from there, Uganda during Idi Amin’s bloody reign; then brief stops in Sudan and Zaire, in 1988; then Somalia in the early 1990s, then Uganda again, this time with a lecture on Rwanda provoked by memories of massacres and an excursion to Congo. But we also find ourselves in the west: on the border of Mauritania and Senegal, then Mali, and finally Liberia and Cameroon. This journey inland from both directions was reminiscent of past expeditions, which also started from the coast with the aim of reaching the inaccessible truth of the continent. Africa’s coasts epitomize the sinister history of its relations with the world. Lagos and Zanzibar were founded as slave islands, gigantic concentration camps, where abducted Africans awaited their forced transport to the Americas or West Asia. The march of world trade and the march of colonization began from the coasts; only after the Berlin Conference of 1884 did both reach the continent’s centre. It was on the coasts that white racism was born and that the Blacks’ answer to that racism was formed; mutual stereotypes were soon taking shape. The first independent states, which also emerged on the coast, would be unable to overcome the colonial legacy, which promised grim turns of events for the rest of the continent. Kapuściński was immediately drawn to the continent’s “centre.” That is where he experienced the dangerous power of nature but also the strikingly beautiful landscapes that had barely been contaminated by human presence. He also found an answer (or many regionally diverse answers) to the question of what death and human life, home and family, the world of the dead and the world of supernatural beings, memory and tradition, mean to Africans. Almost all of the episodes in The Shadow of the Sun that reconstruct African spirituality, and the inner world of African culture, happen somewhere in the continent’s interior, in small villages, during random stops or on

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a caravan journey. The impression of plunging into what is eternal increases as he gradually stops dating individual entries. The book’s earliest sections, referring to the writer’s first stays in Africa, are carefully dated and placed. Those found in the second half of the book, based on travels in the 1990s during which he uncovers ever older layers of the continent’s cultures, tell of some African universe. In this sense, the book’s expansion according to the chronology of the last forty years of the author’s life is accompanied by a kind of return to the origins of time. The extraordinary effect of The Shadow of the Sun is to enchant the reader with a world created on the page. In that sense, it is comparable to works of magic realism. He was able to achieve this effect by drawing from experiences he had not yet tapped in his earlier texts about Africa, and by this time he was looking at those earlier experiences in a new way. While faithfully following his own first steps in Africa, Kapuściński made new discoveries or found unexpected depths to earlier ones by re-examining his past with the eye of a roving anthropologist. For example, we already knew from his 1958 Ghanaian reports about his first bus trip inland, but his discovery of how Africans measure time has come to us only now. We knew already that he had lived in Lagos surrounded by poor Africans. The Shadow of the Sun turns this episode, once buried in a memoir, into an anthropological study about overcoming barriers between strangers and us by patiently observing and learning to respect their customs, including their superstitions. Matters that were once background, or marginal, or completely unnoticed, have now turned into a literary study of morning and evening rituals, of hospitality, of wandering with a caravan. So to the end, to the description of the tree with which he bids farewell to Africa – the tree that grows in paradise? – which can be read as a profound observation about all ancient cultures. The Shadow of the Sun was a creative breakthrough for Kapuściński. He could now consider himself a travel writer rather than a reporter, a writer whose “patch” was now cultural analysis and synthesis as well as the search for the cultural roots of great historical formations. This opened the way for him to further syntheses of this kind (he set out to write companion books about South America and, perhaps, Asia); it also allowed him to see himself in a new way. That new self-perspective would consume him to the point that he halted his work on a South America book in order to write the autobiographical Travels with Herodotus.

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That book, which focuses on Kapuściński’s first travels as a journalist (up until 1965), could well bear the subtitle “How I Became a Travel Writer.” It is indebted to The Shadow of the Sun, for it is thanks to that book that from such diverse biographical experiences, he could begin to pull at the thread of the attitude that would soon guide his life – at least his writing life. To know, understand, and accept otherness so as to discover and cross new boundaries, both real ones and those between people, and even within oneself – is, as we soon learn in Travels with Herodotus, the author’s great life challenge, and his autobiography revolves largely around the circumstances that enabled or impeded his efforts to meet that challenge. Travels to India, China, and finally Africa, his dream of overcoming borders, and his preparations for doing so – these are the pivotal events in his life story. Travels, conflicts, and struggles with cultural otherness are what largely shaped both his life and his writing. One consequence for him of working the seam of his own life story was to make it independent of the historical circumstances against which it was written. The author manages to convince us that he was greatly influenced by reading Herodotus, whose Histories is one of the first works of European historiography, created as a result of expeditions to faraway lands and a reportorial “gathering of material,” in a word, the prototype of reportage. But this is not the only reason Kapuściński chose him as the patron of his early journeys. Whether or not he actually carried the Histories with him on all his expeditions, and whether or not he was actually affected by that book more than by the events in which he participated, the figure of Herodotus now serves the author’s entirely new needs. His patron’s apparent task is to pull the writer out of the time in which he actually participated in events so that he can overcome the boundaries of historical epochs. In The Shadow of the Sun, the author notes with some envy that Africans find it easy to maintain contact with the roots of their own culture. Because theirs was not a written culture, they could hold on to their past only by casting it as a never-ending intergenerational story. In this same vein, in declaring Herodotus to be a founding father of European cultural identity, Kapuściński emphasizes that his predecessor was the first person ever to immortalize, through writing a story, everything that had lived so far, to convert spoken into written memory. In his view, that made him the most distant source we can reach back to and draw from today.

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The possibility of “using” Herodotus to neutralize historical time, however, results not only from who the historian, traveller, and storyteller was, but also from what he wrote about – which was, mainly, the Greco-Persian wars of the fifth century bc , which were almost contemporary to him. According to Kapuściński – who repeatedly turned to long quotations, discussions, and interpretations, intertwining them with his own text – in those wars, Herodotus saw a clash between Asian slave civilization and the European culture of free citizens, autocracy and democracy, imperial aggression and the will to defend the ideals and values of freedom. In this way, Herodotus provides readers today with a guide to modern European history, including the twentieth-century defence against the aggression of a totalitarian eastern empire. And that can free those who read him today from the terror of present-day history. In this regard, at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, when this terror was still at its height, the novice reporter Ryszard Kapuściński was just discovering the deep continuity of European history, including its madness, and these discoveries absorbed him more than participation in the present day. Travels with Herodotus ends in the mid-1960s, during the writer’s first extended stay in Algeria, and thus on the Mediterranean Sea, after his visit to Herodotus’s birthplace in Halicarnassus, a former Greek colony in Asia Minor. It ends at the very moment the writer has grasped and assimilated the master’s patterns, which are linked, among other things, to doubts about the utility of chasing current historical spectacles. Kapuściński also finds an answer to the question why people travel: Herodotus travels in order to satisfy a child’s question: Where do ships on the horizon come from? And is what we see with our own eyes not the edge of the world? No. So there are still other worlds? What kind? When the child grows up, he will want to get to know them. Herodotus learns about his worlds with the rapturous enthusiasm of a child. His most important discovery? That there are many worlds. And that each is different … And that one must learn about them, because these other worlds, these other cultures, are mirrors in which we can see ourselves. (263) Finding the answer to the question about the sources of hunger for travel in children’s curiosity about the world beyond the waters, however, suggests that Kapuściński intended to continue looking for an

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answer to the question of his new identity. For if he could find part of that answer in Herodotus’s childhood, why shouldn’t he look for it in his own? In the writer’s more and more frequent statements about his childhood in Pińsk (where, let us recall, his parents were members of the Polish minority), the theme of water begins to recur – the spring floods cut the city off from the rest of the world, even while the Polesie rivers connect it with all the seas. The boundary between travel as understood by the author and by Herodotus also disappears as the former satisfies his curiosity about other cultural worlds. So it is that Herodotus, who was the first patron of Kapuściński’s passions for travel and history, could also become the patron of his anthropological passions in The Shadow of the Sun – or give way to someone even better suited for this, Bronisław Malinowski. His many years of communing with Herodotus could lead not only back to Pińsk but also out into the entire world. In his article “Ryszard Kapuściński i jego filozofia ‘Innego’” (Ryszard Kapuściński and His Philosophy of “the Other”), Tadeusz Sławek offered the following interpretation of the sentence “My home is somewhere else,” once uttered by the creator of The Shadow of the Sun in the context of the loss of his Pińsk homeland: “Mine” is marked by closeness; “mine” is “here,” and especially when what it refers to is “home.” Meanwhile, the philosophy of the author of the Lapidaria is the demystification of such thinking: when we say “my home is somewhere else,” we make an act of specific relocation – we establish our “home” always not “here.” Thus, “home” exists as a certain hypostasis, as a projection, and is no more than an aspiration for home. “Somewhere else” presupposes “never here”; there is no such “here” that in today’s world is capacious enough to become “home.” To be “curious about the world” is to live in such an eternally “designed” and “reconstructed” home, in a home located “somewhere else,” which in turn means that I am as far as I am on my way.13 According to Kapuściński, it was valid to approach his biography in terms of philosophy and dialogue, for life, not reading, was the basis of his vision of the Other. He had problematized his own thoughts by re-evaluating his own experiences, among which the loss of the family home was only the first fact – albeit the most significant one – in a chain of events. Indeed, throughout his professional life, the creator of

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The Shadow of the Sun would search for various forms of community – ideological, social, and ethical. Over time, however, “encounters” – a capacious category, free from virtually all restrictions – would serve as the culmination of this long process. He first recognized the issue of the Other “on his own,” and only then did he find a philosophical formula for it in the texts of others. Having decided to find his own path toward the Other, Kapuściński sought help in that effort. He chose those who were first interested in this issue, who had created its foundations and set the farthest research horizon. His first teacher of otherness could have been Herodotus – a traveller, a collector of stories, who had set off into the world driven by insatiable curiosity. Without hesitation, the Master of Halicarnassus had abandoned that which was known in order to enter the alien and often dangerous unknown parts of the globe – to visit the distant Egyptians, Scythians, Persians, and Lydians. As a result, he became a patron of rapprochement between cultures and nations, and, finally, with the Other. It was the author of Histories who taught us how to behave properly when faced with otherness – to treat such people with respect, observe them closely, and try to understand them. Herodotus, who lived two and a half thousand years ago, knew the value of encounters very well. He knew that the Other is a mirror in which we can see the truth about ourselves – that it is the Other who breaks the illusory bubble of our exceptionalism, saves us from self-righteousness, and guards us against stagnation. Only by opening up to the Other can we experience reality in all its richness. Kapuściński considered encountering the Other to be “the greatest challenge of the twenty-first century.” Why this century specifically? After all, the confrontation between Europe and the rest of the world had been ongoing for centuries. In his second Viennese lecture, part of the collection Ten Inny (The Other), the author noted its various stages: from the era of merchants and envoys, which lasted more or less until the fifteenth century, through the era of great travels – a time of slaughter and conquest; to Enlightenment attempts to get to know the Other and their cultures; to the twentieth century – the century of anthropology, philosophy, and dialogue – and finally to the present time: the era of multiculturalism. From that point on, Bronisław Malinowski served as the greatest patron of the encounter with other cultures. That outstanding anthropologist appears relatively late in the Lapidaria. In the 1990s, Kapuściński’s views – in addition to those of Marcel Mauss – became an important counterbalance to Samuel Huntington’s popular

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concept of the clash of civilizations.14 By declaring the author of the monograph about the Trobriand Islanders the patron of the idea of peaceful coexistence among cultures, Kapuściński in effect assigned himself the role of intermediary between distant worlds: “Well, most often I would describe my profession as the profession of a translator,” he said, on receiving his first honorary doctorate in 1997. “But a translator not from language to language, but from culture to culture.” Kapuściński discovered Malinowski in stages. Initially, the anthropologist was one of many fascinating figures who understood the value of dialogue, others being Emmanuel Levinas, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Ferdinand Ebner, Gabriel Marcel, and Father Józef Tischner. Together with theirs, Kapuściński folded Malinowski’s name into subsequent books, numerous lectures, and countless interviews. Over time, however, the writer began to set him apart. On receiving another honorary doctorate in 2004, this time awarded by the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, he devoted most of his speech to the issue of the Other seen from the perspective of Malinowski’s findings. This significant lecture, a kind of tribute to the great graduate of Kraków, went beyond the usual bow to the hosts. There is no doubt that in recalling this figure, Kapuściński was reaching into his own deeply personal discoveries. In that lecture, he invokes the philosophy of encounter that made the Other, especially the one struck by the experiences of totalitarianism, the subject of his investigations. That “one” is usually uncertain of its own identity, having been melted in the magma of civilization, wounded by history. Levinas could accept the idea of the Other, as professed by Kapuściński, but only up to a point. His philosophy concerned the I–Other relationship “within one, historically and racially uniform civilisation” (TI, 73). Malinowski went further: as he explored the exotic community of the Trobrianders, he went beyond European culture and introduced new contexts, thus becoming a patron of meetings with other cultures. The last years of Kapuściński’s life passed – so to speak – under the sign of Malinowski: this was a time of fascination with the works of the great anthropologist, when he looked for similarities between the work of a cultural researcher and that of a reporter, so as to develop a new form of writing – anthropological reportage. There are so many similarities between the two “translators of other cultures” that a characteristic of one can often be considered a characteristic of the other. Clear similarities are evident at the very beginning of their careers: “Malinowski was interested in so-called living history,”15

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wrote Barbara Olszewska-Dyoniziak. Like the creator of The Shadow of the Sun, but unlike a professional historian, he had abandoned his office without regret and gone into the field to experience first-hand the events he was supposed to be writing about. Between 1914 to 1918, the author of Argonauts of the Western Pacific lived in northwestern Melanesia. He set up a tent in the middle of the village and observed the daily life of the Trobrianders. Realizing the role it played in direct contact, he quickly learned the native language (he had outstanding linguistic abilities). New conceptions about direct contact with Others did much to boost the popularity of field research, which required researchers to radically alter their perspective. Relinquishing the position of outsider – including its standard tools, such as observation, interviews, and statistics – the new anthropologist became an participant in events. Over time, this innovative approach to research turned anthropology from an office-bound, speculative, theoretical discipline into a living science based on interpersonal contact. Years later, Malinowski’s student, Edmund Leach, wrote: “No European had ever done this before, and the ethnography that came out of it was something completely new.”16 The founder of modern social anthropology knew the value of direct contact. He saw it as an opportunity to describe reality more fully. In the field, he had access not only to the facts but also and above all to the psychological context of events, including the moods, emotions, and social climate affecting people. Thanks to his direct presence, he could describe – as he said – not only the “skeleton” of a culture (all the regularities and norms of tribal life) but also its “flesh and blood” (the imponderables of daily life: clothing, hygiene, food) and, most importantly, its “spirit” (people’s world views, opinions, and self-perceptions). Observations carried out according to this scheme made it possible to achieve the ultimate goal, which was to “grasp the indigenous point of view, the native’s attitude to life, understand his view of the world.”17 In his efforts to understand the Other, Malinowski emphasized that research should be conducted in an atmosphere of openness and empathy. Without these, research could not but miss the meaning of “all studies of humanity.”18 But the great researchers of otherness are also linked by the experience of the dark side of confrontation with strangeness – they are defenceless white people thrown into a neither/nor situation, which they experience as an identity crisis; they feel their loneliness painfully; their daily duties become their rescue from madness.19

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Kapuściński and Malinowski were also brought together by a belief in the richness of cultures and their equality. Malinowski maintained that “the problem of anthropology is simply to observe, describe and arrange this diversity” according to the principle that “people are equal, but different, and all differences are equal.”20 Years later, Kapuściński echoed: “I consider myself a researcher of otherness, other cultures, other ways of thinking.” An Other who has become an equal participant in the dialogue is subsequently a valuable source of knowledge about ourselves: in getting to know distant cultures, we can see our own in a new light. Malinowski wrote in Argonauts of the Western Pacific: “Perhaps as we read the account of these remote customs there may emerge a feeling of solidarity with the endeavours and ambitions of these natives. Perhaps humanity’s mentality will be revealed to us, and brought near, along some lines which we never have followed before. Perhaps through realizing human nature in a shape very distant and foreign to us, we shall have some light shed on our own.”21 What undoubtedly connects these two researchers of otherness is Polishness, which both men understood as valuable but also often as problematic. Malinowski’s dear friend Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz once joked in a letter to him from Poland: “Have you become completely anglicised? … I would like you to become Polish again. It is a pity to so remove your nationality. Remember how we considered Conrad a traitor.”22 Malinowski’s position on this same matter is commented on by his researcher: “He believed that practising social anthropology requires a sense of belonging to the whole world and all mankind, and to look at human matters from the point of view of humanity in general, and not only through the prism of the particular interests of one’s own nationality.”23 Kapuściński may well have agreed. •

As his last great dream, Kapuściński decided to follow the world-renowned Malinowski to the Trobriand Islands. This group of volcanic islands, now part of Papua New Guinea, is inhabited by indigenous people who speak their own language – Kiriwina. Thanks to – among others – Malinowski’s anthropological studies conducted in 1914–18, the Trobriand culture is among the most thoroughly described Melanesian cultures. Kapuściński’s expedition to the islands was to have been a necessary complement to a series of journeys to his sources. The reporter was attracted to the place where modern anthropology was born, where

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Malinowski’s impressive career began, where only a hundred years earlier there had been communities virtually unknown to Western civilization. The Pacific Islands seemed like the perfect place to explore the consequences of that encounter from a century ago. However, the strongest impulse to undertake the difficult journey related to the impact Malinowski had made on his own creative work. He was looking for an analogy between Malinowski’s trajectory and his own. And, finally, he yearned to encounter the place that gave us Malinowski, just as he had wanted to visit the land that gave us Herodotus. Over time, this journey evolved into Kapuściński’s last great dream. His deteriorating health was not a sufficient argument for him to abandon this hellishly difficult challenge. A friend recalled a conversation with the writer, who was now chronically ill: “He said softly, with that shy smile of his, ‘I know I’m dying, but I still want so badly to go to a place I don’t know.’ It was Oceania again.”24 The longed-for trip to the Trobriands was gradually and irrevocably moving beyond the writer’s horizon. However, it soon turned out that an encounter with Malinowski’s space did not remain a completely unfulfilled dream. Three months before his death, in October 2006, Kapuściński made a much easier journey, to Bolzano, in the Italian Alps near the Swiss and Austrian borders. This place had been fought over for many centuries, but the inhabitants of the region had found a formula for the peaceful coexistence of three ethnic groups – Ladin, Italian, and German. Bolzano had since become a “laboratory of peace and harmony between cultures,”’25 “one of the best examples of overcoming international … ethnic conflict after the Second World War.”26 Indeed, the Dalai Lama had visited this region to glean whether the same model of autonomy could work in Tibet. No wonder, then, that Kapuściński was seduced by the magic of this place. As soon as he received an invitation from the Centro della Pace di Bolzano (Center for Peace in Bolzano), he decided to go: “I was interested in a trip to a place where three language groups live together. I wanted to see up close how people communicate, how they mix, how they directly confront otherness.”27 He may have perceived the trip, with its promise of a “good encounter,” as a metaphysical return to prewar Pińsk, which for him was still synonymous with multiculturalism, diversity, and peaceful coexistence. It probably also pleased him that it was a living example of the dream of an ideal world, one where differences are seen as a treasure, not a burden to be eradicated.

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It turned out, however, that the city, with its cultures living in harmony, had yet another priceless value for the tireless traveller. “When he accepted an invitation to a conference at the Free University of Bolzano, he did not yet know it” – so began an article in a local newspaper, Corriere dell’Alto Adige, that announced the arrival of the “candidato al Nobel.”28 What did he not know? By choosing this place on account of its unique values, he was in fact going on a very personal journey, one that would serve as a substitute for his dream-trip to the Trobriand Islands. It was in Bolzano that he unexpectedly encountered his last great master. It turned out that the city was a favourite not only of Freud, Mahler, and Kafka but also of Malinowski, who had lived nearby in a two-storey villa high in the mountains before he left Europe forever in 1938.29 Moreover, this is the place where his ideas may have crystallized before they revolutionized social anthropology. The sixteen years during which Malinowski regularly visited Bolzano to repair his poor health30 were also the most productive period in the Polish anthropologist’s work.31 The main addressees of this meeting were dozens of young people – middle school, high school, and university students – who participated in the last workshops ever conducted by the “journalist of the century.” Kapuściński first talked to a handful of pupils and students in a mountain inn; a few hours later, he spoke to the hundreds-strong academic community at the Free University; then in the morning, just before his departure, he met for breakfast with high school students. The young people had been preparing for this event for months – they had read all of his books, discussed them many times, and compiled a list of questions. The guest, willingly revealing the mysteries of a reporter’s work, talked about the cultural richness of the world in an interesting way and about the dangers threatening our planet – the traps prepared by the mass media, the difficult art of encountering the Other, and especially the too long ignored problem of poverty. It was in Bolzano that his words about the need to care about the poor, and those who had no voice, resonated especially strongly: “You cannot ignore them if you dream of being a journalist. The poor make up eighty per cent of the planet’s population.”32 Kapuściński’s visit to Bolzano was an event of great importance for the city. Francesco Comina, coordinator of the Centro della Pace, remembers it as a historic moment that left a lasting mark on the participants: “Even today,” he wrote to us a year later, “many remember the full university auditorium, his words full of hope and courage, his invitation to meet the Other. At the time, the young people said that this event had marked their lives forever.”33

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The welcoming atmosphere in Bolzano and the unexpected opportunity for a spiritual meeting with his last great patron deeply affected the reporter. Alicja Kapuścińska later wrote that her husband considered this trip one of the greatest of his life.34 He was happy in Bolzano because at the end of his rich but also hellishly difficult life, he had finally found himself in a place that every philosopher of the encounter can only dream of. Perhaps there, in Bolzano, while talking to young people in a mountain inn, he saw that they too – though equipped with electronic gadgets – longed for an ordinary conversation that promised authenticity and credibility, that they dreamed of a trip to “their” Trobriands, that they also wanted to reach the sources – more simply, the truth. Then perhaps he understood that his great dream had not disappeared beyond the horizon, because others would travel to the ends of the earth. Some might even follow him.35

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“There is an old proverb: ‘All roads lead to Rome,’” wrote Alicja Kapuścińska, “and it worked for Ryszard: both his first journey – fifty years ago and his last – in 2006, led through Rome.”1 The inescapable question is whether the reporter, endowed with his legendary intuition, had a sense that his Italian journey would be his last. Francesco Cataluccio, accompanying him during those Roman walks, recalled the following event: When I met him for the last time, in October, in Rome, taking advantage of the free morning, we went to an exhibition of Paul Klee’s drawings. A beam of light in a completely dark room fell on a picture of a funny little man keeping his balance with a long pole on a rope drawn between light scaffolding made of beams. Kapuściński looked at him in delight and said quietly: “I’m dying.”2 Paul Klee – known as the “wizard of the line” – was not simply a famous painter, lecturer, and musician of great erudition. First and foremost, he was a poet who “thinks in pictures.”3 His poetic sensitivity to the word gave the titles he assigned to his works a role that cannot be overestimated. The author of History of Art, H.W. Janson, wrote: “The title has an indispensable role. It is characteristic of the way Klee worked that the picture itself, however visually appealing, does not reveal its full evocative quality unless the artist tells us what it means. The title, in turn, needs the picture.”4 The work that caught Kapuściński’s attention three months before his death is called Tightrope Walker (Der Seiltänzer). It dates from 1923, during Klee’s Bauhaus period, between 1921 and 1933, when he was a

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lecturer at the school of art and architecture in Weimar. By that time he had developed his economical and precise “pictorial language,” born of his fascination with primitivism and children’s drawings. What does this somewhat childish picture present? What additional meanings does its title reveal to us? And, finally – why did this lithograph, its few thin lines, so jolt the writer who admired it so deeply? A grotesque, somewhat schematic figure with a pole in his hands walks on a rope stretched across a bizarrely twisted scaffold. It is flimsy and unstable, provides no support, and is suspended in space. From behind the figures and objects, the outline of a light beige cross shines through, delicately shown on a pale pink background gradually changing into cloudy greys. All of this intimates loneliness, uncertainty, an underlying sadness. And who is the only actor in this bizarre presentation? It is the tightrope artist, walking the rope to the public’s delight, who is sometimes interpreted as a figure of death. The Hungarian writer Sándor Márai, quoted in Lapidarium VI, noted in his Journal two years before his suicide: “I walk like a tightrope walker keeping his balance with difficulty, every step is tempting God.”5 Another author appreciated by Kapuściński, Wacław Berent, used this same image as a metaphor for death on at least two occasions: first, among the heroes of Żywe kamienie,6 and another time when translating the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, who in Thus Spoke Zarathustra offers a moving description of the fall and death of a tightrope walker.7 That description is preceded by the following commentary from Zarathustra: “Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Übermensch – a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting.”8 But in many religions it is the bridge itself that signifies death. Muslims believe the road to paradise leads through Al Sirat, a bridge as thin as a razor blade. In the mythology of Native Americans, that road is a narrow wooden beam. In ancient Chinese symbolism, the passage leading to the world of the dead is very narrow and sinners walking down it fall into the depths of blood and gore. In Zoroastrianism, souls must cross the Chinvat Bridge, which is thin as a hair, before they are judged. We encounter the same kind of adjudication of guilt in medieval iconography and in medieval romance, especially in Arthurian myths.9 The lithograph by Paul Klee – who uses sparse lines and the simplest materials to express the most difficult and dramatic experiences that face us all – fit vividly into Kapuściński’s reading fascinations and, more generally, into the reflections that accompanied him in his last years.

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Motifs of death clearly dominate his poetry and permeate his last, posthumously published volume of notes. There are many images of dying here … There is nameless death in the desert, and the death of rulers who had swallowed potions to prolong their life. There is reverie over Jan Nowak-Jeziorański’s death, the recollection of reading Paul Celan’s Death Fugue, which unexpectedly coincided with the end of John Paul II’s life, and the deeply felt death of Susan Sontag. Could these last notes, therefore, have been his attempt to tame death, to build a relationship with it on what he realized was the eve of his own departure? •

Kapuściński’s death shocked the world. Only a few months earlier, he had been under serious consideration for the Nobel Prize in Literature. By then, his name had been appearing for several years on unofficial lists of contenders. In 2005 the Polish media were in a fever after Horace Engdahl, president of the Swedish Academy, said that “in the history of the Nobel Prize in recent years, ‘aesthetic’ literature has dominated. But literature is changing, and the Nobel Prize is evolving with it. Perhaps the time has come for the Nobel Prize for non-fiction.”10 From that moment on, the author of The Emperor became the most serious candidate among authors of non-fiction. Four months before his death, according to Ladbrokes, the British bookmaker, he was tied for second place with the Syrian poet Adonis.11 This time, however, the committee’s decision came as no surprise – the prize was awarded to Orhan Pamuk of Turkey. It is said that Kapuściński was relieved by their choice. Sławomir Popowski recalled: Once again, I kept my fingers crossed for Ryszard. I asked: “Don’t you feel excited?” – “Of course I do. But you know,” he added, “there are many more famous people than me who deserved the Nobel Prize and never got it. And almost none of those who have already been honoured with it have written anything important afterwards. They had no time.” So the next day, when the winner’s name was announced, I called Ryszard, and he said most sincerely: “I can relax. Now I can continue writing.”12 The academy’s verdict disappointed those many people who had expected Kapuściński to receive the well-deserved award. Tomas Venclova, the renowned Lithuanian poet, translator, and lecturer in

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Slavic literature at Yale University, wrote: Ryszard Kapuściński certainly deserved the Nobel Prize in literature … And for several years, I was sure that Kapuściński would receive this award. Whenever I was informed that the Nobel Prize was given to someone else, I felt disappointed. It was always an unpleasant surprise. I always thought: next year, it will surely be him. I do not know why he never got the Nobel Prize. Maybe because his genre was not considered to be literature by some people. That’s the thing with this prize, the best writers in history never got it. And many of those who did not get it had a bigger impact on world literature than some Nobel prize winners. Tolstoy, Ibsen, Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Rilke and Mandelstam did not get it. And yet, they had a great impact on literature. It will be the same with Kapuściński.13 In the last months of his life, the creator of The Emperor worked intensely. On 25 November, he travelled to Poznań to unveil a plaque at the railway station there commemorating the prewar reporter Kazimierz Nowak, who between 1931 to 1936 travelled alone around Africa by bicycle. In December, he still dreamed of going to Colombia. He did not go, but he did prepare the sixth volume of the Lapidaria for printing. In his workspace, he collected materials for his last great projects – a book about Bronisław Malinowski, which was to be preceded by a trip to the Trobriand Islands; a Latin American Shadow of the Sun, about which it was said that “the world is waiting”;14 another book, about Indian spirituality; and – conceived as his last word – a nostalgic story about Pińsk, which was to begin with the first memory he could recall – a mouse in a pantry playing around an Easter cake. Few knew that his last years were marked by serious illnesses, often ending in hospitalization, with doctors cancelling surgery at the last moment because of his heart condition. The world was not prepared to bid the reporter farewell. On the contrary: it was getting ready to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday. A number of projects were undertaken around the world to add splendour to that day. In Belarus, Kapuściński’s friends – mainly from Pińsk – planned celebrations, and in various cities around the world, thirteen of Kapuściński’s translators prepared a surprise gift for him: a book of friendship about meetings with “our author” and how he changed their lives. Czytelnik planned to publish his debut collection, The Polish Bush, with an original jacket design by Andrzej Heidrich (the “white series”). Newspapers and magazines

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prepared special issues, having recruited his closest friends, his most outstanding students, and the most accomplished experts in his work to fill the pages. Meanwhile, however, death – this “perfection in every respect,” as he called it in one of his poems (“Śmierć,” PN, 54) – reached him at an unusual moment: “An unusually warm January, on the eve of the first and such late snows.”15 Jerzy Pilch wondered: “What are the metaphors in this – I don’t know. He would probably have known.” The news of the passing of the “journalist of the century” on 23 January 2007 spread around the globe. It immediately reached Polish and foreign internet portals (it was the top news from Europe on the cnn website), and many sites immediately posted books of condolence, which soon filled with thousands of entries. The unofficial website www.kapuscinski.info was under siege – more than one thousand people visited it within an hour, and a new post appeared on the forum every two or three minutes. The following day, the sad news led most of the major Polish news programs and upended tv and radio schedules. Conversations with politicians sometimes began with a request for reflection, and the Sejm (the Polish Parliament) celebrated the memory of the writer with a minute’s silence. The voices of intellectuals were heard from all over, expressing their admiration for his work and their regret for his premature passing. Kings and princes sent condolences. The press reacted with lightning speed – on 24 January, his death led the news; newspapers and weeklies prepared special supplements; and unpublished interviews and photographs were printed. Publishers, operating at a much slower pace, would bring out six new editions under his name in just four months, which sold tens of thousands of copies.16 The international media published extensive articles about the writer in which his professional journey was recounted, his most important books were discussed, and his contributions to journalism and literature were highlighted. The sense of loss was commonly emphasized: the Peruvian daily El Correo called its recollection “Adios, Maestro”; Mexico’s El Universal noted that Kapuściński’s books had become “compulsory reading for students of journalism all over the world”; and the Cuban newspaper Juventud Rebelde wrote that an entire generation of journalists had tried to imitate him, “blending in with the crowd and experiencing the same feelings as the heroes of the events. According to Gabriel García Márquez, Kapuściński had been “the best journalist of the twentieth century.”17 In a long memoir in the New York Times, Michael T. Kaufman called him “a writer of sparkling

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allegories.”18 The European media also reacted energetically – the most prominent opinion magazines all prepared profiles. Libération began its column as follows: “The world is shrinking. One of those who contributed most to its enlargement has passed away.”19 The Italian daily Corriere della Sera recalled a significant incident in Baghdad in 2003 during the US intervention in Iraq. At the time, the Hotel Palestine was home to media envoys from all over the world reporting on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. As Andrea Nicastro emphasized, many were bursting with pride that they were so close to these historic events. “And then one of the youngest asked a question: ‘What would Ryszard Kapuściński do in this situation?’ The group was silent. The boasters lowered their heads. One of the Polish reporters who had been silent all evening, clearly in awe of her more experienced colleagues, replied: ‘He wouldn’t be here in the hotel with us. He would be somewhere else, in some Iraqi home, in some miserable little hotel.’”20 Of the things of this world only two will remain, Two only: poetry and goodness … and nothing else …21 One can safely say that those well-known lines are the strongest metaphor for Kapuściński’s legacy. Those two noble categories – poetry and goodness – are the values most often invoked in his writing. The first, of course, is not limited to rhymed speech but rather is, generally speaking, a sign of great literature. Since his death, this has been interpreted in two ways – in terms of his sincere love of literature, and as part of attempts to delineate how the author of The Emperor influenced its transformation. Filmmaker Piotr Załuski was astonished to see Pan Tadeusz: The Last Foray in Lithuania by Adam Mickiewicz – Poland’s national epic – lying next to the reporter’s bed just before his death. When he asked, “Why Mickiewicz?,” the writer replied that it was for the sake of contact with the beauty of language, to be “satiated” by it.22 He was most often praised for lifting reportage to the realm of great literature, which he did by saturating it with essayistic reflection, using boldly poetic language that combined conciseness, plasticity, and musicality.23 Kapuściński was remembered as well for his good heart. Those who knew him well, and those who had only brief contact with him, agreed that he was not at all intimidating; on the contrary, he made his interlocutors feel valued, important, interesting, special. Thanks to his kindness, openness, and empathy, people always remembered

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their meetings with him, however fleeting. One of them posted this on the internet: “A year ago, I accidentally passed Mr Ryszard near the University of Gdańsk. I did not dare to ask my beloved Writer for an autograph. He was in a great hurry … He smiled.”24 Innate decency was one secret of his success. It was useful in his working travels, for it helped him get closer to potential protagonists, and it was also an important feature of his writing. Jerzy Pilch wrote: Nowadays, his goodness is remembered. Indeed, he was a good man, his courage and wisdom derived from kindness … Seeing the world and humanity in all complexity, he seemed not to see the wrong side of humanity, the dark side of the world. This specific Franciscanism gave his writing an incredibly strong perspective … He behaved as if it was a waste of time to overthrow false and hostile concepts. He believed that spreading good is better. He was a good man.25 Linguist Jan Miodek captured this same quality: “With him, the world grew more beautiful … He looked at the world in such a ‘kapuścińskified way’ – I will use such a word – with a margin of tolerance for human errors and vices.”26 Eustachy Rylski recalled: “Ryszard Kapuściński confirmed the opinion that talent is not enough for great literature, that wisdom is essential, understood not only as an intellectual but also a moral category. He was a sage – this is the highest degree of literary initiation. We lost both a writer and a good man who understood the world. I don’t know which to mourn more.”27 Yet even before the writer’s death, there had been rumours, premonitions, predictions of a big scandal. Indeed, the first attempts to discredit his memory came only four days after his passing.28 As Jerzy Pilch later noted in the title of his column – “Szaleństwo wokół Kapuścińskiego” (Madness around Kapuściński) – the turnaround had less to do with Kapuściński himself than with the concept of lustration in general. This was a time of lustration hysteria in Poland, when prominent figures were constant targets of despicable accusations, however unwarranted. In this, both sides could be guilty. In the widespread hunt for prominent names whose reputations to tarnish, some viewed Kapuściński as a valuable trophy. The file the government kept on him would eventually turn out to be devoid of compromising materials; unfortunately, none of his accusers at the time had opened it to look. The contents of the file were disclosed in a May issue of Newsweek, in a manner characteristic of that time. That story, supposedly a

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blockbuster, turned out to be a damp squib that reverberated only briefly.29 Yet it is interesting here because it served as the impetus for a renowned Italian war correspondent, Valerio Pellizzari, to investigate the whole. Pellizzari provided the results of his investigation in the article “The Spy Who Did Not Spy,” published in early January 2008 in Turin’s La Stampa. The Italian visited Poland three times – first in June, just after the Newsweek story, then in September, and finally in November.30 He spoke, among others, to Alicja Kapuścińska, Andrzej Arseniuk, Father Adam Boniecki, Andrzej Friszke, Andrzej Nagorski, Jerzy Nowak, Wiktor Osiatyński, Andrzej Paczkowski, Ernest Skalski, Teresa Torańska, and the editors of Newsweek – Michał Kobosko, Aleksander Kaczorowski, and Igor Ryciak. In November, he personally familiarized himself with the files on the reporter, which at that time were kept at the Institute of National Remembrance. However, his ensuing article was only a cursory analysis of the portfolio’s contents; it focused mainly on the story’s murky atmospherics. It opened with information about a man who on 26 January 2007 – as Pellizzari emphasized, sixty hours after the writer’s death and five days before his funeral – was the first to open dossier #11630/I. This was Piotr Gontarczyk, at the time the deputy director of the archives at the Institute of National Remembrance. Pellizzari then painted a portrait of Igor Ryciak, who in his opinion was an arrogant thirty-year-old who believed he had found “the most important story of his life” and who was determined to ride it hard. In a private conversation with an Italian journalist, Ryciak referred to the need for journalistic integrity (“I have to tell my clients about the facts, about the truth. I can’t sweep the truth under the rug”), but Pellizzari was unconvinced; rather, he thought that “the truth emerges from this reconstruction defeated, if not disgraced.” In his view, Piotr Gontarczyk was a “relentless inquisitor,” a “file hunter,” “spreading biased and suspicious stories in various circles of Warsaw, extracting poison from the dossier when he himself remains in the shadows.” He described the Institute of National Remembrance as a “surreal fortress” and the portfolio revelations as “a counterfeit of outdated truth.” Indeed, he added, the time of lustration was measured by the “clock of the absurd.” The article in La Stampa is significant for two reasons. First, the Italian’s stance reflected the international outcry that had been sparked by the lustration of one of Poland’s most famous writers. Second, being an outsider’s perspective, it confirmed that the explanation for the whole

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affair must be directed less toward the portfolio and more toward the atmosphere of the time. It was enough to hear that “something” had been found, to immediately prejudge the writer and thereby open a Pandora’s box of accusers and defenders. It was hardly surprising that in the end, a scandal based on rumours was like a colossus on clay legs – after causing a lot of confusion, it quickly collapsed into pieces. •

The “portfolio scandal” failed to tarnish the writer’s image. Indeed, it demonstrated once again the broader world’s huge respect for him. The thousands of posthumous reminiscences (especially those included in condolence books) that have poured in for decades since from various parts of the world are clear testimony that the cult of Kapuściński endures to this day. An anecdote told by Bill Buford, an American journalist and the publisher of Granta, comes from 1987. It concerns a certain authors’ evening: The meeting was scheduled for 5 pm. Although we came half an hour earlier, there was no way to get inside. The hall was so stuffed with people that no one – including those pressed into the door frame – could get out. Before the reporter got to the podium, he was crushed and tossed so much that he lost all his buttons, his shirt was torn, and he lost his glasses somewhere. Around 5.30 pm, he started the reading … He finished around 2 am. There were so many questions.31 The American’s astonishment must have reached its zenith when he learned that the reporter always had a free parking space at a petrol station in Warsaw and that an employee working there always washed his car on his own initiative, also free of charge. Of course, the man had read all of his idol’s books. And besides that, his brother, a car mechanic, called Kapuściński every three months, asked about the clutch, oil, and engine, and personally took his car for inspection. Of course, also free of charge! This plain human adoration, which seemed so improbable to the foreign journalist, had swelled to sizable proportions. Kapuściński also owed his strong position in the world to many moments of recognition from eminent personalities. At the end of the last century, King Carl XVI Gustav of Sweden invited him to a private

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seminar devoted to the future of the world, during which a dozen or so people, including directors of the World Bank, un heads, and leading businessmen discussed the most important global problems and undertook immediate actions. Kapuściński recalled his hopes from that meeting: “After a short conversation, I saw one of them write out an order to mobilize $50 million to fight malaria. There has never been so much money to fight malaria. We are truly witnessing the birth of a new consciousness, new great undertakings, and a new world.”32 The importance of Kapuściński’s writing was recognized by eminent representatives of world reportage and literature. Gabriel García Márquez called him a master. The best Italian reporters – Tiziano Terzani, Ettore Mo, Valerio Pellizzari, and Paolo Rumiz – considered him an unsurpassed model, and the young Norwegian reporter Åsne Seierstad, known for, among others, the book The Bookseller from Kabul, translated into thirty languages, repeatedly emphasized that for her, Kapuściński was always the ideal reporter.33 Kapuściński’s work fascinated famous people and ordinary readers in equal measure. Hundreds had always shown up at public meetings he attended and at his lectures and book promotions. Artur Domosławski offers an excellent example of the cult of Kapuściński in his article “Kapumania, kapumafia”: I don’t remember anymore how the folder with press clippings from Kapuściński’s visit to Mexico in 2001 came into my hands. What wasn’t there? Twenty or forty-five articles, essays, interviews, notes, reflections, impressions … from the left, from the right, the top, the bottom. It gave the impression that the person who had just arrived was not a reporter, not a writer, but a combination of intellectual magnificence, religious guru and pop star. Kapuściński’s words were listened to with pious attention; the most eminent pens and minds spoke about the Master: Enrique Krauze, Carlos Monsiváis, Gabriel Zaid, probably also Carlos Fuentes, and Octavio Paz almost rose from the grave to add something from himself. Even the deputy commander Marcos entered the capital at the time, at the head of a multitude of Indians – as if he wanted Kapuściński to describe him, because only he would properly understand what was going on … Kapuściński, at least in the Iberian world (and I am sure that much more beyond that – also in Italy or Scandinavia), is not just considered the greatest writer among reporters and vice versa. He is on a pedestal; everybody

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listens to him as if he were about to explain the world, solve the puzzle, expand the perspective, give the key to wisdom. His meetings are attended in droves, his books fly off the shelves in countless numbers, presidents beg for him to come for dinner, queens invite him to receptions, dukes present him with awards.34 Also testifying to the cult of Kapuściński is the great international prestige of the houses that published his books. Anagrama, for example, is proudly independent and sells its titles both in Spain and in Latin America. Agata Orzeszek – a translator of Polish literature into Spanish – notes that “the very appearance of the book in Anagrama is a great honour for the author, and if you have also more than a dozen editions, like The Shadow of the Sun, you are at the summit of Parnassus.”35 There are dozens of similar examples of Kapuściński’s popularity, both in the media, in the form of reprints and citations of his works, and in the more hidden world of private, unpublished memoirs – all underscoring his cult status. And at the same time – not surprisingly, given his status – he has been an inspiration for multitudes around the world because of his personality, his creativity, and the life he led. Just as impressive as his impact has been its durability. The young Kapuściński was a model for many reporters of his generation. Wojciech Giełżyński wrote: “For my generation of journalists and reporters, he was not only an unsurpassed role model and master but also a heartfelt friend and adviser.”36 Wojciech Jagielski, an excellent reporter of the younger generation, says it succinctly: “I only became a journalist because Kapuściński was.”37 Similarly, Tomasz Sekielski – a well-known political journalist for tvn , believes that his reporter’s soul truly woke up after he read Shah of Shahs.38 But it would be an error to think that Kapuściński’s influence has been limited to journalism. It runs much deeper – he awakens in his readers the desire to be unique; he stimulates their hunger to express their true selves. The finalist on the famous tv show Idol – eighteen-year-old Gosia Karpiuk – spoke about the shock she felt when she read Autoportret reportera (A Reporter’s Self-Portrait). Having read that book, she realized she no longer wanted to compromise with her own life. She wanted to start living her own way and getting to know the world. She immediately turned her life upside down – she abandoned the stage, began studying applied linguistics, and saved up for a professional camera and travel.39 Internet forums are full of similar examples of people finding ways to live the way their master did.

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A unique forum for the Kapusciński cult is the website www.kapuscinski.info. Unlike the reporter’s official website, this one is unofficial. Its creators are two engineers, Maciej Skórczewski and Robert Nowacki, and a sociology student, Krzysztof Pacholak. It is a valuable source of knowledge about the author and a place to exchange information about important events, news, and prizes related to him; it is also a place meet other “Kapumaniacs” to discuss his work from various perspectives. That site today is considered the most complete source of knowledge about Ryszard Kapuściński. It receives 20,000 visitors per month.40 Its beginnings were quite modest. When he was a teenager, Maciej Skórczewski was assigned to prepare a profile of his favourite writer. He chose Kapuściński. But he encountered considerable difficulty finding access to materials; little was available on the internet. So in September 2000, he set up a site dedicated to the master. He started by posting his homework on it and then gradually added other texts, including a brief biography, an index of awards, and a collection of interviews and publications by the reporter. Over the first six months, the site drew only around 200 visits. Skórczewski was beginning to lose faith in his project when Nowacki contacted him out of the blue and offered the use of his archive, which he had been compiling since the mid-1990s. They decided to work together: Maciej from Gdańsk, Robert from Bydgoszcz. Working by phone and email, they agreed on how they would run the project together. (They would not meet in person until a few years later, in 2004, when Kapuściński was receiving an honorary doctorate at the University of Gdańsk.) Since those frail beginnings, the website has been developing rapidly. In 2002, the website added a discussion forum as well as materials for teachers. In addition, it significantly expanded its biographical material on the reporter, including juvenilia, interviews, the reporter’s publications, current events in his professional life, and a list of translations. The number of visitors soon increased to several thousand a month. This mobilized the creators to expand the scope of the site’s activities – they did not want it to be just an archive of texts and were looking for much more ambitious challenges. The website’s main purpose was to gather materials related to the master. This was first limited to library queries, careful media tracking, and internet surfing. But as time passed, those sources turned out to be insufficient: “I wanted to know which school he attended,” said Nowacki, “what professor he wrote for, the first prize he won. I wanted to

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recreate his every day. The idea was to save single words, sentences that Mr Ryszard said, from oblivion.”41 To that end, he decided to start his search at the source. In May 2003, he travelled to the writer’s hometown of Pińsk as a “special envoy” for the website. He spent a dozen days there, during which he tried to find all traces of his master’s presence, crumbs of prewar Pińsk, and to meet his former friends, pupils, and neighbours. He started his search just like the author himself had done some years earlier – through conversations with people coming out of Sunday mass. In his travels, he reached all the important places related to the author’s childhood. The report that soon appeared on the website is an ingenious compilation of Nowacki’s Pińsk experiences (the findings of which he confirmed in an interview with Kapuściński) along with valuable notes about the city, photographs, and reflections from the reporter’s interviews and memoirs. This report is the most complete attempt so far to reconstruct the earliest period of the reporter’s life. After functioning in virtual space for seven years, the high school student’s website has become a powerhouse. According to the webmaster’s estimates, it has been visited by half a million internet users; the ma theses published on it are downloaded around one thousand times a month, which means they have considerable reach in terms of numbers of readers – several tens of thousands. There is a real need for this selfless project to have foreign-language versions – in English, Spanish, and Italian, at the very least. The only problem is – how? For now, Skórczewski and Nowacki declare that their website will always be available. Besides everything else, Kapuściński was a teacher. By the 1970s he was teaching a postgraduate journalism course at the University of Warsaw. Later he lectured at many foreign universities, including Harvard (Cambridge, ma ), Columbia (New York), and ubc (Vancouver), as well as universities in Bonn, Irkutsk, Canberra, Cape Town, London, Madrid, Caracas, and Philadelphia. In his last days, he taught the art of reportage in workshops for the Colombian School of New Journalism, which he organized with García Márquez in various Latin American cities (2001 – Mexico, 2002 – Buenos Aires, 2004 – Caracas). In all this, he had more than just an “institutional” effect – besides being an academic lecturer, he was a master of what he was teaching. Many famous reporters view themselves as his apprentices: Wojciech Jagielski, Wojciech Tochman, Artur Domosławski, Mariusz Szczygieł, Jacek Hugo-Bader, Paweł Smoleński, Olga Stanisławska, Maria Wiernikowska, to name the most popular.

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He introduced them to the arcana of the profession, promoted their books, and wrote numerous introductions, afterwords, and recommendations for them. But Kapuściński – as they say – was not a “typical” teacher who taught a craft and showed students how to edit a text. One of his students, Ewa Juńczyk-Ziomecka, recalled that when she and her friends gave him their texts to be checked, they were disappointed because he gave them back without any deletions and just this three-word comment: “Good, write, write.”42 He talked little about the craft, a lot about ethics: “It is important … that you maintain the ability to experience. That there are things that can amaze you, shock you. It is important that you do not catch that terrible disease – indifference.” “Be a good person,” he urged, “demand of yourself.” They remember these lessons: “He taught us this: before you write about something, try to read everything that has been written about it so far” (Tochman);43 “this obligation to constantly learn, improve, constantly ask questions and reluctance to unequivocally and definitively define anything was the most important lesson I took from my meetings with Kapuściński” (Jagielski).44 He did not imposes himself, nor did he overwhelm students with his personality; on the contrary, he was discreetly inspiring, allowing them to find “their Kapuściński,” and thus their own excellence, in themselves. After his death, Teresa Torańska somewhat prematurely announced the end of the “Polish school of reportage.”45 The author of The Emperor is undoubtedly its greatest representative, but fortunately not the only one. After all, he himself had been a student of the former masters of this genre – Melchior Wańkowicz and Ksawery Pruszyński, an outstanding reporter of his generation and a model for the next generations. Kapuściński’s passing closed an important stage in the history of the Polish school but fortunately did not bring an end to it. Wojciech Tochman, one of the best reporters of the younger generation, rightly objected: “True, we are few … But we are … We feel Kapuściński’s legacy.”46 And that is so true! Because Polish reportage, especially that of younger journalists, is different from what it was before the advent of the author of The Shadow of the Sun, and there is no doubt that this significant evolution happened in part thanks to his work. It was he who inspired his talented successors to scour the Third World, he who developed the criteria for a new reportage and equipped it with anthropological tools. In the works of the best Polish journalists, this influence has translated into a kind of regionalism that can be traced directly back to Kapuściński.

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Thus, Artur Domosławski has become a natural heir to his Latin American passions, whose books, especially Latin American Fever, are a synthesis of the continent’s issues, imitating the language of that culture and drawing upon models from Ibero-American literature. Another of Kapuściński’s great subjects – Africa – has for many years been a place of exploration for Olga Stanisławska. Islam and terrorism turned out to be the most important topic for Beata Pawlak, who, tragically, died on the island of Bali in 2002 during a terrorist attack. Jacek Hugo-Bader found his place in the countries of the former Soviet Union, and Wojciech Jagielski in the Transcaucasus, Afghanistan, and Africa. Kapuściński encouraged his students not to dwell on the surface of cultures but to get to know them as deeply as possible, to enter their core, to try to become part of them. Hence the clear geographic and cultural specialization in their works, and hence the variety of literary means they use, such as sensual metaphors, rich symbolism, attempts at synthesis, and also – well-known from the books of the “journalist of the century” – dilemmas of participation. How far can we enter the world of human tragedy? How should we understand it? How do we speak about it honestly? Texts originating from the excellent “Kapuściński school,” as if bearing the master’s signature, have become an important trace of his ongoing presence on the constantly developing literary map of the world. •

The work of the author of Shah of Shahs has been drawing the attention of the academic world for a number of years. Today his books serve as research materials for literary scholars and cultural researchers as well as for sociologists, anthropologists, historians, theologians, and Africanologists. In this way, perhaps without specifically intending it, the author of The Emperor has left another clear imprint on the world’s intellectual map. Ever more interpreters of his creative output are subjecting his works to analysis, seeking traces of its unique creative dna. Over the course of ten years, the international academic community honoured Kapuściński’s creative output seven times with its highest award. In 1997 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Silesia; four years later, from the University of Wrocław. A year later, he was honoured by Sofia University; then in 2004, by two Polish universities: the University of Gdańsk and then the Jagiellonian University. In 2005, the University of Barcelona joined the

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group of “institutional kapumaniacs”47 – as Artur Domosławski jokingly put it – and in May of the following year, so did Italy’s Udine academic community. These awards are another marker of his reputation. Kapuściński received dozens of great international prizes – the Goethe, Prince of Asturias, Viareggio, and Premio Napoli Prizes, to name just a few of those he valued the most. In February 2007, an exceptional event occurred – the Ryszard Kapuściński Award was given out for the first time in Poznań.48 Two months before his death, on his last visit to the city, the reporter said he hoped to establish an award “for those who do good in the world.” After the writer’s death, it was confirmed that the award would bear his name. The first statuette, depicting the spread wings of an angel, was awarded to Dr Wanda Błeńska, then in her nineties, who had worked as a lay missionary for forty years among lepers in Africa. The laureate and the writer had met twenty years earlier in Uganda. In May 2007, Kapuściński received another posthumous laurel, but not his last. In Bergamo, Italy, he was awarded the “Takunda Award,” named after a Zimbabwean boy who, thanks to a program to combat aids , was born healthy even though his mother was hiv -positive. These new posthumously awarded trophies testify to the lasting infatuation with Kapuściński’s work and the constant presence of his message in the world. Kapuściński’s works have been part of world literature for more than thirty years. More than fifty translators have performed the crucial role of promoting his works on the international stage. They are the author’s most sincere allies, most insightful readers, most ruthless error hunters, and most devoted literary agents. It is thanks to translation that the Polish author can speak in many languages of the world, it is to translation that he owes the unique opportunity to meet the Other and – last but not least – it is thanks to the work of the translators that the phenomenon of “kapumania” has been able to cross the boundaries of languages and cultures. Kapuściński’s books have been translated so far into more than thirty foreign languages – among them Albanian, Amharic, English, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Esperanto, Finnish, French, Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, Japanese, Catalan, Dutch, German, Norwegian, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Romanian, SerboCroatian (Serbian), Slovak, Slovenian, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Hungarian, Vietnamese, and Italian. The map of his works’ global influence is constantly changing – his books are still entering the literary circulation of other countries, still gaining new readers.

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Czesław Apiecionek, the owner of Agencja Literacka Puenta, which attends to Kapuściński’s interests in Poland, Central and Eastern Europe, and Asia (excluding Japan), stated that in 2008 he signed agreements with eight countries – Taiwan (The Shadow of the Sun, Travels with Herodotus), South Korea (Imperium, Travels with Herodotus), Lithuania (The Emperor, Shah of Shahs, The Soccer War, Travels with Herodotus), Romania (Travels with Herodotus), Slovenia (Travels with Herodotus), Bulgaria (Travels with Herodotus), Russia (Shah of Shahs, The Emperor – collected in one volume, Travels with Herodotus), and Belarus (Collected Poems, Imperium).49 In the field of new publishing undertakings, the Italian series I Meridiani Mondadori50 should be highlighted. This, like La Pléiade in France, is a prestigious publishing project, functioning as a collection of classic works of world literature. Kapuściński’s selected works will soon be published in a volume of almost 2,000 pages. All texts have been corrected according to the latest Polish editions by Vera Verdiani, Kapuściński’s Italian translator. That volume, comprising six books (The Emperor, Shah of Shahs, Imperium, The Shadow of the Sun, Travels with Herodotus, Collected Poems) and extensive passages from the Lapidaria I–V and The Soccer War, was edited by Silvano De Fanti, who prepared footnotes to all texts, described the history of the creation of individual books, and is the author of an extensive biography of the author (Cronologia). Kapuściński is the first Pole whose works appear in this unique Italian series. An interesting complement to the world cult of Kapuściński is the Polish series of selected works prepared by Bożena Dudko and Mariusz Szczygieł for the Agora Publishing House. It has collected sixteen volumes (including four audiobooks), enriched with prefaces and afterwords. The names of the authors of these discussions – John Updike, Salman Rushdie, Claudio Magris – prove the top-tier world ranking of the Polish journalist. The publication of the series was an important event in the publishing world. Czesław Apiecionek estimates that the total circulation of the collection exceeded 600,000 copies after only a few months. Kapuściński’s death deeply moved a great many people. Almost all memories are dominated by a sense of loss combined with the effort to remember. The authors recall their reading revelations, private discoveries, personal meetings – the most important, the last, and the mere crumbs: fleeting moments when the writer made a dedication, when he looked, when he exchanged a few words … What will happen

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now? To what extent will these fascinations prove to be permanent? It is not known. Time has not yet verified their longevity. Some will likely be obliterated, others will go unnoticed, and many will remain. Will Kapuściński find more followers? Will the impact of his books continue to be as strong? Will readers want them to keep changing their fortunes? How can we know? •

So it is worth looking at his legacy differently – from the perspective of what we already know about it, what has turned out to be permanent, and what has left an indelible mark. We are used to thinking that the exceptional popularity of the creator of The Shadow of the Sun is a matter of the last three decades, the time counted from the publication of The Emperor. But it is also interesting to look at Kapuściński in his twenties, when he was just on the threshold of his career, and at how he was perceived by his peers at the time, and whether he stood out even then, and if so, why. Professor Alina Brodzka-Wald, an eminent literary scholar, recalls that in the 1950s, when both were part of the circles of committed youth, “every one of his texts attracted attention. He seemed to be very mature at a very early age, very focused from within. There was some hidden strength, stubbornness, but not aggressiveness, no inner fury. It seemed as if he was ‘unevenly baked’: from the top – a friend to the whole world, in the middle – focused and serious.”51 The echoes of the aforementioned discussion on the poetry debut of a teenage junior high school student are significant testimony to his position at the time. They must have been quite loud, since more than half a century later, an outstanding intellectual could still recall them. Leszek Kołakowski, attempting to reconstruct his first memories of the author of The Emperor, said: I don’t remember when I met Ryszard Kapuściński in person. However, I knew earlier about his existence. As a teenager, he wrote poems like everyone else, of course, and I remember that in some literary periodical, probably in Nowa Kultura, there was a discussion about how Kapuściński differs from Mayakovsky. I no longer remember what the panellists thought was different or not different. I suppose that he also didn’t consider this discussion an important part of his biography.52

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For Kapuściński’s peer, later a well-known novelist and playwright, Jarosław Abramow-Newerly, the press discussion of his school friend’s poem was rather a “shock.” Half a century later, he recalled: I first heard Kapuściński’s name in 1950, 55 years ago. It was at a special moment for me. I was lying at home, sick with scarlet fever, and the article I found in Odrodzenie turned out to be a real bomb for me. It was called “Dyskusja o poezji w liceum im. Staszica w Warszawie” [Discussion about Poetry at the Staszica Liceum in Warsaw] … The fact that my peer fared better – which was emphasized in the discussion – than Kazimierz Wierzyński, a beloved poet of my father … truly shocked me.53 Kapuściński, however, gave up writing poems for a long time and launched a new stage of his writing activity – he took up journalism. And he did it “for real” from the very start. Let us recall that as a twenty-year-old, he wrote a brave text about Nowa Huta and was ready to accept the consequences of his act. Two years later, he did not hesitate to fight for the ideas of October ’56, sympathizing with the journalists of the Po prostu weekly, which had just been liquidated by the authorities. Moreover, when he was a twenty-five-year-old reporter, then residing in China, part of the newspaper team waited to hear his attitude before reacting with their decisions: “Even then, people knew about him,” remembered journalist Wojciech Adamiecki.54 Supporting the idea of October back then caused him to lose his job in the newspaper and earned him a year-long publication ban. Then it was time to write books. His debut, The Polish Bush, was a watershed moment in his creative biography. The renowned reporter Małgorzata Szejnert recalled its impact on her: “Fifteen years ago, I read the report in Polityka called Wydma. I read it many times and finally knew it by heart … What was it about this report? What was in the others …? Everyone read them, everyone talked about them.”55 Here is Romuald Karaś, in the same vein: “I remember how we experienced the publication of his first book, The Polish Bush. It was revelation and infatuation. This reportage read like fairy tales of everyday life. Almost everyone went through the themes he described, and suddenly these accidental tales shone with the brilliance of concrete details.”56 Fifty years later, The Polish Bush still has a magical impact on readers. As he travelled around “his Europe,” Andrzej Stasiuk admitted his fascination with the same volume:

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It just happened like that, that I read Kapuściński’s books whilst travelling … I had The Polish Bush with me when I was backpacking in Transylvania one summer. Thanks to that, I had strange images in my head. Reality mixed with literature, yet this literature comprised a masterful description of reality, a reality which was only a little bit more distant than the one I was in. Somehow, Albania will always be the European Africa for me, and the Polish province will always shine through from Transylvania. Not directly, of course, but on the basis of bizarre, irrational associations.57 However, the strength of Kapuściński’s early Polish reportages, which, after all, have the distinct character of philosophical stories, lies not only in their durability but also in the growing self-awareness of their author. That they spurred discussion about the place of reportage in postwar Polish literature will forever be part of his biographical legend. As a fledgling poet and a deeply committed young journalist, he was firmly convinced from the start about the literary possibilities of reportage. He treated reporting, understood as a tool for discovering the world, seriously from the very beginning. He was aware that he would be paying a price for this uncompromising attitude. Many years later, he declared in an interview: I suffered greatly for this reason … There were even those who advised me to write in a more sensational and adventurous manner, then I would be bought. I rejected this proposal because … I believed that there would come a time when readers would read, appreciate and recognize this type of literature. I knew that what I was writing was a new type of literature that did not fit either classic reportage or classic stories. I knew that this is a different type of writing for which readers were not prepared, which they would not accept immediately because every novelty is difficult to accept. I knew that I had to patiently wait.58 Well, he waited – for years … And then – with Christ with a Rifle on His Shoulder, Another Day of Life, The Soccer War, and most of all with The Emperor, he succeeded in finding readers. The role of The Emperor in Kapuściński’s biography and work, and in the history of Polish literature, indeed world literature, as a reflection on human power cannot be overestimated. The story of the “king of kings” was a popular success that also earned him a place on the literary Parnassus. His

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report on the emperor’s fall was recognized by the greatest authorities as a masterpiece and became the significant argument in a debate on whether reportage can be literature. The Emperor – the culmination of the author’s commitment to reportage and his innovative approach to it – changed people’s views about this underappreciated genre, sometimes called “the poor cousin of literature.” Kapuściński, like Truman Capote with In Cold Blood, with one clear statement sharply increased the importance of non-fiction. This “genealogical breakthrough” is probably his greatest achievement as a writer. But it is not the only reason why The Emperor is so important. The Emperor is renowned above all as an insightful study of the mechanisms of power and a valuable addition to a great humanistic debate that is centuries old. Yet when one looks at Kapuściński’s entire legacy, it is hard not to conclude that his elevation of reportage to literature was not his only and perhaps not even his most important contribution. In hindsight, the advancement of reportage was not his main goal, however much he desired it; rather, it was a side effect of a much deeper process. The success of The Emperor, and the renown it brought him, meant he had found himself in a new social role. Perhaps that was the point when he realized that the calling of a creator, especially a writer, is to explain reality and disseminate values he considers important.59 Shah of Shahs was born out of this need to make the world more understandable. It was a penetrating analysis of the totalitarian system, the phenomenon of revolution and cultural alienation. Similarly, Notatki z Wybrzeża (Notes from the Coast) was more than the best reportage about the Polish August ’80; it was also, as Bronisław Geremek summed up, one “of the instruments of change, a breakthrough in the mindset of the rulers of the time.”60 •

So – what traces has Kapuściński left? What did he build his message from? How is it credible? It has been said that the creator of The Emperor inspired followers, indeed worshippers. Yet his writing is so distinctive that no one can duplicate it. His literary world must remain sui generis, just like the worlds of other authors who build the space of their works from their own life experiences. His works reflected the unique teachings that history afforded him, as well as his own personal responses to the lessons the world taught him. His own first lesson, and probably the one he felt most strongly, had to do with the sudden

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interruption of his childhood. As a seven-year-old, he found himself immersed in the horrors of war, and he struggled thereafter to sort out that experience. Would the scars inflicted on him by humiliation, fear, and exile be easily healed? How is one to build an identity on foundations so terribly weakened from so early on, out of a youth that offered only loneliness, humiliation, and fear of persecution? Finally, living under constant threat, how is one to build lasting bonds with others and make friends with the world?61 The tragic experience of his first lesson would be transformed into an instinctive search for conflict situations, for the clash of opposing ideas, first at home and then in the world. Even in his twenties, he was seeking the scent of gunpowder, travelling to zones of upheaval, where the greatest human dramas were taking place and where he found his childhood nightmare enlarged to an incomprehensible scale. Yet the African wars were not simply a repetition of his own remembered experiences. Those conflicts also taught him a cruel new lesson, this one about the colour of his skin. That physical trait, which he had paid no attention to before, precluded him from participating in the fight on the side of the Good. As a white man, he was the colonizer, someone who had been the continent’s oppressor and humiliator for centuries. Every white person in Africa is marked with that stigma, which accompanied him constantly in his peregrinations there. Of course, he tried at first to fight the unfair and completely unfamiliar dictate of colour and to tame the otherness he came into contact with. He immediately sought common experiences with the Africans: “My country was a colony,” he explained to a village chief in Ghana. “That was what we called fascism. It’s the worst colonialism” (W, 232). He renounced the politics of voracious empires: “I’ve always regarded colonialists as the lowest vermin. I’m with you and I’ll prove it with deeds” (W, 63). He showed proof of his lasting solidarity: “At the age of sixteen, I joined a youth organization. On the banners of that organization were written slogans about the brotherhood of the races and the common struggle against colonialism” (W, 63). In the end, however, he surrendered, having grasped that this stigma could not be erased, that he must take responsibility for the shameful actions of whites, and that he would have to accept his portion of the guilt white people bear toward the wronged continent. These two history lessons left two clear and permanent marks on Kapuściński’s identity: childhood scars on the one hand, and the stigma of white guilt on the other. What did he learn from those lessons? He

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must have been emotionally debilitated by the war, yet he did not break under its weight. Instead he set out to learn from that experience. The misery of Pińsk and the terrors of war, but also the multiculturalism of the borderlands, fuelled his curiosity about the Third World, which in the 1960s was an unpredictable, boiling crucible.62 He then applied the knowledge he had gained as a child of the war to communicate effectively with those who had become the focus of his wanderings – people excluded from the better world. A man who had been driven from his family home and condemned by history to an uncertain existence consciously began to live – to use the title of Tadeusz Sławek’s book – “against familiarity,”63 against the dullness of comfort, against excessive feelings of “being at home.” What lessons did he learn from his second history lesson – the one he learned in the African school? He took responsibility for white guilt, he accepted that undeserved stigma, and he tried to repay the debt incurred to the Third World by the privileged community with his whole life and writing. He learned his African lesson in the same way he learned the previous one: he worked through the painful marks that history had branded on him and then turned his weaknesses into assets. His “scars” and “stigma” in this way became a “calling.” In the typology of traces proposed by Barbara Skarga, the “calling” is a special kind of sign. It is a clue one wants to follow, a mysterious sign that promises hope. It pulls one into a journey toward a higher goal. That journey may have religious, moral, or more practical vectors, but not necessarily. It is set apart by the fact it always makes one climb higher. Unlike with a scar or a stigma, we do not want to erase anything of this trace; instead we want to keep it and even highlight it. A “calling” leads us to what we most desire, to our most important meaning in life. Callings “are a gift for us, a blessing, a vision of fulfilment.”64 This “calling” is thus the right track to follow if we want to unearth the general sense of Kapuściński’s writing. What was this higher purpose that made him exceed himself, that became for him the promise of a fulfilled existence? He heard its call early on, when as a twentyyear-old he went on his first journey, to India and China. Jerzy M. Nowak, a friend of his for almost half a century, remembered how Kapuściński told him about the shock he felt when he saw millions of people living in extreme poverty and enduring their tragic fate with humility and acceptance. The coexistence of poverty and wealth would grow to become his obsession. Nowak recalled:

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When we both found ourselves in Dar es Salaam in 1962 … walking along the shores of the Indian Ocean, he told me about the need for self-sacrifice – to do something for these crowds of people and for each of them individually … He claimed that neither the First World, nor the West, nor the Second World, nor the Socialist Bloc at the time, would do anything good … These people can only be helped by those who are ready to sacrifice their health, their lives, even at the risk of losing them.65 Nowak explains the idea of “self-immolation” as sharing a tragic fate with the needy – as experiencing humiliation, suffering, and rejection and then giving an honest account to the world, in order to touch the consciences of those whom fate has allowed a better life. This idealistic desire next drove Kapuściński to another hemisphere – to Latin America, where he became fascinated by the local revolutions and the fate of their heroes. There too he was accompanied by the same dream of a fruitful encounter between two worlds – poverty and wealth, war and peace, glamour and contempt. For almost half a century, that would be his most important theme and the focus of all of his journalistic missions. Over time, his international fame became an excellent opportunity for him to propound on that hard-won theme. In the early 1990s, he explained: The greatest difficulty, but also the greatest achievement, is making a normal process of life and creation from my career. This means that my career is not for the sake of my career, but it is helpful for the promotion and dissemination of those values, ideas and thoughts that I would like to pass to my audience. Its great value is that it has made it possible to share certain values with the world.66 From then on, he used every opportunity to advocate for those about whom history is silent. In hundreds of tv , radio, and press interviews, in dozens of readings, lectures, and publications, and in his last books, he kept returning to themes taken from philosophy and meetings. He appealed for friendship with the world, he encouraged peaceful coexistence, and he argued that people are good – you just need to get to know them to find the good in them. He authenticated this – it would seem – naive faith with the experience of his rich life.

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But he was perfectly aware of his own helplessness and that arguments about social justice would not reach everyone. He did not refer to humanistic values at the time, but rather to common sense: he spoke of the dangers of the global inequality of wealth distribution, of the growing awareness of the humiliated, who might one day lay claim to what they deserved. In support of his words, he quoted astonishing statistics: There are six billion of us at the moment and one hundred million more every year. Our world community lives as if in two civilizations – one is a civilization of development and prosperity: about 500 million people live in it. The other is a civilization of survival. This inequality in which the modern community lives, our entire human family, is the problem we will have to solve in the twenty-first century. Such contradictions will be disturbing, bringing conflict and a serious threat to world peace. At this moment, seventy-three armed conflicts in the world – all taking place in the so-called Third World, in the poor world. Poverty breeds anxiety, breeds violence, breeds frustration, breeds rebellion. Therefore, the common sense of the world, the sense of those who think about the world, influence the distribution of the wealth, and the simple instinct of self-preservation – these will mobilize and guide those people to share mankind’s resources more equitably. There is only one planet, and we must live in such a way, and with enough knowledge, and be tolerant enough to understand each other enough that we may survive because only in this understanding, tolerance is there a chance of survival. I have written about it, and I want to write about it more.67 This statement constitutes a kind of a memento by Ryszard Kapuściński. It is a fragment of a several-minute film impression prepared by tvp as part of the series titled Mój ślad (My Trace). The project was conceived as a compilation of statements by great Poles (including John Paul II and Jan Nowak-Jeziorański), balancing their achievements in the context of the turn of the century. Kapuściński presented his idea of intercultural exchange and peaceful coexistence to crowned heads, state leaders, and economists. But they were not the most important recipients of this message. Above all, he wanted his voice to reach the public, in order to mobilize people to act. It was there that he saw a powerful force, capable of influencing the policy-making of states.68 In the unequal fight to attract attention, he turned to the oldest tool – the word.

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Two years before his death, he declared, “Can writing make a difference? Yes. I deeply believe this. Without this faith, I would not be able to write.”69 He was speaking at the inaugural pen World Voices Festival, held that year in New York. In 1997, while being awarded his doctorate honoris causa from the University of Silesia, he clearly and thoroughly articulated his desire to make the world better by heightening the awareness of the privileged, who were living in peace, abundance, and often excess, perhaps for the first time in their lives. Kapuściński, then already the recipient of many journalistic and literary prizes, was on that day being honoured by the academic community with the highest possible distinction (and one of the rarest). He took the opportunity to nurture and popularize the idea of getting to know the world through friendships. In his lecture, he reminded his listeners that all the world’s people form a unique “human family.”70 He regarded the unresolved problem of mass poverty as the bane of most of our “brothers and sisters.” He then answered a question he had avoided for many years: “Why do I write?” “The trick is to create relations not of dependence and subordination, but of understanding and partnership between cultures. Only then is there a chance that in our human family, consent and kindness will prevail over all hostilities and conflicts. I would like to contribute to this with my tiny, microscopic patch, and that is why I write.”71 The issues of solidarity between people, present with Kapuściński from the very beginning of his writing activity, had evolved into a slightly different form. Increasingly “expert” terminology was replaced by a quasi-evangelical form: he was now speaking for his neighbour, a poor brother, in the “human family.” Among the many and diverse traces that Kapuściński imprinted in the consciousness of the world, the latter “mission” was endowed with special attention. Why did he care that he be remembered as a “translator of cultures” and not simply as the journalist of the century or an outstanding writer? Why did he arouse so many emotions, have so many followers and even “worshippers”? He was undoubtedly one of those authors who cared about more than a beautiful word. The outstanding Czech philosopher Jan Patočka speaks of people similar to him – “spiritual people,”72 explaining that they seemingly do not differ from intellectuals, writers, creators, who also practise some kind of craft and write, create, and lecture. However, it is only them that people want to follow. Why? A spiritual man is a man on the road, consciously exposing himself to new dangers. More – this is a man questioning the illusion of security and the supposed obviousness of

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the surrounding world. This is a man immune to difficulties; he even thrives on them. The world has known a plethora of such heroes. The masters of acceptance of life’s problems were Socrates and Plato. They were “the authentic spiritual people, searching and fighting as honestly as possible for us not to be deceived by illusions and not to simulate in front of some illusory world in which we would seemingly be firmly established; that they are people who want to seek in the most radical way possible.”73 Spiritual people are not scared of challenges, they are not deluded by illusions, and they are not afraid to fail. We should still ask: why do they do it? The Czech philosopher, who died in 1977 after a series of brutal police interrogations, responded: Practically the whole cruel world we lived in and in which we live, a cruel world of two wars and terrible revolutions, all that we see around us cannot be understood in another way, only this way, that people who are exposed to these terrible catastrophes, didn’t just give in to them passively, but often they went into the mouth of Moloch voluntarily and even with joy; having a certain awareness of the fact that life and the world directly experienced are not everything, that it can be offered in sacrifice, and perceive in this a glimmer of light in the dark.74

Timeline

1932 4 March. Kapuściński is born in Pińsk, Brest region, in today’s Belarus, in the hospital at Bernardyńska St, son of Maria (b. 1910) née Bobek and Józef (b. 1903) Kapuściński, teachers in local primary schools. 1933 On 1 June, sister Barbara is born. 1933–1938 The Kapuścińskis move house many times. First, they rent a room at Bernardyńska St; later they live for a year at Teodorowska, from 1933 on Błotna, and in 1939 they move two more times: to Kolejowa and then to Wesoła Sts. 1938 September. Starts education at Primary School no. 5 in Pińsk. 1939 Maria Kapuścińska and her children spend the summer with her brother in the village of Pawłów near Rejowiec in the Lublin region. In September, they go to Pińsk, which by then has been captured by the Red Army. Ryszard returns to school and begins to learn the Russian language. Józef Kapuściński is mobilized in the spring and captured by the Russians in September; he escapes and, disguised as a peasant, after a night visit at home, goes deep into the countryside.

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1940 May. After monetizing all of their belongings, Maria Kapuścińska escapes with her children (by cart, foot, and rail) from probable deportation through Lviv, Przemyśl, and Kraków, then Warsaw, where, in the village of Sieraków, in the Kampinos Forest near Palmir (a site of a mass executions), they join Józef, who has been teaching without pay in the local school. 1941–1944 Józef Kapuściński, threatened with arrest because of his Home Army activities, is forced into hiding. He moves his family first to Krochmalna St in Warsaw (at one of the gates of the ghetto), and then to Świder near Otwock, where he teaches at the local school for some time. During the Warsaw Uprising, there is a Polish Army field hospital nearby. 1944–1945 Ryszard Kapuściński continues his education in the primary school in Otwock. 1945 The Kapuściński family settles in Warsaw. In connection with Józef ’s work in a construction company, he first lives in a cement and brick warehouse at Srebrna St and then in one of the so-called Finnish houses in the Mokotów Fields, near the current seat of the National Library (Wawelska St III/6). Ryszard begins his education in the nearby Stanisław Staszic High School. 1945–50 On 6 June 1950, Ryszard receives his high school diploma at the Stanisław Staszic High School. He participates intensively in sports. He plays football on the junior team of the Legia club, led by Kazimierz Górski (a future legendary coach of the Polish football team), and boxes at the Polonia club, winning the vice-championship of Warsaw juniors in the bantamweight class. 1948 After a brief membership in the Związek Walki Młodych (zwm ) (The Union of Youth Struggle), he joins the Związek Młodzieży Polskiej (zmp ) (Union of Polish Youth), in which he holds various lower-level managerial functions.

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1949 He makes his debut as a poet with “Pisane szybkością” (Written by Speed) and “Uzdrowienie” (Healing) in the weekly Dziś i Jutro (no. 32). 1950 March. A note about a student discussion is published in the weekly Odrodzenie (no. 10) in which the poem “Różowe jabłka” (Pink Apples) by Kapuściński, as a representative of the young generation, is compared with works by Mayakovsky and the classics of prewar Polish poetry. 6 June. He starts working in the editorial office of Sztandar Młodych (Youth Banner). He writes reviews and reports, answers letters, and takes field trips for meetings with the “active” zmp , often together with young writers. He also works as a courier. August/September. He publishes a fragment of a poem about Nowa Huta called “Zetempowcy” in Youth Banner and two fragments of the cycle “Droga prowadzi naprzód.” October. Starts studies at the Faculty of Polish Studies at Warsaw University. He will stop after a year because they cannot be reconciled with work in the editorial office. November. Twórczość prints four works from the cycle “Droga prowadzi naprzód”; Nowa Kultura prints “Poemat o Nowej Hucie.” 1951 July. First trip abroad, to the zwm peace gathering in Berlin, extended by a tour of the gdr with a song/dance ensemble from Płock high school. A series of reports in Youth Banner, in numbers 191 to 193 and (with Stefan Skrobiszewski) in numbers 209, 212, 214, 218, and 223. October. He starts his studies for the second time, now at the Faculty of History of Warsaw University, interrupting his editorial work until May 1955. 1952 6 October. Marries Alicja Mielczarek, whom he met at the Faculty of History. At the time, she is a medical student, a future paediatrician, born on Szczecin. He joins the Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza (Polish United Workers’ Party), for which he holds managerial functions at lower levels, including as secretary of the local organization. He is still active in the zmp . He also participates in the Youth Circle of the

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Warsaw Branch of Związek Literatów Polskich (Union of Polish Writers). In 1955 he will serve briefly as its chairman. 1953 His daughter Zofia is born. 1955 June. He graduates, having defended his thesis on the role of the intelligentsia in the Kingdom of Poland at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He was a student under Professor Henryk Jabłoński, future chairman of the Council of State of the prl . He returns to work at Youth Banner as a journalist. August. As a journalist at Youth Banner, the organ of the World Youth and Student Festival taking place in Warsaw, he participates in the festival’s most important events and writes about them in the newspaper. September 30. In issue 234 of Youth Banner, he publishes a prominent article, “To też jest prawda o Nowej Hucie.” He later receives a Golden Cross of Merit (1956). 1956 February–September. He publishes prominent articles and journalistic accounts preceding the October ’56 changes: “Młodzi w wielkich zakładach pracy,” “Dość krzyku o mętliku,” “Rada Bogów,” “O demokracji robotniczej,” “Musisz to wiedzieć,” “Nowy.” August. He stays for a week at the Congress of the World Federation of Democratic Youth in Kiev, from where he sends correspondence. September. He goes on his first long journey, to India for a few weeks. During the return leg, which was impossible by sea due to the Suez Canal blockade, he unexpectedly lands in Kabul. He is arrested because he has no visa and spends several days in Afghanistan. 1957 January–March. He publishes a series of reports in Youth Banner from Afghanistan (“Droga przez Afganistan,” 24–26 December 1956 and 1, 7, and 17 January 1957) and from India (“Indie z bliska,” 24 and 28 January, 5, 14, and 20 February, and 8 March). July–August. He attends the Youth and Student Festival in Moscow. Youth Banner prints his correspondence on 27–28 July and 3–4, 5, 8, and 10–11 August.

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August. As part of the youth press’s journalistic exchange, he travels to China for six months, via Tokyo and Hong Kong. He returns by the Trans-Siberian Railway. 1958 In protest against the dissolution of the democratically elected editorial board and the imposition of new management on the editorial board, Kapuściński and most of the then-current team leaves Youth Banner at the end of March. He starts working at the Polish Press Agency as a “wireman.” Soon after, he volunteers for exercises after completing the Military College. At the end of the year, he starts working in the weekly Polityka while continuing to cooperate with pap . April–May. In Youth Banner (issues 87, 93, 105, 111, and 123), he publishes a series of articles about Japan related to his stay in Tokyo the previous year. 1959–62 As a reporter for Polityka’s national department, he spends a lot of time in the field, and writes dozens of reports, the best of which are to be found in his debut book Busz po polsku: Historie przygodne (in order of creation: “Zbiórka wśród drzew,” “Partery,” “Słoneczny brzeg jeziora,” “Sztywny,” “Wielki rzut,” “Danka,” “Bez adresu,” “Dom,” “Daleko,” “Nikt nie odejdzie,” “Wymarsz piątej kolumny,” “Reklama pasty do zębów,” “Wydma”). 1959 December–January 1960. He travels to Ghana and also visits Dahomey and Niger. 1960 February–May. A series of reports appears in Polityka: “Ghana z bliska” (“Bojkot na ołtarzu,” “Gwardia jako taka,” “Dzień ministra,” “Busz po polsku,” “Bezdomny z Harlemu,” “Szepty w samo południe,” “Czarna Gwiazda,” “Stracony dla Forda”); and in Współczesność (no. 13; “Hotel ‘Metropole’”). Except for “Busz po polsku,” these texts, slightly shortened, are included in his second book, Czarne gwiazdy. December–February 1961. He is in Africa, mainly in Congo (during the civil war), where he sneaks in, risking his life. He is arrested and sentenced to death, and fortunately rescued by un soldiers.

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1961 March–June. Polityka prints a series of eleven reportages titled “Kongo z bliska” (“Kongo z bliska,” “Granica,” “Zielone piekło,” “Tata z mamą,” “Maj, Wodzowie,” “Jeden z czwórki,” “Bar wzięty,” “Prezesi,” “Ofensywa,” “Po roku”), almost all of which, after considerable changes and supplemented with texts by Gizeng and Czombe (Polityka 1962, nos. 4 and 6), will be printed in Czarne gwiazdy. November–February 1962. A dispute over the links between Bohdan Drozdowski’s drama Kondukt, published in the November issue of Dialog, and Kapuściński’s story “Sztywny” (The Stiff) is launched by Kapuściński’s letter to Polityka (no. 46) in which he accuses Drozdowski of plagiarism. The dispute ends with the decision by a commission appointed by the zg zlp to exonerate Drozdowski. The dispute, which was followed in several magazines, was used to fight for the autonomy of reportage. 1962 Spring. He quits his job in Polityka, though without breaking contact with the magazine, and travels to Dar es Salaam, the capital of what was then Tanganyika (today Tanzania), as a permanent correspondent of the Polish Press Agency. Summer. Busz po polsku is published by the Czytelnik publishing house. 1962–65 He remains in East Africa, residing first in Dar es Salaam and later, after 1964, in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. From the latter, he makes trips to several countries in this part of the continent. 1962 July. He travels to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, at the time of that country’s declaration of independence. October. He travels by car more than 1,000 kilometres to Kampala, the capital of Uganda, for its declaration of independence. He develops cerebral malaria and lands in a newly opened hospital; Izabella Nowak, wife of Jerzy Nowak, attaché of the Polish Embassy in Tanganyika, collects him there. His tuberculosis returns, for which he is treated in public health care settings. 1963 February. He participates in the conference of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization in Moshi, Tanganyika.

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May. In Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, he participates in the first conference of leaders of African countries. At that conference, the Organisation of African Unity is established and the oau Charter is adopted. After returning from Ethiopia, he resumes treatment for tuberculosis. His wife Alicja nurses him for a few months. July–August. Polityka (nos. 29, 30, 34, 35, 37, 38) prints a series of his correspondence from Addis Ababa. Wiedza i Życie (no. 10) prints his extensive correspondence as “Plan Nkrumaha.” Czarne gwiazdy is published by Czytelnik publishing house. December. He goes to Kenya for a week to observe the events preceding the country’s declaration of independence. The correspondence is published in Trybuna Ludu (no. 105) and Wiedza i Życie (1964, no. 5), among others. 1964 January. Kapuściński visits Zanzibar shortly after the overthrow of the sultanate and the proclamation of the People’s Republic of Zanzibar. He travels with a small group of Western journalists, who expose themselves to incredible danger. February. When conflict breaks out between Ethiopia and Somalia, he travels to the disputed province of Ogaden, where he finds himself stuck for a week in deserted Hargeisa. He then travels for five days to Mogadishu in a column of twenty military Land Rovers. October. In Sudan, he observes events after the revolution that overthrew the dictatorship of Marshal Ibrahim Abboud. He prepares to relocate the pap facility to West Africa. 1965–66 After moving the pap facility to West Africa, he settles in Lagos, at the time the capital of Nigeria, and temporarily also in Ghana’s capital, Accra. From there, he sets out on journalistic expeditions to more than a dozen countries in West and Central Africa. 1965 February–beginning of April. He is in Poland on his first vacation since his arrival in Africa. He returns not to Nairobi but to Lagos. April. He travels to Dakar, the capital of Senegal, for the First World Festival of African Art, and continues to Mauritania by trans-Saharan truck to the settlement of Atar. There he takes a ten-day journey with a caravan of Moorish nomads. During his return he spends two days in the desert under a broken-down truck, almost without water. He

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arrives in the capital of Mauritania, Nouakchott, in a delirium. June. He arrives in Algiers, the capital of Algeria, shortly after the military coup d’état, in which the young President Ahmed Ben Bella, popular in the country and in the world, was overthrown by the even younger army commander, Houari Boumédiène. October. For pap , he observes and comments on the conference of foreign ministers and the meeting of leaders of African countries in Accra, which ends before half the agenda was addressed. November–December. He travels through four countries where military coups have just occurred or soon occur: Guinea (assassination attempt on the life of President Sékou Touré), Congo (General Mobutu arrests President Kasa-Vubu), Dahomey (General Soglo removes two presidents: one “self-proclaimed” and the other “chosen by the people”), and Nigeria (war is starting in western Nigeria preceding the coup in January 1966, which will remove Prime Minister Balewa). 1966 January–February. He witnesses further military upheavals, in the Central African Republic (Colonel Jean Bokassa topples President Dacko), Ghana (removal of President Nkrumah – the “African Messiah”), Uganda (Milton Obote’s revolution), Togo, Upper Volta, and especially Nigeria. February–March. He publishes a series of reports about the coup in Nigeria in three issues (6, 7, 11) of Polityka. August. He observes and comments on another coup in Nigeria, which brought Lieutenant-Colonel Yakubu Gowon to power. September. He develops a tropical infection that is difficult to identify (swollen and covered with ulcers) and enters the hospital in Lagos. After two months, he asks his superiors to return him to Poland, where he continues treatment in the hospital in Warsaw at Płodz St. He does not return to Africa. 1967 January. He returns to work at the pap headquarters as an editor at the foreign desk. April. He visits the Soviet Union for three months to gather materials for a book about the Asian and Transcaucasian republics. 22 July. He receives the Award of the Minister of Culture and Art of the 1st Degree in the “Press” (report) category.

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August–September. The daily Życie Warszawy prints fragments of reportage from the Soviet Union in five numbers (241, 246, 251, 255, 257). November. He accepts an offer to go to South America as the pap correspondent. His first destination is Santiago, Chile. 1968 February. He gives a lecture about Poland at the Chilean Institute of International Affairs, displaying his good level of Spanish. April. The Chilean authorities view his first stories about Chile (published in a Special Bulletin) as interference in their country’s internal affairs and demand that he immediately leave the country. He goes to Lima, the capital of Peru, which has granted him a visa. In a hotel in Lima, he translates Che Guevara’s Bolivian Diary, treating that task as a continuation of learning Spanish. Probably from Lima, he flies to Bolivia to follow the trail of the guerrilla unit known today as la Ruta del Che. It is about 130 kilometres long and leads from the city of Santa Cruz to the village of La Higuera, the place of Che’s last skirmish, and his death. He is captured by a military unit and sentenced to death but eventually rescued. August. Polish Ambassador to Brazil Aleksander Krajewski proposes that pap establish an office in that country. He moves to Rio de Janeiro and starts learning Portuguese. Autumn. His report from his trip to the Soviet appears, Kirgiz schodzi z konia (The Kirghiz Dismounts). Edmund Osmańczyk leaves the pap bureau in Mexico. He takes his place and begins to fulfill his duties as a correspondent. 1969–1972 He remains at the office in Mexico. From there, he embarks on journalistic trips to almost all South and Central American countries. His wife and daughter join him in Mexico for nearly three years. 1969 Winter. His book Gdyby cała Afryka (If All Africa …) consisting of correspondence from Africa is published. July. In Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, he observes and comments for pap on the beginnings of a brief conflict with El Salvador, known as the Football War.

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August. He travels around Peru, Bolivia, and Venezuela, observing the accelerated social and political changes in each of these countries; they are all different and referred to as revolutionary. September. He returns for a month-long vacation to Poland. Autumn. The Książka i Wiedza publishing house publishes Che Guevara’s Dziennik z Boliwii (Diary from Bolivia), translated by Kapuściński, with an introduction by Fidel Castro. 1970 April–May. He follows the kidnapping and killing of the German ambassador Count Karl von Spreti by Guatemalan far guerrillas and the press’s reaction to this event. His correspondence about this subject runs in Trybuna Ludu (no. 143) and Tygodnik Kulturalny (no. 24). September. He travels around Peru and Bolivia again, collecting impressions after a year’s absence, and Chile, where Salvador Allende is about to be elected president as leader of the People’s Unity bloc, which includes communists. Autumn. Książka i Wiedza publishing house publishes his Dlaczego zginął Karl von Spreti? 1971 May. He returns home for a three-week vacation. October. He is in Chile again, observing Fidel Castro’s first visit to the South American continent. He visits a few other countries on this occasion. 1972 To end his stay in South America, he tours Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Uruguay, and Brazil. After returning, he resigns from full-time employment with pap and moves to a looser form of cooperation. He undertakes classes at the Warsaw University Department of Journalism. He establishes closer contact with the monthly Kontynenty, with which he will cooperate as a consultant until 1980, including a year as a full-time employee. 1973 He assumes the position of deputy editor-in-chief of Kontynenty. January. He plans a two-month trip to Chile with a delegation from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Foreign Trade. He does not receive confirmation that the trip can proceed.

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July. He flies to India for a two-week journalism congress. December. He resigns from his full-time position in Kontynenty. 1974 He starts working with the weekly Kultura, with which he will be associated until its suspension and termination after the imposition of martial law in 1981. April. He leaves for a one-month trip to the Middle East. June. He visits Vienna for a few days for the conference on disarmament. As a visiting professor, he gives lectures at the University of Bangalore in India. He briefly visits Colombia. 1975 He travels to Cyprus in connection with the recent landing of Turkish troops and the division of the island. He continues on to Ethiopia. Spring. Chrystus z karabinem na ramieniu is published by Czytelnik. 23 September–8 October. His first photographic exhibition (Ethiopia ’75) in the Warsaw Empik store Ściana Wschodnia. September. He travels to the war in Angola. 1976 February–October. Kultura (nos. 6, 8, 9, 10, 13, 16, 19, 20, 38, 39, 40, and 41) prints a series of reports about the war in Angola, “Trochę Angoli.” November. Starts a series of travels around Africa (Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Ogaden, Nigeria, Uganda, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Tanzania). These travels continue until the end of 1977. Autumn. Czytelnik publishes Jeszcze dzień życia (Another Day of Life). 1977 August. He publishes the report “Wojna w Ogadenie” in Kultura (nos. 33 and 34). He returns to Ethiopia to observe the consequences of the fall of Emperor Haile Selassie. 1978 Winter. Czytelnik publishing house releases Wojna futbolowej. February–July. Kultura (nos. 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 21, 22, 24,26, and 27) prints a series of reports about the fall of Emperor Haile Selassie – “Trochę Etiopii.”

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June. Kapuściński goes on a two-week trip to Czechoslovakia and Austria. 24 November. Premiere of the play Cesarz, directed by Jerzy Hutek, at the Stefan Jaracz Theatre in Lodz. Autumn. Cesarz appears in Czytelnik, published in an elegant graphic design created by Andrzej Heidrich. This inaugurates the famous “white series,” in which all of Kapuściński’s books issued by this publishing house would later appear. 1979 January. He visits Mexico (in connection with the pope’s visit) as a pap special envoy. As a visiting professor, he lectures in Mexico and in Caracas, Venezuela. March. He travels to Iran, where the Islamic Revolution is under way. October. He visits the Soviet Union for a week at the invitation of the Poleskaja Prawda newspaper. He visits Pińsk for the first time since the war. July–October. Kultura (nos. 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, and 43) prints a series of reports about the Iranian Revolution, titled “Katharsis.” 1 December. He returns to Iran in connection with the diplomatic crisis, staying there until February 1980. 1980 August. He is in the Gdańsk Shipyard during the strikes. September. Kultura (no. 37) prints “Notatki z Wybrzeża” (Notes from the Coast). He helps to organize Solidarność (Solidarity) and promotes the idea of horizontal agreements in the party. He lectures on the Islamic Revolution and the contemporary political situation in many Polish cities (until mid-1981). December. Krajowa Agencja Wydawnicza publishes a special Reporters’ Express, devoted entirely to the August strikes. In addition to texts by Wojciech Giełżyński, Ewa Juńczyk-Ziomecka, Jacek Poprzeczko, Cezary Rudziński, Ernest Skalski, Lech Stefański, Małgorzata Szejnert, and Mariusz Ziomecki, “Notatki z Wybrzeża” by Kapuściński is included. Authors Agency and Czytelnik publishing houses release a book about Ryszard Kapuściński. This is a biographical sketch in English – Christiana Cenkalska’s translation of the book by Andrzej W. Pawluczuk, Kapuściński.

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1981 2 February. Broadcast of the adaptation of Cesarz, directed by Jerzy Hutek, at the Television Theatre. Kapuściński is elected vice-president of the Poland 2000 Committee of the Polish Academy of Sciences. August. Kultura (nos. 31, 32, and 34) prints the last part of the cycle “Katharsis – Martwy płomień” (Catharsis – The Dead Flame). 1982 Kapuściński leaves the pzpr , and loses his job at Kultura due to the magazine’s suspension and then closure. Spring. Czytelnik publishes Szachinszach (Shah of Shahs). October. He goes to Switzerland for a month by invitation of the un University in Geneva. 1983 May. He goes to Columbia University for two months, where he gives a series of lectures about Ethiopia. Młodzieżowa Agencja Wydawnicza issues Zaproszenie do Gruzji (An Invitation to Georgia). With W. Kubicki, he co-authors Słodkie morze Bajkał [Sweet Lake Baikal]). In New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich publishes the English translation of Cesarz as The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat, translated by William Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand. 1984 April. He visits France and West Germany for two weeks to further his publishing interests. 1985 May. He visits Budapest for a week for an author’s evening in connection with the publication of Shah of Shahs in Hungarian. 1986 He goes to Oxford for a few months. Autumn. The first volume of his poetry, Notes, published by Czytelnik publishing house. November. He visits Hungary, where from 24 November to 6 December his first photography exhibition abroad is presented at the Eötvös Club in Budapest.

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1987 January–July. He travels to the Netherlands, the US, Canada, and England. March. The London premiere of the adaptation of The Emperor, at the Royal Court Theatre, produced by Jonathan Miller and Michael Hastings. A television production of The Emperor is prepared by the bbc, directed by Jonathan Miller. A documentary film with his participation is created in the pwsftvit Reportage Studio with Mark Miller’s involvement, titled Ryszard Kapuściński (scripted and directed by Jacek Talczewski). Broadcast 1989. 1988 bbc Television makes a documentary film for its arena series, directed by Adam Low, Your Man Who Is There. Broadcast 29 January 1988. As a visiting professor, he gives lectures at Temple University in Philadelphia. He becomes a member of the Polish pen Club (after 1991 a member of the Board). Czytelnik prints the four-volume series Wrzenie świata – containing a selection of his eight most important books (vol. 1: Kirgiz schodzi z konia, Chrystus z karabinem na ramieniu; vol. 2: Jeszcze dzień życia, Wojna futbolowa; vol. 3: Cesarz, Szachinszach; vol. 4: Busz po polsku, Notes). 1989 He begins a series of travels around the republics of the former Soviet Union (which last until 1992). 1990 Spring. Lapidarium is published by Czytelnik publishing house. 1992 August–January 1993. Gazeta Wyborcza prints weekly instalments of successive episodes of Imperium. 1993 He travels in southern and eastern Africa (including Ethiopia). He becomes a member of Academia Scientiarium et Artium Europaea in Salzburg.

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He becomes a member of the Culture Council for the President of the Republic of Poland. Spring. Imperium is published by Czytelnik publishing house. 1994 He becomes a member of the International Parliament of Writers in Strasbourg. He receives an annual scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service in Berlin (daad ). He becomes a member of the program board of the Polish Institute of Culture in Berlin. February–May. He travels around West African countries. Autumn. Lapidarium II is published by Czytelnik publishing house. 1996 November 22. The “Vernissage of One Evening” exhibition is presented in the Magic Media Chris Niedenthal and Woody Ochnio Warsaw photography studio. 1997 March–May. Gazeta Wyborcza prints Lapidarium III in weekly installments (nos. 68 to 113). Spring. Lapidarium III is published by Czytelnik publishing house. October. He receives an honorary doctorate from the University of Silesia. 1998 January–September. Gazeta Wyborcza publishes Heban in weekly instalments (nos. 20 to 238). Grupa Filmowa Kontakt and Agencja Produkcji Filmowej produce a documentary film directed by Filip Bajon for tvp 2: Poszukiwany Ryszard Kapuściński. August. He visits Sweden for an author’s evening and stays for two weeks. Autumn. Heban is published by Czytelnik publishing house. 1999 November. At the invitation of the King of Sweden, Kapuściński participates in a debate about the state of the world.

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Timeline

2000 April–August. Gazeta Wyborcza publishes Lapidarium IV (nos. 94 to 180) in weekly instalments. Autumn. Lapidarium IV is published by Czytelnik publishing house. His first photo monograph is released by Buffi – Z Afryki (From Africa). A documentary film is made at Telewizja Wrocław, directed by Piotr Załuski: Druga Arka Noego. 2001 March. With Gabriel García Márquez, he teaches at the New Journalism School in Mexico. November. He receives an honorary doctorate from the University of Wrocław. 2002 April. He receives an honorary doctorate from the University of Sofia. July–November. Gazeta Wyborcza, supplement Duży Format (nos. 9 to 27), publishes Lapidarium V (nos. 154 to 260) in weekly instalments. August–October. He travels to the US and South America (Mexico, Argentina, Brazil). He participates in a writers’ conference at Sun Valley (Idaho) and in lectures, readings, book promotions, and discussions at universities in New York, Santa Fe, and Buenos Aires. (These are among many related journeys undertaken in these years to present new translations, receive awards, and deliver lectures.) November. He visits Greece to gather materials for Travels with Herodotus. In Athens, he promotes Wojna futbolowej (The Soccer War) and Heban (The Shadow of the Sun). Autumn. Lapidarium V is published by the Czytelnik publishing house. 2003 Publishing house Znak issues Autoportret reportera, with an introduction by Krystyna Strączek. A documentary is created, directed by Gabrielle Pfeiffer: A Poet on the Frontline: The Reportage of Ryszard Kapuściński. September–August 2004. Gazeta Wyborcza publishes Podróże z Herodotem in weekly instalments (nos. 214 from 2003 to 202 from 2004).

Timeline

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2004 May. He receives a doctorate honoris causa from Gdańsk University. October. He receives a doctorate honoris causa from the Jagiellonian University. Autumn. Publisher Znak releases Podróże z Herodotem. 2005 June. He receives a doctorate honoris causa from the Ramon Llull University in Barcelona. 2006 May. He receives a doctorate honoris causa from Udine University. Znak releases Ten Inny. Winter. Wydawnictwo Literackie releases his poetry volume Prawa natury. 2007 23 January. He dies in the hospital of the Warsaw Medical Academy on Banacha St at the age of seventy-four. Spring. Publication of 26 bajek z Afryki (with photos by Kapuściński), Warsaw, Agora sa , Green Gallery. Czytelnik publishes Lapidarium VI. Znak publishes Rwący nurt historii. Zapiski o XX i XXI wieku, selected by and with an introduction by Krystyna Strączek, with photos by Ryszard Kapuściński. 2008 Publishing house Znak releases an Italian translation of Dałem głos ubogim. Rozmowy z młodzieżą about his last trip to Bolzano. January–May. His selected works appear in Gazeta Wyborcza’s library (Cesarz, Heban, Busz po polsku, Wojna futbolowa, Szachinszach, Lapidaria I–III, Lapidaria IV–VI, Jeszcze dzień życia, Autoportret reportera, Wiersze zebrane, Imperium, Podróże z Herodotem) in addition to four audiobooks (Cesarz, Wojna futbolowa, Szachinszach, Imperium), Warsaw, Agora sa .

Bibliographical Note

In preparing this book, the authors published several sketches, which constituted preliminary outlines of individual issues related to the life and work of Ryszard Kapuściński. None of the articles below have entered this book in full, but fragments of some of them were used in the text: B. Nowacka, “Modele lektury,” in eadem, Magiczne dziennikarstwo. Ryszard Kapuściński w oczach krytyków (Katowice, 2004; 2nd ed. 2006). B. Nowacka, “O nowej formule reportażu (na marginesie książki ‘Jeszcze dzień życia’ Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego),” in Nasz wiek XX. Style – tematy – postawy pisarskie, ed. A. Opacka and M. Kisiel (Katowice, 2006). B. Nowacka, “Cesarz,” in Polska literatura współczesna. Interpretacje, ed. K. Heska-Kwaśniewicz and B. Zeler (Cieszyn, 2007). B. Nowacka, “Ślad i obecność.’ Wspomnienie o Ryszardzie Kapuścińskim,” Opcje, no. 1 (2007), 82–5. B. Nowacka, “Do końca życia będę reporterem” (afterword), in R. Kapuściński, Lapidaria I–III, ed. B. Dudko and M. Szczygieł (Warsaw, 2008). B. Nowacka, “Śladem Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego,” in Ryszard Kapuściński. Portret dziennikarza i myśliciela, ed. K. WolnyZmorzyński, W. Piątkowska-Stepaniak, B. Nierenberg, and W. Furman (Opole, 2008). Z. Ziątek, “Wymiary uczestnictwa (Ryszard Kapuściński),” in Sporne postaci polskiej literatury współczesnej, ed. A. Brodzka and L. Burska (Warsaw, 1996).

324

Bibliographical Note

Z. Ziątek, “Wyprawa w głąb,” Przegląd Polski (supplement to Nowy Dziennik), 15 December 2000. Z. Ziątek, “Powrócić do Pińska,” Odra, no. 3 (2007). In addition, in the third issue of Pamiętnik Literacki from 2007, two chapters of this book were published: 1. “Polskie i afrykańskie historie przygodne.” 2. “Ree-shard Kah-poosh-CHIN-skee. Kapuściński po angielsku.” Unless otherwise indicated, all English and Italian translations are by the authors.

Notes

chap t er on e 1 Compare B.N. Łopieńska, “Człowiek z bagien,” Przekrój, no. 28 (2003). 2 See “Pińsk – miasto rodzinne,” http://www.kapuscinski.info/page/ zyciorys/8; “Życiorys Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego,” https://kapuscinski. info/zyciorys. 3 We are indebted for information about the Kapuściński residences to Edward Żłobin, a historian from Pińsk, and Robert Nowacki, who visited Pińsk in May 2003 (R. Nowacki, “Relacja z pobytu w Pińsku,” http://www. kapuscinski.info/page/zyciorys/11). 4 To celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Kapuściński’s German publisher, prepared a special publication. Ten writers from nine countries were invited to contribute – for example, Lev Kopelev from the Soviet Union, Sadako Kurihara from Japan, and Heinrich Böll from West Germany. “Ćwiczenia pamięci” was first translated by Martin Pollack and published in German. In 1985 the text came out in the anthology Das Ende, and in 1988 it was published in Polish in a series titled Wrzenie świata. We owe this piece of information to Bożena Dudko. 5 Franciszek Bobka lived in Pińsk, on Honczarska Street, in a house belonging to the Onichimowski family. When Kapuściński visited Pińsk for the first time after the war, he was accompanied by Leon Onichimowski. We owe this piece of information to Edward Żłobin. 6 In the 1987 documentary film with the participation of Marek Miller, Kapuściński contends that this description helped John Updike understand Picasso’s Guernica. 7 This refers to a Jesuit monastic complex from the seventeenth century. The church of St Stanislaus, believed to be the largest church in the Grand Duchy

326

Notes to pages 18–37

of Lithuania, was blown up in 1953. The only part of it left is the college building, which presently houses the Museum of Belarusian Polesie. 8 “O pamięci i jej zagrożeniach. Z Ryszardem Kapuścińskim rozmawiają Zbigniew Benedyktowicz i Dariusz Czaja,” Konteksty, nos. 3–4 (2003), 12.

chap t er t wo 1 “Dyskusja o poezji w gimnazjum im. Staszica w Warszawie,” Odrodzenie, no. 10 (1950), 5. 2 W. Woroszylski, “Materiały do życiorysu,” Powrot do kraju (London, 1979), 11. 3 This can be found in the book by Tadeusz Drewnowski about Tadeusz Borowski, Ucieczka z kamiennego świata. O Tadeuszu Borowskim (Warsaw, 1977), inset, photo 42. 4 W. Woroszylski, “Materiały do życiorysu,” 14. 5 Kapuściński, “Droga prowadzi naprzod!,” Tworczość, vol. 11 (1950), 33–41. 6 Kapuściński, “Masowe wydania poetyckie,” Sztandar Młodych, no. 2 (1950), 2. 7 Kapuściński, “Młodzieży Wrocławia należy się dobry teatr,” Sztandar Młodych, no. 100 (1950), 2. 8 The avoidance of the danger of participating in “bad matters” is particularly noted by Andrzej Drawicz, Kapuścinski’s peer, publishing in Sztandar Młodych after 1952, in his many reckoning memories, including, among others, in Wczasach pod lufą (chapter “Uśmiechnięta twarz młodzieży”) (Warsaw, 1997). 9 Compare Krzysztof Mroziewicz, “Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego niepodzielny świat rewolucji,” itd , no. 31 (1975), 3, 6–7. 10 Compare Kapuściński, “Pofestiwalowe sprawy Szczecina: 1. Dyskutujemy, 2. Idziemy na spotkanie, 3. Dotrzeć – zdobyć!,” Sztandar Młodych, nos. 200, 201, 203 (1955). 11 Kapuściński, “Gdzie rosną róże,” Sztandar Młodych, no. 223 (1955). 12 Kapuściński, “Między festiwalami,” Sztandar Młodych, 16 September 1955. 13 A. Ważyk, “Poemat dla dorosłych,” Wiersze wybrane (Warsaw, 1978), 122. 14 Kapuściński, “To też jest prawda o Nowej Hucie,” Sztandar Młodych, no. 234 (1955). 15 J. Ambroziewicz, R. Wiśniowski, “Tam zapomniano o socjalizmie,” Po prostu, no. 39 (1955). 16 Compare J. Snopkiewicz, “Czarne i białe,” Radar, no. 7 (1978); W. Skulska, “Reporter,” Przekrój, 30 October 1988; R. Wójcik, “Kapuściński,” Razem, no. 15 (1978). 17 Kapuściński, “Młodzi w wielkich zakładach pracy,” Sztandar Młodych, 13, 14, 28 February 1955.

Notes to pages 39–54

327

18 M. Miller, “3 × K: Kąkolewski, Krall, Kapuściński. Polska szkoła reportażu,” Instytut Dziennikarstwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, Laboratorium Reportażu [typescript], 10. 19 I. Parker, “The Reporter as a Poet,” The Independent on Sunday, 18 September 1994. 20 T. Konwicki, Kalendarz i klepsydra (Warsaw, 1982), 67. 21 W. Woroszylski, “Materiały do życiorysu,” 25 22 T. Konwicki, Kalendarz i klepsydra, 64. 23 W. Woroszylski, “Materiały do życiorysu,” 28. 24 Kapuściński, “Malowanie portretu,” Polityka, no. 46 (1959), 1. 25 Kapuściński, “Inna nazwa ziemi,” Polityka, no. 39 (1959), 1. 26 Kapuściński, “Rada Bogow,” Sztandar Młodych, 28–9 April 1956. 27 Kapuściński, “Musisz to wiedzieć, Nowy,” Sztandar Młodych, no. 228 (1957). 28 Kapuściński, “Trzy dni pobytu premiera Nehru w Polsce,” Sztandar Młodych, 28 June 1955. 29 Kapuściński, “Indie z bliska,” Sztandar Młodych, nos. 24 and 28 January, 5, 14, and 20 February, 8 March 1957. 30 Kapuściński, “Fatamorgana egzotyki,” Sztandar Młodych, no. 43 (1957). 31 Sztandar Młodych, nos. 87, 93, 105, 111, 123 (1958). 32 Kapuściński, “Droga przez Afganistan,” pt II: “Wołanie mułłow,” Sztandar Młodych, no. 1 (1957). 33 W. Woroszylski, “Materiały do życiorysu,” 25. 34 Kapuściński, “Metryka naszego pokolenia,” Sztandar Młodych, 20–2 April 1957. 35 Kapuściński, “Meldunki z Afryki,” Sztandar Młodych, 8 August 1957.

chap t er three 1 Kapuściński, “The Stiff,” An Advertisement for Toothpaste, trans. W. Brand (Penguin 2018). 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 H. Bereza, “Duch nowy i forma nowa,” Nowa Kultura, no. 35 (1956). Reprinted in Sposób myślenia, vol. 1: O prozie polskiej (Warsaw, 1989), 402. 7 H. Bereza, “Powieść, opowiadanie, reportaż,” Rocznik Literacki 1962 (Warsaw, 1964), 102. 8 Compare “Dalszy ciąg dramatu. List Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego do redakcji ‘Polityki.’” Polityka, no. 45 (1961), 12.

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Notes to pages 55–76

9 Ibid. 10 Compare Wspołczesność, no. 23 (1961), 3, no. 2 (1962), 8–9, no. 4 (1962), 11; Polityka, no. 47 (1961), 12, and no. 48 (1961), 1–2; Sztandar Młodych, no. 282 (1961), 3; Nowa Kultura, no. 48 (1961), 1; Prasa Polska, no. 1 (1962), 9–10, no. 3 (1962), 34–5; Kierunki, no. 4 (1962), 2, 6; “Komunikat Zarządu Głownego Związku Literatow Polskich z dnia 2.02.1962 r.,” Wspołczesność, no. 4 (1962), 3. 11 “Komunikat Zarządu Głownego Związku Literatow Polskich z dnia 2.02.1962 r.,” Wspołczesność, no. 4 (1962), 3. 12 W. Maciąg, “Debiut reportażysty,” Życie Literackie, no. 37 (1962), 11. 13 S. Dan, “Miejsce reportażu,” Nowa Kultura, no. 49 (1962), 11. 14 “Dalszy ciąg dramatu.” 15 Kapuściński, Busz po polsku. Historie przygodne (Warsaw, 1962), 119, 123. 16 Kapuściński, “Hotel ‘Metropole,” Wspołczesność 1960, no. 13, 1. The next quote from this story also refers to the first edition, which is significantly different from the version in Czarne gwiazdy and in the following reprints. 17 Kapuściński, “Zaproszenie do Afryki,” Polityka, no. 44 (1960), 3. 18 Ibid. 19 Compare Kapuściński, “Kongo z bliska,” Polityka, no. 12 (1961), 1. 20 Kapuściński, “List z Afryki,” Polityka, no. 6 (1961), 9. 21 Ibid. 22 Compare Kapuściński, “Po roku,” Polityka, no. 25 (1961).

chap ter f ou r 1 N. Bouvier, Drogi i manowce. Z autorem rozmawia Irene Lichtenstein-Fall, trans. K. Arustowicz (Warsaw, 2002), 63–4. 2 Ibid., 65. 3 N. Ascherson, “Zabiegany, odważny, lekkomyślny,” Książki w Tygodniku (supplement to Tygodnik Powszechny), no. 5, 4 February 2007. 4 Compare Kapuściński, “Hausa, Yoruba. Ibo (Nigeria w dniach zamachu),” Polityka, no. 7 (1966). However, Alicja Kapuścińska remembers then reading a pap editorial typescript containing a detailed description of this event. 5 Compare S. Skrobiszewski, “Mister Richard,” Panorama, no. 4 (1967). 6 Compare ibid. 7 When including quotations from the “Biuletyn Specjalny” (Special Bulletin) in the text, we use the following description. 8 “Orientowali się na niego,” ed. L. Ostałowska, Press, no. 2 (2007), 8. 9 The book version differs significantly from the quite rough working nature of the correspondence printed in Polityka, nos. 29, 30, 34, 35, 37, 38 (1963),

Notes to pages 76–87

10 11 12

13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23

329

first instalment under the title “Przy okrągłym stole,” the subsequent ones under the permanent title “Afryka przy okrągłym stole.” W. Giełżyński, “Czterokrotnie rozstrzelany,” Ekspres Reporterow (Warsaw, 1978), 27. Compare Kapuściński, “Pierwszy strzał za Mozambik,” Chrystus z karabinem na ramieniu (Warsaw, 2007). Compare “Święty Franciszek w stylu macho. O zmarłym niedawno Ryszardzie Kapuścińskim opowiadają jego wieloletni przyjaciele Jerzy Nowak i jego żona Izabella. Rozmawiała Anna Bikont,” Gazeta Wyborcza 3–4 March 2007. Compare “Białe plamy Czarnego Kontynentu. Z Ryszardem Kapuścińskim rozmawiają Witold Bereś i Krzysztof Burnetko,” Apokryf (supplement to Tygodnik Powszechny), no. 2 (1993), 13. Compare among others: S. Skrobiszewski, “Mister Richard”; W. Giełżyński, “Czterokrotnie rozstrzelany.” Kapuściński, “Pierwszy polski dziennikarz w Republice Zanzibaru,” Trybuna Ludu, no. 18 (1964), 6. “Święty Franciszek w stylu macho.” Compare Z.M. Kowalewski, “Na odsiecz rewolucji kongijskiej,” Dalej, no. 4 (1997), http://palestyna.com.pl/news/felieton. Kapuściński, “Pierwszy polski dziennikarz.” Kapuściński, “Operacja miłosierdzie,” Polityka, no. 1 (1965), 1, 13. Compare Z.M. Kowalewski, “Na odsiecz rewolucji kongijskiej.” Based on the texts, it is difficult to see how long Kapuściński lived in Nairobi. According to the memoirs “Pierwszy strzał za Mozambik” (First Shot for Mozambique) (Ch, 162), he left Dar es Salaam at the end of October 1964. From what he told Giełżyński (“Czterokrotnie rozstrzelany,” 24–5), it can be concluded that he was already moving to Lagos no later than the end of that year in fear of being expelled from the country, three months after the publication of an article in Polityka that displeased the Nigerian authorities, and that the article “Elita władzy” (The Power Elite) was published in issue 8 of 1964. It is possible that Kapuściński was still so often in the relatively close vicinity of Dar es Salaam that he did not strictly separate these two places of staying. Alicja Kapuścińska maintains that he lived in Nairobi from December 1963 to August 1964. S. Skrobiszewski, “Mister Richard.” Information about finding Kapuściński’s portfolio in the archives of the Institute of National Remembrance was disseminated by the editorial staff of the Polish edition of Newsweek. Four months after the writer’s death, there was

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Notes to page 87

published an article by Igor Ryciak, “Contact” 11630/I, presenting the contents of the portfolio in a way symptomatic of that time, when something like a hunt for prominent names was under way. People of unquestionable authority were in danger of being charged with cooperating with the People’s Republic of Poland Security Service. This encouraged widespread vetting, which, however, was discredited by various abuses. The editors tried to protect themselves from accusations of acquiescing to the vetting fever – they enclosed Ryciak’s text with a commentary by the editor-in-chief, as well as an interview by Aleksander Kaczorowski and Wojciech Maziarski with the popular journalist Ernest Skalski (who was familiar with the issues the journalistic community had with the Security Service) – but one cannot say they succeeded. The magazine’s readers had in their minds a column from two months past (Newsweek, no. 11 [2007], 111) titled “Trafiony teczką” (Hit with a Portfolio), the author of which, Mariusz Cieślik – citing rumours and statements by three unidentified interlocutors, allegedly well-informed experts on the subject – suggested that Kapuściński had cooperated with the Secret Service – and in this following publication, they saw the natural consuence of the first one. This was also supported by the issue’s “accusatory” cover. Here the writer sits in a bathtub dressed in a sports jacket and jeans, and a large inscription states “writer’s portfolio .” Below, in smaller font: “Could Ryszard Kapuściński possibly refuse to work with the security services of the prl .” Then at the bottom, in smaller print, a note is added: “From the officer’s report: ‘He did not pass on any relevant materials of interest to Secret Service.’” Furthermore, Ryciak’s article, despite the seemingly impassioned, dry presentation of documents, perfectly fitted into the ritual of stigmatizing people suspected of cooperation, which had nothing to do with uncovering the actual truth. Its character is best reflected in the leader – the text opens with a summary in bold: “During his travels abroad in 1967–1972, Ryszard Kapuściński was preparing reports for the Polish People’s Republic intelligence service. He received the pseudonyms Vera Cruz and Poet.” However, one should probably first ask whether these and other indications of cooperation, in general, refer to the situation of the writer – who had been solicited by intelligence officers and persuaded to carry out spying tasks abroad. In Kapuściński’s case, we can say, there was no systematic and continuous “reporting” to the Secret Service. There were three attempts to coerce his cooperation, made in different situations and meeting with various resistance (once connected with writing something, once not). It is impossible to discuss these together. That is why we present them as separate biographical episodes, so as to reveal some truths about the working conditions of a writer-traveller in the prl era.

Notes to pages 89–102

331

24 Compare K. Meloch, “Afrykańczyk”; S. Skrobiszewski, “Mister Richard.” 25 Compare Kapuściński, “Dylematy rozwoju Afryki,” Sprawy Międzynarodowe, no. 4 (1967). 26 “Kirgiz schodzi z konia,” http://serwisy.gazeta.pl/Kapusciński/0,23546.html. 27 Comprehensive biographical materials about the revolution are collected in the bibliography: J. Holzer, Rewolucja Październikowa: W pięćdziesiątą rocznicę 1917–1967. Poradnik bibliograficzny (Warsaw, 1967); and Rewolucja Październikowa w sześćdziesiątą rocznicę 1917–1977, ed. W. Stankiewicz (Warsaw, 1977). 28 50-lecie Wielkiego Października. Poezja. Pieśń. Proza, selected by L. Pasternak (Warsaw, 1967); Sierp i młot niepodległy. Antologia poezji rewolucyjnej 1917–1967, selected by L. Pasternak (Warsaw, 1967); Dzień powszedni rewolucji, selected by A. Drawicz, L. Jęczmyk (Warsaw, 1967); Wspomnienia weteranow rewolucji 1905 i 1917 roku, ed. Z. Spieralski (Łodź, 1967). 29 J. Siemek, “Z serdecznego notatnika podroży,” Spotkania ze Związkiem Radzieckim. Wybor reportaży, selected by J. Feliksiak (Warsaw, 1967), 245. 30 B. Sowińska, “Wędrując po świecie,” Życie Warszawy, no. 15 (1969), 3. 31 Kirgiz schodzi z konia. 32 The genre features of “travel” are given by J. Kamionka-Straszakowa, entry “Podroż,” Słownik literatury polskiej XIX wieku, ed. J. Bachorz and A. Kowalczykowa (Wrocław, 1997), 699. 33 S. Burkot, Polskie podrożopisarstwo romantyczne (Warsaw, 1988), 9. 34 Ibid. 35 J. Chociłowski, “Pisanie lancetem,” Kontynenty, no. 4 (1969), 38. 36 S. Symotiuk, Filozofia i Genius loci (Warsaw, 1997), 7. 37 An excellent interpretation of this fragment of The Kirghiz Dismounts … was recently proposed by Aleksandra Kunce in “Intymność,” Intymność wyrażona (2), ed. M. Tramer and A. Nęcka (Katowice, 2007), 9–17. The author recalls the context of the meeting in the yard, in which Benik’s sculptures were laid out, as an example of “epistemological intimacy” – making it possible to get to know the Other without prejudice, without ostentation, and without violating any taboo. The application of the “intimate research horizon,” of which Kapuściński was a master, becomes a chance for a credible description of contemporary culture. The researcher concludes: “Intimacy saves this curiosity about culture. It combines aesthetic contemplation with moral understanding. It trusts secondary trends, sheltered spaces. Thinks in solidarity.” Kunce, “Intymność,” 17. 38 Compare B. Jasieński, Człowiek zmienia skorę, trans. J. Brzęczkowski (Warsaw, 1961). 39 W. Giełżyński, “Czterokrotnie rozstrzelany.”

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Notes to pages 103–16

40 Kapuściński, “List do redakcji,” Nowe Książki, no. 6 (1969), 420. 41 Che Guevara, Dziennik z Boliwii, introduction by F. Castro, trans. and notes by Kapuściński (Warsaw, 1969). 42 “Uczestniczyć i relacjonować. Z Ryszardem Kapuścińskim rozmawia Jadwiga Radomińska,” Kulisy, no. 50 (1972), 13. 43 “El Classico Latino,” conversation between Jacek Żakowski and Ryszard Kapuściński, Viva, 24 March 2003, http://www.kapuscinski.info. 44 Ibid. 45 Compare ibid. 46 Compare ibid. and W. Giełżyński, “Czterokrotnie rozstrzelany,” 24. 47 Compare “El Classico Latino.” 48 The authors wrote that Kapuściński, who maintained friendly relations with Sten until the end (she died six days before him), told Stefan Bratkowski about her fate in the early 1970s, “describing her hurt and resentment towards the Polish authorities. Then he was to inform him that after leaving Poland, Sten specifically asked him to tell the authorities what she thought about them and revealed that their highest representatives were interviewed by the secret services in March ’68. The reporter was supposed to have said that he gladly complied with her request.” Compare W. Bereś and K. Burnetko, Kapuściński: nie ogarniam świata (Warsaw, 2007), 134. 49 Trybuna Ludu, nos. 40, 44, and 52 (1969). 50 Tygodniowy Biuletyn Specjalny, no. 1066–7 (1969). 51 Perspektywy, no. 28 (1971). 52 Ideologia i Polityka, no. 5 (1971). 53 Tygodniowy Biuletyn Specjalny, no. 1062 (1969). 54 Compare R. Kapuściński, “Ameryka Łacińska na przedpolu rewolucji,” 65. 55 Compare Z.M. Kowalewski, “Brazylia. Karabin przeciw zależnemu imperializmowi,” Guerrilla latyno-amerykańska (Warsaw, 1978). 56 Compare “Ciemna strona ikony” (reprint of three articles from the world press), Forum, no. 41 (2007), 48–55. 57 Compare “El Classico Latino.” 58 Compare “Uczestniczyć i relacjonować.” 59 Kapuściński, “Od tłumacza,” in Che Guevara, Dziennik z Boliwii, 6. 60 Compare “Na marginesie wizyty Rockefellera,” bs , no. 7307 (1969); “Po zakończeniu latynoskiej podroży Rockefellera” bs , no. 7325 (1969); “Peryferie Rockefellera,” Trybuna Ludu, no. 151 (1969), 2. 61 “Korespondencja pap z frontu hondurasko-salwadorskiego,” bs , no. 7317 (1969). 62 “Peruwiańska reforma rolna – najnowszym przewrotem społecznym Trzeciego Świata,” bs , no. 7317 (1969).

Notes to pages 116–29

333

63 “Correspondence from Peru,” bs , no. 7701 (1970); Compare also “Pierwsza autentyczna rewolucja,” Polityka, no. 42 (1970). 64 Compare among others: “Nacjonalizacja kopalń miedzi w Chile,” Życie Warszawy, no. 135 (1969); “Trzej kandydaci na prezydenta Chile prezentują swoje programy,” Trybuna Ludu, no. 67 (1970); “Wkrotce rozmowy chadecji z koalicją lewicy w Chile,” Trybuna Ludu, no. 263 (1970); “Salvador Allende prezydentem Chile,” Życie Warszawy, no. 255 (1970); “Większość Chilijczykow głosowała na tak ,” Trybuna Ludu, no. 97 (1971); “Deklaracja z Limy,” Życie Warszawy, no. 268 (1971); “Powitanie Fidela Castro w Limie,” Trybuna Ludu, no. 315 (1971). 65 Compare “Po zabójstwie Pereza Zujovica – Czy chadecja przejdzie do totalnej opozycji,” tbs , no. 1260 (1970); “Zakończenie konfliktu Allende – prawica kongresu,” bs , no. 8096 (1972). 66 He spoke of this with Jacek Żakowski. Compare “El Classico Latino.” 67 Kapuściński, “Dlaczego zginął Karl von Spreti?” (Warsaw, 1970). Fragments in Trybuna Ludu, no. 143 (1970); and Tygodnik Kulturalny, no. 24 (1970). Reprint in Chrystusie z karabinem na ramieniu, with the title “Śmierć ambasadora.” Quotes are from this reprint. 68 Compare Z.M. Kowalewski, Guerrilla latyno-amerykańska.

chap t er fi ve 1 K. Meloch, “Afrykańczyk. Rzecz o Ryszardzie Kapuścińskim,” Kontrasty, no. 10 (1975), 38. 2 Compare G. Herling-Grudziński, “Wojna w oczach pisarzy,” W oczach pisarzy. Wybór opowieści wojennych 1939–1945, ed. G. Herling-Grudziński (Rome, 1947), 5–14. 3 M. Miller, Reporterów sposób na życie (Warsaw, 1982), 314. 4 M. Hodalska, Korespondent wojenny. Ofiara i ofiarnik we wspołczesnym świecie (Kraków, 2006). 5 Compare E. Juńczyk-Ziomecka, “Uczył czytać, nie pisać,” Orientowali się na niego, ed. L. Ostałowska, Press, no. 2 (2007), 9–10. 6 J. Roszkowski, “Ryszard Kapuściński, Pożegnanie (1932–2007),” Gazeta Stołeczna (supplement to Gazeta Wyborcza), 6 July 2007, 19. 7 M. Wierzyński, “Duszy systemowi nie oddał,” Orientowali się na niego, 8–9. 8 Finishing reading the documents of the ipn , we can probably state unequivocally that the causes of Kapuściński’s “portfolio scandal” were rooted in the atmosphere of time and in the people who surrendered to this atmosphere, and not in the file itself. It is evident from the internal documentation that the intelligence officers counted on Kapuściński’s insane

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13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Notes to pages 129–45

courage, his ability to unearth valuable information, his ability to establish friendly contacts with high-ranking people from the worlds of politics and diplomacy, and his actual gifts as a spy. Meanwhile, Kapuściński failed to provide them with relevant or serious information and offered them, if anything, precisely what they did not want of him. The content of the portfolio makes it possible, first of all, to ascertain how the writer did not collaborate with them and at the same time to guess how much effort, dodging, and “playing dumb” was finally required of him to dodge their approaches and still be able to travel. Because where could he get material for his future books if he couldn’t travel? In the country? We should not forget that when all this was happening, Kapuściński could not yet know that he was paying the price for his future fame as a writer. He paid this price for the chance to work hard in the most challenging conditions, risking poverty, disease, and death, in order to learn what the world really is. K. Mroziewicz, Prawdy ostateczne Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego (Warsaw, 2008), 118. R. Frelek, “Brudny i oberwany,” Orientowali się na niego. Recording of the conversation in the authors’ possession. At that time, the writer told Katarzyna Meloch about the usefulness of the Bible and Dostoyevsky in recognizing good and evil in the world. Compare K. Meloch, “Afrykańczyk,” 36. Kapuściński, “Trochę Bliskiego Wschodu. Fedaini,” Kultura, no. 32 (1974), 1. See also A. Bukowska, “Literatura bez fikcji,” Miesięcznik Literacki, no. 19 (1975), 10. Compare Kapuściński, “Metryka naszego pokolenia,” Sztandar Młodych, 22 April 1957. Kapuściński, “Wojna w Ogadenie (II),” Kultura, no. 34 (1977), 10. Kapuściński, “Allach idzie na południe,” Kultura, no. 33 (1975), 1. Kapuściński, “Nie będzie raju,” Kultura, nos. 20, 21, and 23 (1975). This quotation does not appear in the English edition and has been translated from the Polish. Compare K. Meloch, “Afrykańczyk.” The first Portuguese occupied the territory of today’s Angola as early as 1482; they founded Luanda almost one hundred years later. For four centuries, the African province was a “gold mine” for Lisbon – in the 1970s, the colonies’ profits accounted for one third of Portugal’s national income. The end of this excessive exploitation helped bring about a revolution in the metropolis. The liberation efforts intensified in Angola. The war to keep the colonies turned out to be too expensive for Portugal – it consumed almost half of the state budget. Regarding the revolution in Angola, see M. Leśniewski, Wojna w

Notes to pages 146–65

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Angoli, in Zarys dziejów Afryki i Azji 1869–1996. Historia konfliktow, ed. A. Bartnicki (Warsaw: Ksiązka i Wiedza), 375–87. Excerpt from an unpublished interview with Kapuściński, conducted by the authors in Warsaw on 31 January 2005. See L. Kołakowski, “Rewolucja jako piękna choroba,” in Kołakowski, Cywilizacja na ławie oskarżonych (Warsaw, 1990), 178–94. This quotation does not appear in the English edition and has been translated from the Polish. Compare the statement about The Soccer War: “Wojna futbolowa,” www. kapuscinski.info/page/ksiazki/9/txt/237. “Czarne i białe: Z Ryszardem Kapuścińskim rozmawia J. Snopkiewicz,” Radar, no. 7 (1978). Compare the statement about The Soccer War: “Wojna futbolowa.” W. Giełżyński, “Ogromniejący świat Kapuścińskiego,” Kultura, no. 49 (1978), 8. R. Nycz, Sylwy wspołczesne. Problem konstrukcji tekstu (Wrocław, 1984). A.W. Pawluczuk, “Świat na stadionie,” Kontrasty 1979, no. 4 (1979).

chap ter si x 1 K. Meloch, “Afrykańczyk. Rzecz o Ryszardzie Kapuścińskim,” Kontrasty, no. 10 (1975), 39. 2 See a detailed analysis of narrative mechanisms serving to build a sense of social anomie in the state of Haile Selassie: M. Horodecka, “Narracja w ‘Cesarzu’ Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego,” Pamiętnik Literacki, no. 3 (2007), 33–9. 3 Such a full description of the genesis of The Emperor can be found only in the recording of Marek Miller’s television program, made at the Polish National Film School in Łódź in 1987. 4 See also L. Kołakowski, “Rewolucja jako piękna choroba,” in: Kołakowski, Cywilizacja na ławie oskarżonych, 178–94 (Warsaw, 1989). 5 In fact, The Emperor includes a fourth part – excerpts from press articles about the death of Haile Selassie at the end of the book. 6 M. Horodecka writes interestingly about the epigraphs (also those absent from the book, but appearing in the press cycle), “Narracja w ‘Cesarzu,’” 24–7. 7 The language of The Emperor deserves separate attention (see J. Fras, “O języku ‘Cesarza,’” Język Polski, nos. 3–5 [1981], 255–8). The Emperor is written in the rhythm of a Saxon rhyme, and it was the Saxon era that became the book’s lexical background. The choice of this era is significant – these times in Polish culture are most often equated with utter degradation, complete backwardness, and universal ignorance. M. Szpakowska draws

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Notes to pages 166–72

attention to the context (M. Szpakowska, “Saskie ostatki ‘Cesarza,’” Tworczość, no. 6 [1979], 106–10). Noting Gombrowicz’s phrase (TransAtlantyk) in The Emperor, she interpreted the book as a story about the phenomenon of decline and human behaviour faced with the end of the world. This stylization is known from Gombrowicz but is derived from Saxon times. According to the reviewer, “it is enough for half of the heroes’ characteristics, it is a description of their cognitive abilities, it determines their mental horizon.” A fragment of Father Baka’s poem appeared in Kultura, 28 May 1978. It also opened one of the following parts of the third chapter. It should be noted that this aphoristic quote was considered by Wacław Borowy to exemplify Baka’s valuable sentences striking “firmness.” Quotation from A. Nawarecki, Czarny karnawał. ‘Uwagi o śmierci niechybnej’ Księdza Baki. Poetyka tekstu i paradoksy recepcji (Wrocław–Warsaw–Krakow, 1991), 35. David Rose proposed that The Emperor be interpreted as a fairy tale; see Rose, “Time Out,” The Lord of Flies, 13–19 October 1983. J.Ch. Andersen, “On Judgment Day,” in The Complete Andersen, trans. J. Hersholt (New York, 1956), 290–2. Compare Rose, The Lord of Flies. Kapuściński’s statement is posted on his official website. In 1995, The Emperor also become the material for an opera libretto, Pałac, by Aulis Sallinen, a leading Finnish artist. The authors of the libretto were Irene Dische and Hans Magnus Enzensberger. J. Kański, “Savonlinna – groteska i krwawy dramat,” Ruch Muzyczny, 1 October 1995. The play, directed by Jerzy Hutek, was staged a bit later at the Teatr Powszechny in Warsaw (April 1979), although with a different cast. It was later broadcast from the Television Theatre on 2 February 1981. Although the book details state that printing was completed in October 1978, it appeared in bookstores only at the turn of 1978 and 1979. This issue was discussed by among others, Z. Umiński, “Cesarz,” Kierunki, no. 25 (1980), 10; A.W. Pawluczuk, “Traktat o upadaniu,” Literatura, no. 9 (1979), 14; and A. Zwaniecki, “Rozbieranie Cesarza,” Tygodnik Kulturalny, no. 10 (1979), 11. Quotation after A.W. Pawluczuk, “Reporter ginącego świata. Opowieść o Ryszardzie Kapuścińskim,” Rzeczpospolita, no. 51 (1997), 16. M. Smolorz, Cysorz (wspomnienia kamerdynera) (Katowice, 1991). Z. Bauer, “Izmael płynie dalej,” Życie Literackie, no. 46 (1979), 6. The following authors also write about the mechanisms of power: W. Giełżyński, “Cesarz co miał fajne życie,” Nowe Książki, no. 2 (1979), 60; A. Zwaniecki,

Notes to pages 173–82

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“Rozbieranie Cesarza”; and J. Zatorski, “Cesarz czyli wielka inercja,” Kierunki, no. 12 (1979), 11. A.W. Pawluczuk, “Traktat o upadaniu.” An excerpt from an unpublished interview between the authors and Kapuściński. W. Giełżyński, Rewolucja w imię Allacha (Warsaw, 1979), 173. W. Giełżyński, Byłem gościem Chomeiniego (Warsaw, 1981), 8–9. In his correspondence of 8 December, Kapuściński wrote: “I landed in Tehran last Saturday morning … I returned to my old hotel Keyan in a good point, in the city centre, next to the Intercontinental hotel, where all the foreign correspondents stay, but which is too expensive for our budget.” Quotation in “Na konferencji u studentow. Notatnik irański Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego,” Życie Warszawy, no. 289 (8–9 December 1979), 1, 4. From the beginning of December to the end of February, when Kapuściński was in Iran, the issue of the hostages was the main topic of his correspondence sent to pap . Just the titles of the correspondence in “Special Weekly Bulletin” [tbs ] from December to February give an idea of the scale of interest in this topic: “Iran. Bilans czterech tygodni,” tbs , no. 2124 (8 December 1979); “Niebezpieczeństwo wojny domowej w Iranie,” tbs , no. 2125 (12 December 1979); “Kryzys usa –Iran. Sprawa zakładnikow,” tbs , no. 2127 (19 December 1979); “Kryzys usa –Iran. Kontrowersje w sprawie okupacji ambasady usa ,” tbs , no. 2129 (29 December 1979); “Stawka irańska,” tbs , no. 2132 (12 January 1980); “Kryzys usa –Iran,” tbs , no. 2134 (19 January 1980); “Iran. Działalność studentow islamskich,” tbs , no. 2141 (13 February 1980); “Sprawa zakładnikow a sytuacja polityczna w Iranie,” tbs , no. 2142 (16 February 1980); “Iran. Problem zakładnikow,” tbs , no. 2149 (20 February 1980). J. Dul, Rewolucja Chomeiniego (Warsaw, 1990), 41. E. Lisowska, “Zabrakło mistrza,” http://poznajswiat.com.pl/art/1028. Information concerning the circumstances of the traveller’s meeting with Ryszard Kapuściński in Tehran comes from our conversation with Elżbieta Lisowska, conducted 23 January 2008. Correspondence from Iran, commenting in detail on the current political situation and economic problems, but also explaining the subtleties of this culture (for example, the difference between the hijab and the chador), was sent to the pap editorial office from 24 March to 14 April 1979. The episodes titled “Katharsis” were added to the book, after some minor corrections and additions, as the first two parts – the chapters “Karty, twarze, pola kwiatow” and “Dagerotypy.”

338

Notes to pages 184–99

30 A. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. and ed. J. Norman, A. Welchman, and C. Janaway, introduction by Janaway (Cambridge, 1994), 207–8. 31 W. Giełżyński, “Dlaczego odszedł szach?,” Kontynenty, no. 7 (1982), 35. 32 See, among others, R. Pietrzak, “Tyrania i rewolucja,” Trybuna Ludu, no. 74 (1982), 5. 33 Pietrzak, “Tyrania i rewolucja.” 34 R. Ciemiński, “Szachinszach,” Fakty, no. 16 (1982). 35 J. Surdykowski, “Zawod: Kasandra,” Zdanie, no. 5 (1982), 56. 36 W. Giełżyński, “Dlaczego odszedł szach?,” 35. 37 K. Pysiak, “Dla ludzi na rozdrożu,” Radar, no. 3 (1982), 13. 38 Z. Bauer, “Pomnik płomienia,” Nowe Książki, no. 3 (1982), 65. 39 Kapuściński began writing a third part of the cycle about dictators. However, the volume about Idi Amin, Uganda’s bloody strongman, never appeared (the author devoted a chapter in The Shadow of the Sun to that tyrant). The trip to the Soviet Union got in the way. After that, the author did not return to his idea of writing a trilogy about dictators, considering that Amin’s regime had been characterised solely by senseless and brutal cruelty and, as such, presented no challenge to the writer.

chap t er seven 1 M. Miller, Kto tu wpuścił dziennikarzy. 25 lat poźniej (Warsaw, 2005), 15. The title of the chapter, which is a quote from Kapuściński, comes from the same publication, 244. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from journalists who spent time in the Gdańsk Shipyard in August 1980 come from this book. Page numbers in parentheses. 2 J. Wolska, “Przecieranie szlakow,” Polish Weekly. Australia, 8 December 1995, 8. 3 Excerpt from an interview with Piotr Halbersztat, conducted by the authors on 31 January 2005. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 “Osiemnaście długich dni,” Ekspres Reporterów, special ed., ed. S. Kozicki and A. Rowiński (Warsaw, 1980). Later quotations from the same source. Pierwodruk, Kultura, no. 37 (1980), 1, 8. 8 “Rewolucja ‘Solidarności.’ Polska od sierpnia 1980 do grudnia 1981,” Polityka (special ed.), no. 4 (2005), 7. 9 “Wyjście z kostiumu. Z Ryszardem Kapuścińskim rozmawia Z. Miazga,” Sztandar Ludu, 11 March 1981. Later quotations from the same source.

Notes to pages 199–207

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10 A.W. Pawluczuk, “Rzeczy, ktorych nie można cofnąć,” Kontrasty, no. 2 (1981), 4. 11 See materials from the discussion organized by the editors of Miesięcznik Literacki at the beginning of 1981. In addition to Kapuściński, other participants of the events at the Gdańsk Shipyard took part in the conversation, including Tadeusz Strumff (Trybuna Ludu), Janina Jankowska (Polskie Radio), Wojciech Giełżyński (Kontynenty), Krystyna Jagiełło (Literatura), Wojciech Adamiecki (Literatura), and Jerzy Surdykowski (Życie Literackie). “Etos klasy robotniczej,” Miesięcznik Literacki, no. 4 (1981). 12 “Wyjście z kostiumu.” 13 Compare B.N. Łopieńska and E. Szymańska, Stare numery (London, 1986). 14 M. Miller, “3 × K: Kąkolewski, Krall, Kapuściński. Polska szkoła reportażu,” Instytut Dziennikarstwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, Laboratorium Reportażu [typescript], 36. 15 T. Torańska, “On. Rozmowa z Jerzym Urbanem,” Gazeta Wyborcza (11 December 2002).

chap t er ei g ht 1 The name of his wife, Pavla Provaznikova, can be found on the front page of the book. This is the result of a trick: on account of his political engagement during the Prague Spring, Provaznik was unable to sign his translations because he had been banned from translating light literature. He talked about the circumstances of his Czech translations in an interview with Bożena Dudko. See Podroże z Ryszardem Kapuścińskim. Opowieści trzynastu tłumaczy, ed. B. Dudko (Kraków, 2007), 109–11. 2 Shah of Shahs was translated into Czech on an ongoing basis – it was published in the weekly Světa Prace two weeks after it appeared in Kultura. Subsequent episodes were simultaneously submitted to the Panorama publishing house, which published the entirety shortly after. So when Kapuściński halted work on Katharsis, the translator found himself in quite a lot of trouble. The decision was taken to publish the book in the form in which it appeared in Kultura (without “Martwy płomień”). In 1982, Kapuściński sent his friend the full book version with the following dedication: “Dear Duszan! I am sending you my new book, which – besides – the first world edition was published in Prague thanks to you! Thank you so much […] Rysiek.” The above information and the quote are provided from the book Podroże z Ryszardem Kapuścińskim, 112–15. 3 “Podróże z Ryszardem Kapuścińskim …,” 49. 4 Quotation from J. Waloch, “Dlaczego świat czyta ‘Cesarza’?,” Radar, no. 39 (1983), 17.

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Notes to pages 208–12

5 Quotation from “Imperator wśrod książek,” Literatura na Świecie, no. 7 (1984), 367. 6 J. Updike, “Empire’s End,” The New Yorker (16 May 1983), reprinted in Updike, Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism (New York, 1991), 742–51. 7 Quotation from A. Krzemiński, “Stara sztuka pisania,” Polityka, no. 20 (1985), 7. 8 P. Knightley, “Travels of Polish Prophet” (the text comes from Kapuściński’s home archive). As Kapuściński’s name ceased to arouse surprise, reputable British magazines would publish its phonetic transcription (REE-shard Kahpoosh-CHIN-skee) to help readers say it properly. See S. Schiff, “The Years of Living Dangerously,” Vanity Fair, March 1991; I. Parker, “The Reporter As a Poet,” The Independent on Sunday, 18 September 1994. 9 R. Gott, “Third World through Second World Eyes,” The Guardian, 14 October 1983. 10 T. Ali, “Absolutely,” The New Statesman (the text comes from Kapuściński’s home archives). 11 Both quotes are from Peter Prescott, “His Clement Highness,” Newsweek, 11 April 1983. 12 A. Krzemiński, “Stara sztuka pisania.” Later quotations from the same source. 13 D. Rose, “The Lord of Flies,” Time Out, 13–19 October 1983. Later descriptions from the same source. 14 E. Banaszkiewicz, “Zaangażować najlepszych. Rozmowa z Ryszardem Kapuścińskim,” Radio i Telewizja, no. 52 (1980), 1–2. 15 Quote from a conversation between Kapuściński and Chris Miller, published in the Edinburgh Review (the text comes from Kapuściński’s home archive). For more about the new contexts in which The Emperor functions today, see B. Nowacka, “Parabola władzy,” Res Publica Nowa, no. 4 (2001), 57–8. 16 Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand and William Brand also translated these two books into English: Shah of Shahs (1985) and Another Day of Life (1986). The Soccer War (1990) was translated by William Brand alone. 17 Quotation from A.W. Pawluczuk, “Propozycje,” Nowe Książki, no. 1 (1997), 74; see also C. Miller, Images and Revolutions: Ryszard Kapuściński (the text was published in the Edinburgh Review in 1985; the copy we use comes from the home archive of Ryszard Kapuściński); R. Eder, “Shah of Shahs,” Los Angeles Times, 4 March 1985; E. Fox, “The Peacock,” The Nation, 22 June 1985. 18 C. Czapliński, Kariery w Ameryce (Warsaw, 1994). 19 This text was included in the theatre program issued on the occasion of the transfer of the British performance to the stage of the Studio Theatre in

Notes to pages 212–14

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Warsaw. It is worth noting that Poles were able to watch the London version of The Emperor as early as half a year after its English premiere. H. Rose, “Decline and Fall,” Time Out, 11 March 1987. M. Hastings, Three Political Plays: “The Emperor” (with Jonathan Miller), “For The West” (Uganda), “Lee Harvey Oswald” (London, 1990), 14–15. The quote comes from the theatre program published on the occasion of the staging at the Studio Theatre in Warsaw. J. Kingston, “The Emperor,” The Times, 11 September 1987. P. Kemp, “The Empire Writes Back,” The Independent, 17 March 1987. Quotation from theatre program, The Royal Court Theatre. P. Strathern, “Faultless Production,” Kensington News and Post, 17 September 1987. Michael Hastings prepared, among others, a play about the president of Uganda – Idi Amin – For the West. The premiere took place on 18 May 1977. Quotation from M. Hastings, Three Political Plays, 90. Plays directed by Jonathan Miller include Hamlet, Measure for Measure, and Tosca. Quotation from M. Conveney, “The Emperor,” Financial Times, 17 March 1987. In the stage adaptation of The Emperor, the reviewers also noticed Miller’s interest in details of social history and memory theatre. Quotation from I. Wardle, “Bearding the Lion,” The Times, 18 March 1987. Rastafarians believe that “it is black Africans who are the chosen people. Moreover, they are convinced that their true story is told by the Bible, but it was corrupted by the whites to keep Africans in eternal ignorance, subjection and captivity. Rastafarians believe in the living Black King, the saviour of oppressed Africans, who will bring them out of Babylon, the house of bondage, and lead their exodus to Zion. Rastafarians believe that this living God, Jah, is the Emperor of Ethiopia … Haile Selassie and laugh at stories claiming that he died (according to non-religious sources, the emperor, who had been overthrown a year earlier by his own officers, died in 1975, whereas in 2000, he was buried with honour in the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Addis Abeba). Rastas (their name comes from the name Ras Tafari, assumed by Emperor Haile Selassie) believe in the unity of humans and nature (which is why Marley, who had cancer, refused to have an operation and died in 1981 when the disease attacked his brain) and the power of the holy herb – marijuana.” Quotation from W. Jagielski, “Wdowa po Marleyu chce pochować go w Etiopii,” Gazeta Wyborcza, 13 January 2005. S. Salisbury, “Nie igrać z szatanem,” Forum, 19 March 1988. The threat of a bomb attack and forced evacuation are also mentioned, among others, by David Shanon, “High Drama at Teatime,” Today, 11 September 1987, and the reviewer from the Morning Star, 23 March 1987.

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Notes to pages 214–17

31 This quote and the following statements come from authentic appeals by Ethiopians that were distributed in front of the theatre; these texts are in Kapuściński’s home archive. 32 The reviewers below were unequivocally sympathetic to the authors of this version of the events in Ethiopia. However, it is possible to come across one article whose author Milton Shulman tends to be more critical of the protesters. He wrote, among other things: “Does the death of a famous person give the right to slander him? … If, however, the truth is unimportant, it must be admitted that The Emperor is a charming and moving work.” M. Shulman, “Riddle of Emperor’s New Foes,” London Evening Standard, 17 March 1987. 33 These comments appeared in the article in The Sunday Times, 23 March 1987. A copy of the text comes from the archives of the Royal Court Theatre and does not include the author’s name. 34 M. Billington, “Charades of Power,” The Guardian, 17 March 1987. 35 L.W. Milam, “Another Day of Life,” The Fessenden Review, 5 February 1987. 36 S. Rushdie, “Reportaż z koszmaru,” trans. E. Don, Literatura na Świecie, no. 12 (1987), 301. The first edition appeared as “Reporting a Nightmare,” The Guardian, 13 February 1987. Later quotations from the same source. 37 Milam, “Another Day of Life.” 38 The book was first published in Britain by Granta Books in 1990; the first US edition (A.A. Knopf) was released a year later. 39 M. Tresidder, “A Man of War, a Man of Words,” The Sunday Telegraph, 4 November 1990. 40 N. Marston, “Books,” gq , October 1990. 41 G. Joyce, “Indiana Jones with a Note Pad,” Orlando Sentinel, 2 June 1991; T. Fishlock, “Entering Sombre and Untrodden Recesses,” Sunday Telegraph, 25 November 1990. 42 I. Walker, “Playing Away,” New Statesman and Society, 2 November 1990. 43 J. Weisberg, “Years of Living Dangerously,” Washington Post Book World, 31 March 1991. 44 M. Hoelterhoff, “Almost Better Than Being There,” Traveller, May 1991. 45 J. Queenan, “A Pole Apart,” Wall Street Journal, 25 April 1991. 46 From “Imperator wśrod książek,” Literatura na Świecie, no. 7 (1984), 367. The author of this note lists the publishers who, to his knowledge, used the English version of The Emperor: Flammarion in France, Feltrinelli in Italy, Tammi in Finland, Kiepenheuer & Witsch in West Germany, and Siglo XXI in Spain, with Quartet in Great Britain having signed a contract as well. However, Paul Nathan is mistaken many times. The first Finnish translation of The Emperor was not released until 2006, by the Like publishing house,

Notes to pages 217–20

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54 55 56

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translated by T. Karkkainen. Meanwhile, in 1986 a Norwegian version of the book about the negus was released (trans. Ole Michael Selberg, published by Det Norske Samlaget). Publishers Kiepenheuer & Witsch ultimately also prepared their version from the original (more on that later). No Spanish version was prepared based on the Brands’ translation because, in 1980, The Emperor, translated by Maria Dembowska, appeared from the Siglo XXI publishing house. However, the author did not mention the 1984 Danish translation by Ib Lindberg, the 1985 Swedish translation by Britt Arenander, the 1986 Japanese one by Yamada Kuzuhiro, and the 1988 Persian translation by H. Kamshad, which were essentially based on the Englishlanguage version. An excerpt from an unpublished interview with Kapuściński, conducted in Warsaw on 16 March 2006. For more about the behind-the-scenes situation for the German edition of The Emperor, see Podroże z Ryszardem Kapuścińskim, 158–9. M. Pollack, “Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego przypadki,” Literatura na Świecie, nos. 1–2 (1995), 355–60. Later quotations from the same source. Kiepenheuer & Witsch withdrew from publishing Kapuściński’s books (at the time when Martin Pollack was already working on Another Day of Life). Subsequent books mainly appeared from the Eichborn publishing house in Frankfurt am Main. See M. Pollack, “Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego przypadki.” We have obtained information about the reception in Scandinavia from translators – Ole Michael Selberg, Anders Bodegård, and Tapani Karkkainen. The young Finnish translator Tapani Karkkainen wrote about the circumstances of the first translation in Podroże z Ryszardem Kapuścińskim, 139–51. Kapuściński, “The Warsaw Diary,” Granta 15: The Fall of Saigon, March 1985 (also in the volume: Günther Grass, Noam Chomsky, James Fenton, Salman Rushdie); Kapuściński, “The Warsaw Diary,” Granta 16: Science, June 1985 (also in the volume: Stephen Jay Gould, Oliver Sacks, P. Levi, Italo Calvino, David Mamet, Christopher Hitchens). Recording in the authors’ possession. R.M. Groński, “Hierarchia,” Polityka, no. 6 (1986), 11. See, among others, S. Rushdie, “Reportaż z koszmaru,” 300–3; T. Rafferty, “Portret reportera z czasow młodości,” trans. E. Don and P. Siemion, Literatura na Świecie, no. 12 (1987), 304–9; Z. Biro, “Kapuścińskiego dwie książki o tyranii,” trans. J. Snopek, Literatura na Świecie, no. 1 (1989), 295– 304; “Imperator wśrod książek,” 62; J. Waloch, “Dlaczego świat czyta ‘Cesarza’?,” Radar, no. 39 (1983), 17; A. Krzemiński, “Stara sztuka pisania”; E. Sajenczuk, “Kapuściński łamie szyfr,” Prasa Polska, no. 7 (1988), 13–16;

344

57

58 59 60

61 62

63 64

Notes to pages 220–5

A.W. Pawluczuk, “Zdumiewająca przygoda literacka,” Życie Warszawy, no. 28 (1990). J. Waloch, “Dlaczego świat czyta ‘Cesarza’?,” Radar, no. 39 (1983), 17; A. Krzemiński, “Stara sztuka pisania”; E. Sajenczuk, “Kapuściński łamie szyfr,” Prasa Polska, no. 7 (1988), 13–16; A.W. Pawluczuk, “Zdumiewająca przygoda literacka,” Życie Warszawy, no. 28 (1990). A. Brycht, “Azyl polityczny,” Odgłosy, no. 17 (1989). Klakson, “Rynek,” Szpilki, no. 10 (1988). The one-hour film Your Man Who Is There, directed by Adam Low, in the prestigious series arena . He was the creator of films about Salvador Dalí and Jorge Luis Borges. J. Urban, “Konferencja prasowa rzecznika rządu,” Trybuna Ludu, no. 45 (1988). D. Passent, “Naszym zdaniem … Ankieta ‘Prasy Polskiej,’” Prasa Polska, no. 1 (1979), 10. See also T. Sas, “Dlaczego Passent nie kocha Kapuścińskiego?,” Prasa Polska, no. 4 (1979), 32. S. Głąbiński, “‘Nowy’ Kapuściński,” Nowe Książki, no. 3 (1977), 53. We owe this information to Kapuściński.

chap ter ni n e 1 V. Flusser, Ku filozofi i fotografii, trans. and ed. J. Maniecki, ed. P. Zawojski, (Katowice, 2004). Important information about the evolution of Kapuściński’s photographic adventure is included in his introduction to the album Z Afryki (Bielsko-Biała, 2000), 5–7, with the title “Moja przygoda z fotografią.” 2 Kapuściński, “Wystawa-dokument. Sierpień 1980,” Kultura, no. 46 (1980), 11. The following quotes in this paragraph from the same source. 3 According to Bożena Dudko, the first Polish photo exhibition (Ethiopia ’75) was held in the Warsaw Empik “Eastern Wall” from 23 September to 8 October 1975; and the first foreign exhibition was held at the Eotvos Club in Budapest from 24 November to 6 December 1986. 4 Information about the Italian exhibitions comes from Magdalena Szymków. 5 More about “Wernisaż Jednego Wieczoru” at http://www.magicmedia.com. pl/imprezy.htm. This remarkable project’s tradition was to show a photograph of the hero of the evening sitting in an old bathtub. Chris Niedenthal told us about the history of this idea: “We had an antique, 100-year-old cast iron tub in the studio that we didn’t want to throw away. A hindrance, but beautiful. Each artist had to be photographed by us for the opening invitation, and during the first session with the Niemen family, Czesław came up

Notes to pages 226–30

6 7 8

9

10 11

12

13 14

15

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with the idea to photograph him and Małgosia in that bathtub. And that was exactly what we did, and later on everyone had to be photographed in it.” Incidentally, this is the photo that was used on the cover of Newsweek, no. 21 (May 2007) as a clear illustration of the problem of the “writer’s portfolio.” See more on this in Chapter 4n24. Statement by Chris Niedenthal on 19 June 2008 (correspondence held by the authors). “Roman Pawłowski o albumie ‘Z Afryki,’” http://serwisy.gazeta.pl/ Kapusciński/1,23085,458437.html. M. Miller, “3 × K: Kąkolewski, Krall, Kapuściński. Polska Szkoła Reportażu,” Institute of Journalism at the University of Warsaw, Laboratory of Reportage [typescript], 75–6. Kapuściński, Solo chi indossa tela grezza … Immagini dall’Africa, catalogue of the photo exhibition on the occasion of the opening of the European Library (Polish Institute in Rome, 2006), 20. M. Miller, “3 × K: Kąkolewski, Krall, Kapuściński,” 77. F.M. Cataluccio, “Godność faktów,” trans. J. Ugniewska, Książki w Tygodniku (supplement to Tygodnik Powszechny), no. 5 (4 February 2007), 11. It is a good thing that the author abandoned the idea of naming the volume with an unclear word – “Nastroje” (Moods). When asked by Tomasz Fijałkowski during the Krakow evening promoting Prawa natury about the reason for giving the collection such a title, he responded: “I don’t know how to answer that. It just seemed that way to me. I first wanted to give the title ‘Moods,’ which would correspond to the moments in which poems were created – in moods. Then I realized there was a band called Nas Troje, so I didn’t want to plagiarize … That is why in the title there is an element of chance.” Quotation from http://www.kapuscinski.info/page/ksiazki/24/ txt/63. The writer probably meant the band Ich Troje. T. Sławek, “Przyjaźń ze światem,” Książki w Tygodniku (supplement to Tygodnik Powszechny), no. 5 (4 February 2007), 15. Published posthumously, including seven new and previously unpublished works, as Wiersze zebrane (Collected Poems) in 2008; translated into English four years later. The translations from Collected Poems are by Diana Kuprel and Marek Kusiba. J. Kisiel, “Ja – Inny. O poezji Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego.” The text appeared in the collection Życie jest z przenikania … Szkice o tworczości Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego, ed. B. Wróblewski. All quotes, unless otherwise noted, are from the typescript of this article. The following passage about the poetry by The Emperor’s creator owes much to this work.

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Notes to pages 232–7

16 J. Mikołajewski, “Poeta Kapuściński,” Gazeta Wyborcza (21 February 2006). 17 The collection, Prawa natury, was published two years earlier in Italy, in a bilingual Polish–Italian edition, as Taccuino d’appunti, trans. and ed. Silvano De Fanti (Udine, 2004). Shortly afterwards, he received the prestigious “Premio Napoli” award. But it was published in Poland only in 2006. 18 “I need poetry as a language exercise,” he confessed in Lapidaria. “I cannot give up poetry. It requires a deep focus on the language, and it works as good prose. Prose must have music, and poetry must have rhythm” (L, 211). 19 K. Karasek, in Kapuściński, Notes (Warsaw, 1986), cover flap. 20 S. Bereś, “Lapidarium czyli ‘nowy tekst,’” Odra, no. 6 (1996), 85. 21 P. Rodak, “Tylko kamyki,” Życie Warszawy, no. 57 (1996), 12. 22 T. Szkołut, “Świat według Kapuścińskiego,” Akcent, no. 3 (1996), 14–20; Szkołut, “Świat w końcu stulecia,” Res Humana, no. 2 (1996), 7–10. 23 W. Kot, “Szczątki,” Wprost, no. 30 (1990). 24 L. Żuliński, “Eseje w pigułce,” Wiadomości Kulturalne, no. 26 (1997). 25 M. Zaleski, “Więcej świata,” Życie Warszawy, no. 149 (1990). 26 Z. Bauer, “W lapidarium,” Nowe Książki, no. 6 (1990), 5. 27 Regarding banality, see, among others, T. Jastrun, “Zbieracz rewolucji, okruszkow i kamieni,” Polityka, no. 8 (1998), 50–1; P. Rodak, “Tylko kamyki”; H. Zaworska, “Co z tego?,” Literatura, no. 10 (1990), 55; and L. Szydłowski, “W pobliżu wielkiej metafory,” Gazeta Lubuska, no. 255 (1990). 28 T. Jastrun, “Klątwa telefonow i lapidarne myśli,” Rzeczpospolita, no. 65 (1996). 29 P. Rodak, “Tylko kamyki.” 30 J. Drzewucki, “Całość i fragment,” Wiadomości Dnia, no. 16 (1991). 31 B. Łopieńska, “Warsztat musi być czynny. Rozmowa z R. Kapuścińskim,” ResPublica Nowa, no. 9 (1995), 51–3. 32 The effect of an unprocessed gloss is also obtained by recalling fragments of thoughts without specifying the author’s name – for example, “Civilisation of survival, and next to it – civilisation of development, or otherwise: living soul (peasant, village) and awakened soul (city, its inhabitants). Whose is this? Who wrote it? Tadeusz Zieliński?” (L VI, 49). 33 Z. Bauer, Antymedialny reportaż Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego (Warsaw, 2001), 182. 34 Although the text taken from Lapidarium appeared in print two years later than the one from Imperium, we are not interested in the moment of publication itself, but in the time of writing both books. It is highly probable that the material for the notebook was collected when the book about Russia was written.

Notes to pages 240–8

347

35 J. Pilch, “Kapuściński,” Dziennik (26 January 2007), 24. 36 Magdalena Horodecka presents a thorough description of this perspective in the article “‘Ja’ wśrod śladow świata: ‘Lapidaria’ Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego,” in Narracje po końcu (wielkich) narracji. Kolekcje, obiekty, symulakra, ed. H. Gosk and A. Zieniewicz (Warsaw, 2007), 424–46. 37 L. Kołakowski, “Wychowanie do nienawiści, wychowanie do godności,” in: Cywilizacja na ławie oskarżonych (Warsaw, 1990), 100. 38 Quotation and trans. J. Krawczyk, “Zawod: reporter,” Dziennik Polski, 25 June 1993. 39 A. Hochschild, “Magic Journalism,” The New York Review of Books, 3 November 1994. 40 U. Eco, On Literature, trans. M. McLaughlin (New York, 2004), 27, 28 41 Z. Bauer, Antymedialny reportaż, 182. 42 M. Czermińska, Opinia w sprawie nadania Panu Ryszardowi Kapuścińskiemu doktoratu honoris causa Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, Krakow, 1 October 2004. 43 When he was accused of giving too much space in his books to quotations, he replied: “I am a great believer in quotations. When we explore a field of knowledge, we notice that many books have already been written about it. In each of them, there is at least one fascinating thought. A normal reader will not reach this thought. It is the writer’s duty to find these pearls. Usually, they are lost in the mass of three hundred pages of print, but when brought out, they revive, they start to shine. Quotations give the text vividness. It takes on cubist qualities.” In M. Szczygieł, “Fragment,” Press, no. 12 (1999), 34. 44 B. Łopieńska, “Warsztat musi być czynny,” 52. Information below and quotation from same source. 45 W. Kass, “Dialog jest fundamentem kultury [Discussion with Ryszard Kapuściński],” in Opisać Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego, ed. W. Kass, Topos, nos. 1–2 (2006), 15. 46 M. Miller, “3 × K: Kąkolewski, Krall, Kapuściński,” 32. 47 W. Kass, “Dialog,” 16. 48 Jarosław Abramow-Newerly, who once had the opportunity to travel with Kapuściński by plane, wrote thus about his tendency to read: “Talking about the old days, I noticed that, unlike me, Ryszard didn’t waste time. He had a whole bag stuffed with books, difficult, specialized books, in English, that he literally soaked up, underlining sentences. He said that only a few per cent of this would be useful to him. In any case, he closely followed the literature on the issues he was interested in.” Opisać Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego, 56.

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Notes to pages 252–73

chap ter t en 1 Kapuściński, Autoportret reportera, selected and foreword by K. Strączek (Kraków, 2003). 2 Kapuściński, Rwący nurt historii: Zapiski o XX i XXI wieku, selected and foreword by K. Strączek, photos by R. Kapuściński (Kraków, 2007). 3 W. Bereś and K. Burnetko, Kapuściński: nie ogarniam świata (Warsaw, 2007). 4 Compare “Dotknąć Rosji: Fragmenty dyskusji, ktora odbyła się w warszawskim studiu Radia Wolna Europa z udziałem … Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego,” Życie Warszawy, no. 103 (1993), 2. 5 This quotation does not appear in the English edition and has been translated from the Polish. 6 “Wojna czy dialog,” Plus-Minus (supplement to Rzeczpospolita), 3–4 March 2002. 7 Kapuściński, “Kultura narodowa w erze globalizacji,” Kongres Kultury Polskiej, Warsaw 2000, article at www.kapuscinski.info. 8 “‘Gdzieś kryje się większa racja’ … Z Ryszardem Kapuścińskim rozmawia Andrzej Kantowicz,” Kultura, no. 31 (1976). 9 W. Giełżyński, “Czterokrotnie rozstrzelany,” in Ekspres reporterow (Warsaw, 1978). 10 Compare I. Sariusz-Skąpska, “Obrazki z życia Imperium,” Znak, no. 3 (1994); Andrzej Mencwel, “Dokąd pędzi trojka,” Polityka, no. 21 (1993); Mariusz Wilk, Wilczy notes (Gdańsk, 1998), 58–62. Wilk called Kapuściński’s method as random “tourist observation” and a desire to embrace everything that was both superficial and incomprehensible. He contrasted this with his own practice of researching “Russianness,” consisting of growing into one place and deeply understanding it. 11 The autobiographical nature of Imperium was first and fully interpreted by Jerzy Jarzębski in his excellent sketch “Wędrowka po Imperium,” Tygodnik Powszechny, no. 20 (1993). 12 “Dotknąć Rosji.” 13 T. Sławek, “Ryszard Kapuściński i jego filozofia ‘Innego,’” in Śląski Wawrzyn Literacki 2006, ed. J. Malicki and M. Kisiel (Katowice, 2007), 65. 14 G. Łęcka, “Opisuję stany ducha,” in Łęcka, Salon literacki (Warsaw, 1999), 194. 15 B. Olszewska-Dyoniziak, Bronisław Malinowski: Tworca nowoczesnej antropologii społecznej (Zielona Gora, 1996), 45. 16 Ibid., 18. 17 Ibid., 40 (the quote is from Argonauts of the Western Pacific [Warsaw, 1967]).

Notes to pages 273–5

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18 Olszewska-Dyoniziak, Bronisław Malinowski. Malinowski, who postulated an attitude of kindness and openness toward the natives, was later referred to by some as “the man of song”; others considered him a boring and limited man (an “anthropofoologist”). See ibid., 9, 12. James Clifford, juxtaposing diametrically different information about Malinowski’s relationship with Indigenous informants, as described in the Trobriand monographs and in the Diary he kept faithfully during his stay, undermines the credibility of the ethnographic way of understanding defined as a “coherent position of sympathy and hermetic engagement”; rather, it considers them to be “a creation of ethnographic writing rather than the consistent quality of the ethnographic experience.” Intercultural understanding becomes for him “a rhetorical construct whose balanced, rational status is undermined by ambivalence and violence.” Clifford, “On Ethnographic Self-Fashioning: Conrad and Malinowski,” in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed. T.C. Heller, M. Sosna, and D. Wellbery (Stanford, 1986). 19 Comparing Heart of Darkness with A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, James Clifford also examines the problem of the crisis of the “I” located at the antipodes of Western civilization, at the “farthest point of navigation.” Both books deal with white men “on the border, in the place of danger and decay.” Kapuściński is also no stranger to loneliness. This was particularly strongly heard in the volume Another Day of Life. There, professional work – for example, regular correspondence – also became an effective antidote to loneliness. 20 B. Olszewska-Dyoniziak, Bronisław Malinowski, 35. 21 B. Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (London, 1922), 66. 22 B. Malinowski, Dziennik w ścisłym znaczeniu tego słowa, introduction and edited by G. Kubica (Kraków, 2002), 459. 23 B. Olszewska-Dyoniziak, Bronisław Malinowski, 22. 24 A. Lubowski, “Podroż marzeń z Pińska do Oceanii,” Gazeta Wyborcza, 25 January 2007, 16. 25 This quote and information about the Dalai Lama’s visit come from Francesco Comina, coordinator of the Centro della Pace di Bolzano – the organization that invited Kapuściński to Bolzano. We owe a lot of information about this trip to Magdalena Szymków, curator of Kapuściński’s Italian exhibitions. 26 W. Misiuda-Rewera, Włochy – republika autonomii (Lublin, 2005), 104. 27 Kapuściński, Dałem głos ubogim. Rozmowy z młodzieżą, trans. M. Szymków and J. Wajs (Kraków, 2008), 18.

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Notes to pages 276–8

28 S. Gelmini, “Kapuściński sulle tracce di Malinowski,” Corriere dell’Alto Adige, 10 October 2006, 13. Jarosław Mikołajewski wrote, however, that the information about Malinowski’s stay in Bolzano was known to the writer before his trip and constituted one of the important arguments for him to take up this invitation. J. Mikołajewski, “Bolzano, czyli chwila szczęścia,” in Kapuściński, Dałem głos ubogim, 82–3. 29 The villa is owned by the family to this day. The eighty-year-old daughter of the anthropologist Helena Wayne, who was born in Bolzano and now lives in London, usually spends summers there. Kapuściński had the opportunity to see Malinowski’s house during his October visit. See S. Gelmini, Kapuściński sulle tracce di Malinowski. 30 In a letter to a family friend and his tutor Kazimierz Nitsch, he wrote from Bolzano: “I, as you know, came here to be treated for consumption. Now I am better, but I will have to spend about 4 or 5 months in the mountain climate … . I am currently writing a volume about the sex life of the Trobriand natives. My work goes slowly and with resistance because I am often poorly.” See G. Kubica-Klyszcz, “Listy Bronisława Malinowskiego,” in Antropologia społeczna Bronisława Malinowskiego, ed. M. Flis and A.K. Paluch (Warsaw, 1985), 281–2. 31 It was probably then that he was working on materials brought from the expeditions. During these years, he published, among others: Zwyczaj i zbrodnia w społeczności dzikich (1926), Seks i stłumienie w społeczeństwie dzikich (1927), Życie seksualne dzikich w połnocno-wschodniej Melanezji (1929), and Ogrody koralowe i ich magia (1935). 32 Kapuściński, Dałem głos ubogim, 12–13. 33 Correspondence with Francesco Comina in the possession of the authors. 34 A. Kapuścińska, “Przedmowa,” in Kapuściński, Dałem głos ubogim, 8. 35 Marek Miller’s studio – Laboratory of Reportage (Laboratorium Reportażu) – is already preparing such an expedition. Detailed information on the progress of the work is regularly posted on the project’s website: http://wyprawatrobriandy.pl.

chap t er el even 1 A. Kapuścińska, “Przedmowa,” in Kapuściński, Dałem głos ubogim. Rozmowy z młodzieżą, trans. M. Szymków and J. Wajs (Krakow, 2008), 7. 2 F.M. Cataluccio, “Godność faktow,” trans. J. Ugniewska, Książki w Tygodniku (supplement to Tygodnik Powszechny), no. 5 (4 February 2007), 11. 3 J. Białostocki, Sztuka cenniejsza niż złoto (Warsaw, 2001), 670. 4 H.W. Janson, A Basic History of Art (New York, 1971), 435.

Notes to page 279

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5 S. Márai, Dziennik, trans. and ed. T. Worowska (Warsaw, 2004), 603. 6 “Only the tightrope walker strides like a stork through the room. Death blew over the crowd for the second time that evening, to him as a bad omen and a warning to seek temporal and eternal security in a monastery. Tomorrow he will again hover over the towers of some castle, with as much support as provided by that rope under his feet. Down below, the rabble will rumble with the mob and fire up suggestions. And death will dance again right behind him on the rope and whisper in his ear: ‘Listen how they clap. Take a look down, smile, wave your hand … You don’t even dare to look? … So look beyond yourself fast, because your love, once the strongest in your life, is catching up with you on the rope, probably in fear of bad feelings, to say goodbye to you at this moment, maybe your last … Listen to the hurricane of applause! – for having swayed so cruelly, and not having fallen … Are you falling?! … Fall, on your head, on your neck!’” W. Berent, Żywe kamienie, ed. M. Popiel (Wrocław, 1992), 165. 7 “In the meantime, of course, the rope-dancer had commenced his performance: he had come out at a little door, and was going along the rope which was stretched between two towers, so that it hung above the market-place and the people. When he was just midway across, the little door opened once more, and a gaudily-dressed fellow like a buffoon sprang out, and went rapidly after the first one. ‘Go on, halt-foot,’ cried his frightful voice, ‘go on, lazy-bones, interloper, sallow-face! – lest I tickle thee with my heel! What dost thou here between the towers? In the tower is the place for thee, thou shouldst be locked up; to one better than thyself thou blockest the way!’ And with every word he came nearer and nearer the first one. When, however, he was but a step behind, there happened the frightful thing which made every mouth mute and every eye fixed – he uttered a yell like a devil, and jumped over the other who was in his way. The latter, however, when he thus saw his rival triumph, lost at the same time his head and his footing on the rope; he threw his pole away, and shot downwards faster than it, like an eddy of arms and legs, into the depth. The market-place and the people were like the sea when the storm cometh on: they all flew apart and in disorder, especially where the body was about to fall.” F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, trans. Thomas Common (2014), 37–8. 8 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 34. 9 See entry “Most” in J. Tresidder, Słownik symboli: Ilustrowany przewodnik po tradycyjnych wyrażeniach obrazowych, znakach ikonicznych i emblematach, trans. B. Stokłosa (Warsaw, 2001), 133–4; H. Biedermann, Leksykon symboli, trans. J. Rubinowicz (Warsaw, 2001), 223–4; J. Hall, Leksykon symboli sztuki Wschodu i Zachodu, trans. J. Zaus and B. Baran (Kraków, 1997), 124.

352

Notes to pages 280–4

10 http://serwisy.gazeta.pl/wyborcza/1,68586,2951661.html. 11 “Nobel 2006: Kapuściński w pierwszej trójce,” http://serwisy.gazeta.pl/ Kapusciński/1,23090,3663463.html. 12 S. Popowski, “Goździki na śniegu,” Plus-Minus (supplement to Rzeczpospolitej), no. 23 (2007), 8. 13 “Teksty po śmierci Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego,” http://www.kapuscinski.info/ page/po_smierci/jezyk/1/kat/27/txt/70. 14 A. Domosławski, “Kapumania, kapumafia,” Gazeta Wyborcza, 17 May 2007. 15 J. Pilch, “Kapuściński,” Dziennik, no. 22 (2007), 24. Quotation below from the same source. 16 Podroże z Ryszardem Kapuścińskim. Opowieści trzynastu tłumaczy, ed. B. Dudko (Kraków, 2007); W. Bereś and K. Burnetko, Kapuściński: nie ogarniam świata (Warsaw, 2007); 26 bajek z Afryki ze zdjęciami Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego (Warsaw, 2007); Kapuściński, Busz po polsku (Warsaw, 2007); Kapuściński, Rwący nurt historii (Kraków, 2007); E. Chylak-Wińska, Afryka Kapuścińskiego (Poznań, 2007). 17 “Prasa latynoamerykańska o Kapuścińskim,” http://wiadomosci.wp.pl/drukuj.html?kat=1342&wid=8700339. 18 http://www.kapuscinski.info/page/po_smierci/jezyk/2/kat/45/txt/113. 19 Quotation from M. Winiarska, “Wizerunek Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego w prasie francuskiej po 23 stycznia 2007 roku,” in Ryszard Kapuściński. Portret dziennikarza i myśliciela, ed. K. Wolny-Zmorzyński, W. PiątkowskaStepaniak, B. Nierenberg, and W. Furman (Opole, 2008), 157–62. 20 http://wiadomosci.gazeta.pl/Wiadomosci/1,80651,3871924.html. 21 C.K. Norwid, “Do Bronisława Z.,” in Pisma wybrane, vol. 1, chosen and explained by J.W. Gomulicki (Warsaw, 1980), 57. 22 “Wspominają Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego” (P. Załuski), Dziennik, 24 January 2007. 23 This uniqueness of Kapuściński’s writing was most thoroughly described by Jerzy Jarzębski in the article “Życie w błysku.” He indicated, among other things, features of style “which seek to capture the world in a grid of a limited number of words and images of symbolic meaning, around which the story focuses and which form a system of repetitions, as if musical refrains of the text.” Książki w Tygodniku (supplement to Tygodnik Powszechny), no. 5, 4 February 2007, 2–4. 24 “Internauci wp żegnają Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego,” 23 January 2007, http:// wiadomosci.wp.pl/drukuj.html?kat=1342&wid=8700339. 25 J. Pilch, Kapuściński. 26 “Wrocławskie ślady Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego,” Gazeta Wyborcza, 24 January 2007, http://www.kapuscinski.info/page/po_smierci/jezyk/1/kat/1/txt/21.

Notes to pages 284–5

353

27 “Wspomnienia o Ryszardzie Kapuścińskim,” Dziennik, 25 January 2007. 28 Krzysztof Masłoń’s text titled “Osobliwa skrytość Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego,” published in Rzeczpospolita, could, with a bit of terminological inventiveness, be called an “epitaph of denunciation.” His analysis of guesses, hunches, and doubts leads to a conclusion that is formulated almost like an official message: “Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev invented a Black Land with a sickle and hammer. The People’s Republic of Poland was an ally of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Ryszard Kapuściński did not go to Ghana and the Congo or Angola in the mid-1970s for no reason.” This “peculiar” farewell to the author of The Emperor could be easily ignored were it not for the fact that it anticipated subsequent events. Soon, Newsweek published a text by Mariusz Cieślik that was full of uncertainty and inconsistency. He first accused Kapuściński of having contacts with the secret services and finally identifying himself as their ally. Cieślik’s bizarre feuilleton would also have gone unnoticed had it not been for a sharp comment by Jerzy Pilch in Dziennik. The same topic was raised in the pages of Rzeczpospolita by Rafał A. Ziemkiewicz, after which the media, both pro- and anti-lustration, fell silent for a moment. See K. Masłoń, “Osobliwa skrytość Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego,” Plus-Minus (supplement to Rzeczpospolita), no. 4 (27–8 January 2007), 7, 8; M. Cieślik, “Trafiony teczką,” Newsweek, no. 11 (2007), 111; J. Pilch, “Szaleństwo wokoł Kapuścińskiego,” Dziennik, 16 March 2007, 4; and R.A. Ziemkiewicz, “Kto zabił Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego?,” Rzeczpospolita, 16 March 2007. See also G. Kopacz, “Sam się nie obroni,” Press, no. 5 (2007). 29 The famous program Co z tą Polską?, by Tomasz Lis, was devoted to this. Rzeczpospolita also printed a long article by Bronisław Wildstein, who mocked the “fear and assurance” of the editorial office of Newsweek, and a polemic by Ernest Skalski. Gazeta Wyborcza published statements from a few of Kapuściński’s friends, who vehemently rejected the accusations of cooperation as dishonest considering the nobility of the person to whom they were referring. The event also had some echoes in the world. It was mentioned by the British paper The Guardian, and the Italian papers La Repubblica and Corriere della Sera. See, among others, B. Wildstein, “W świetle sprawy Kapuścińskiego,” Plus-Minus (supplement to Rzeczpospolita), no. 22, 2–3 June 2007, 7, 9; E. Skalski, “W świetle sprawy Kapuścińskiego’ i… mojej,” Plus-Minus (supplement to Rzeczpospolita), no. 23 (9 June 2007), 9. 30 We owe our information about the journalistic investigation’s background to Valerio Pellizzari, with whom we spoke on 21 May 2008, and to the article “La spia che non spio” (The Spy Who Did Not Spy), published on 13 January 2008 in the pages of the Toruń gazette La Stampa. All quotations from the above sources.

354

Notes to pages 286–96

31 B. Buford, “Theatre: Kapusciński,” Vogue, April 1987, 10. Later information from the same source. 32 J. Żakowski, “Świat rozpędzony,” Gazeta Wyborcza, 24 December 1999. 33 Information about the reception comes from Kapuściński’s translators, Silvano De Fanti (Italy) and Ole Michaela Selberga (Norway). 34 A. Domosławski, “Kapumania.” 35 Correspondence with Agata Orzeszek held by the authors. 36 Quotation from Rzeczpospolita, no. 21, 25 January 2007, 11. 37 W. Jagielski, “Umawialiśmy się na poźniej,” Gazeta Wyborcza, 24 January 2007, 3. 38 R. Praszyński, “Dzielny szeryf,” Gala, nos. 22–3 (2007), 55. 39 A. Sztyler, “Pożegnać ten zgiełk,” Twoj Styl, no. 5 (2007), 84. 40 Information about the website comes from Maciej Skórczewski and Robert Nowacki. 41 A. Krzyżaniak-Gumowska, “Chciałem wiedzieć wszystko o panu Ryszardzie,” Gazeta Stołeczna (supplement to Gazety Wyborcza), 1 February 2007, 2. 42 E. Juńczyk-Ziomecka, “Wspomnienie,” Gazeta Wyborcza, 1 February 2007, 2. The quote below from the same source. 43 Reporterzy “Gazety Wyborczej” wspominają mistrza, http://serwisy.gazeta.pl/ kraj/1,34397,3871413.html. 44 W. Jagielski, “Umawialiśmy się na poźniej.” 45 T. Torańska, “Nie mogę uwierzyć w to, co się stało,” “To koniec szkoły reportażu,” http://serwisy.gazeta.pl/Kapusciński/1,23090,3871133.html. 46 W. Tochman, “Tworcze pisanie niefikcyjne,” Książki w Tygodniku (supplement to Tygodnik Powszechny), no. 5, 4 February 2007, 8. 47 A. Domosławski, “Kapumania.” 48 For information about the Ryszard Kapuściński Award, see “dr Wanda Błeńska – nagroda im. Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego,” http://www.money.pl/ archiwum/wiadomosci_agencyjne/iar/artykul/dr;wanda;blenska;nagroda; im;ryszarda;Kapuscińskiego,65,0,224321.html. 49 Information on the undertakings of the Agencja Literacka puenta comes from Czesław Apiecionek. See also http://agencja-puenta.com. The Liepman ag Agency in Zurich also has information about translations. 50 We owe the information about this publication to Silvano De Fanti and Vera Verdiani. 51 The authors interviewed Alina Brodzka-Wald on 31 January 2005. 52 “Opisać Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego” (L. Kołakowski), collected and edited W. Kass, Topos, nos. 1–2 (2006), 52. 53 Kass, Topos, nos. 1–2 (2006) (J. Abramow-Newerly), 55–6. 54 “Orientowali się na niego,” ed. L. Ostałowska, Press, no. 2 (2007), 7.

Notes to pages 296–304

55 56 57 58 59

60 61 62

63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

73 74

355

M. Szejnert, “‘Busz’ po latach,” Literatura, no. 3 (1976), 10. R. Karaś, “Gwiazda Kapuścińskiego,” Tygodnik Kulturalny, no. 37 (1975), 7. “Opisać Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego” (A. Stasiuk), 57. C. Czapliński, Kariery w Ameryce (Warsaw, 1994), 114. In the early 1990s, he spoke about this vocation thus: “Today, in the period of the so-called great changes taking place in the world … there is a great demand for the writer’s opinion. Because people are confused … they would like to have the world explained … Since they have lost confidence in official sources, they seek orientation from people they trust.” Czapliński, Kariery w Ameryce, 111. “Polska straciła wielkiego reportera” (B. Geremek), tvp , http://www. kapuscinski.info/page/po_smierci/jezyk/1/kat/28/txt/77. The categories “trace” as “scar,” “stigma,” and “calling” we quote from Barbara Skarga. Skarga, “Ślad,” in Ślad i obecność (Warsaw, 2004). Adam Krzemiński wrote in Polityka: “Ryszard often said that it was exactly this provincial Pińsk, this poverty of the Borderlands, the simultaneous interpenetration and clash of cultures and the wartime flight from one catastrophe to another which awakened his insatiable curiosity of the Third World.” Krzemiński, “Herodot naszych czasow,” Polityka, no. 5 (2007), 31. T. Sławek, Żaglowiec, czyli przeciw swojskości. Wybor esejow (Katowice, 2006). Skarga, “Ślad,” 105. J.M. Nowak, “Samospalenie,” Książki w Tygodniku (supplement to Tygodnik Powszechny), no. 5, 4 February 2007, 1. Czapliński, Kariery w Ameryce, 113. Moj ślad (R. Kapuściński). Produced by rgb for Program 1 tvp , 1999. Interview conducted by G. Miecugow for tvn 24 (2005), www.kapuscinski.info. Kapuściński, “Siła słowa,” Gazeta Wyborcza, 24 January 2007, 2. Kapuściński, “Jak widzę świat?,” Gazeta Uniwersytecka (special supplement), no. 5 (2007), 6–10. Kapuściński, “Dlaczego piszę?,” Gazeta Uniwersytecka (special supplement) no. 5 (2007), 13. J. Patočka, “Człowiek duchowy a intelektualista,” in Eseje heretyckie z filozofii dziejów, trans. A. Czcibor-Piotrowski, E. Szczepańska, and J. Zychowicz, (Warsaw, 1998), 211–30. In the introduction to this essay Patočka warns: “I guess the term ‘spiritual person’ doesn’t sound very good these days, it sounds somehow spiritualistic. We don’t like it today. But is there any better term to describe what I mean?” (211). Ibid., 223–4. Ibid., 228–9.

Index of Names

Abboud, Ibrahim, 70, 311 Abramow-Newerly, Jarosław, 296, 347n48 Adamczyk, Mieczysław, 36 Adamiecki, Wojciech, 27m 192, 296, 339n11 Adonis (Ali Ahmad Sa’id Isbir), 280 Albinowski, Stanisław, 27 Aldrich, Robert, 108 Ali, Tariq, 340n10 Allende, Salvador, 107, 112, 116, 123–7, 131, 142, 314 Alonso, Carlos, 132 Ambroziewicz, Jerzy, 27, 36, 326n15 Amin, Idi, 77, 266, 338n39, 341n27 Andersen, Hans Christian, 21, 169 Andrić, Ivo, 166 Apiecionek, Czesław, 294, 354n49 Arenander, Britt, 343n46 Arendt, Hannah, 208 Arseniuk, Andrzej, 285 Ascherson, Neal, 71, 242, 328n3 Ash, Timothy Garton, 200 Baako, Kofi, 58–9 Baka, Józef, 166 Bauer, Zbigniew, 172, 187, 235, 237, 245 Ben Bella, Ahmed, 79, 85, 312

Benik, Petrusjan, 331n37 Berberyusz, Ewa, 27 Berent, Wacław, 279, 351n6 Bereś, Stanisław, 235 Bereś, Witold, 109, 253 Bereza, Henryk, 54 Berezowski, Maksymilian, 27 Berling, Zygmunt, 15 Bernanos, Georges, 54 Billington, Michael, 214 Błeńska, Wanda, 293 Bobka, Franciszek, 325n5 Bobkowski, Andrzej, 234 Bocheński, Jacek, 29 Bodegård, Anders, 219, 343n51 Bogart, Humphrey, 216 Bokassa, Jean Bédel, 85, 312 Bolívar, Simón 134 Böll, Heinrich, 9, 325n4 Boniecki, Adam, 285 Borges, Jorge Luis, 186, 221, 245, 246, 344n60 Borowski, Tadeusz, 29, 326n3 Borowy, Wacław, 336n8 Borusewicz, Bogdan, 192 Bouček, Jarda, xix, 61–3 Boumédiène, Houari, 312 Bourgiba, Habib, 79 Bouvier, Nicolas, 70–1

358

Index of Names

Brand, William, 206–7, 317, 340n16 Brandys, Kazimierz, 158 Bratkowski, Stefan, 109, 332n48 Braun, Andrzej, 26, 29 Breza, Tadeusz, 234 Brezhnev, Leonid, 214 Brodal, Jan, 218 Brodsky, Joseph, 242 Brodzka-Wald, Alina, 295, 354n51 Brodzki, Stanisław, 247 Brook, Peter, 212 Brycht, Andrzej, 220 Brzęczkowski, Jerzy 122 Brzeziński, Zbigniew, 242 Buber, Martin, 272 Buford, Bill, 286 Burckhardt, Jacob, 248 Burkot, Stanisław, 95 Burnetko, Krzysztof, 109, 253, 329n13, 332n48, 348n3, 352n16 Calvino, Italo, 207–8, 343n53 Camus, Albert, 54, 154, 208, 214, 215, 239 Capote, Truman, 208, 298 Carl XVI Gustav, 286 Carré, John le (David John Moore Cornwell), 244 Carter, Jimmy, 175 Castro, Fidel, 83, 111, 117, 314, 332n41 Cataluccio, Francesco M., 229, 278 Celan, Paul, 280 Chandler, Charles, 112 Che Guevara. See Guevara de la Serna, Ernesto “Che” Chekhov, Anton, 248 Chipande, Alberto Joaquim, 137 Chissano, Joaquim, 136 Chmielowski, Benedykt, 165 Chociłowski, Jerzy, 91 Chomsky, Noam, 343n53 Ciemiński, Ryszard, 186

Cieślik, Mariusz, 330, 353n28 Clifford, James, 349nn18–19 Comina, Francesco, 276, 349n25, 350n33 Conrad, Joseph, 56, 154, 166, 214, 248, 274 Cooper, Gary, 108 Costa e Silva, Artur da, 112 Cromwell, Oliver, 165 Czechowicz, Józef, 24 Czermińska, Małgorzata, 245 Czombe, Moise, 310 Dąbrowska, Maria, 29 Dacko, David, 85, 312 Dalai Lama XIV (Tenzin Gjatso), 275, 349n25 Dalí, Salvador, 244, 344n60 Dan, Stanisław, 55 Dante Alighieri, 150, 208 De Fanti, Silvano, 294, 346n17, 354n50 Dembowska, Maria, 205, 343n46 Dickens, Charles, 215 Diderot, Denis, 208 Dische, Irena, 336n13 Doboszowa, Henryka, 192 Domańska, Antonina, 247 Domosławski, Artur, 287, 290, 292–3 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 334n12 Drawicz, Andrzej, 27, 326n8 Drewnowski, Tadeusz, 94 Drozdowski, Bohdan, 54–5, 87, 310 Drzewucki, Janusz, 236 Dudko, Bożena, 294, 325n4, 339n1, 344n3 Dziewanowski, Kazimierz, 27 Ebner, Ferdinand, 272 Edelman, Marek, 126 Eder, Richard, 340n17 Elbrick, Charles Burke, 118 Engdahl, Horace, 280 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 208, 219, 242, 336n13

Index of Names Feliksiak, Jerzy, 94 Fenton, James, 212, 343n53 Fijałkowski, Tomasz, 345n12 Fikus, Dariusz, 27, 52 Fischer, Erika, 217 Flaszen, Ludwik, 126 Flusser, Vilém, 224 Forsyth, Frederick, 91 Franco, Francisco, 214 Frei Montalva, Eduardo, 112 Frelek, Ryszard, 129 Freud, Sigmund, 276 Frisch, Max, 207 Friszke, Andrzej, 285 Fuentes, Carlos, 287 Fukuyama, Francis, 242, 255 Gajos, Janusz, 225 Gałczyński, Konstanty Ildefons, 24 Gandhi, Mahatma (Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi), 214 García Márquez, Gabriel, 208, 219, 242, 245, 282, 287, 290, 320 Gaulle, Charles de, 214 Gbenye, Christophe, 81 Genet, Jean, 239 Geremek, Bronisław, 32, 298 Gibbon, Edward, 248 Giełżyński, Wojciech, 158, 174, 185, 187, 194, 288, 316, 329n21, 339n11 Gierek, Edward, 106, 129, 170–2, 191, 209–10 Ginsberg, Allen, 242 Gizenga, Antoine, 66 Goetel, Ferdynand, 45 Gombrowicz, Witold, 188, 336n7 Gomulicki, Wiktor, 247 Gomułka, Władysław, 33, 106 Gontarczyk, Piotr, 285 Gorky, Maxim, 100 Górnicki, Wiesław, 27 Górski, Jerzy, 27

359

Górski, Kazimierz, 26–7, 306 Gott, Richard, 208 Gould, Stephen Jay, 343n53 Gowon, Yakubu, 139, 312 Goździk, Lechosław, 200 Grass, Günter, 207, 343n53 Greene, Graham, 208, 214 Grekow, Aleksander P., 262 Groński, Ryszard Marek, 220 Grudzień, Zdzisław, 172 Guevara de la Serna, Ernesto “Che,” 83–4, 103–4, 108, 112–14, 117, 121, 123, 127, 313–14 Gwiazda, Andrzej, 192–3 Halbersztat, Piotr, 193–4, 198, 338n3 Hárs, Gábor, 205 Hastings, Michael, 212, 318, 341n27 Heidrich, Andrzej, 281, 316 Hemingway, Ernest, 54, 214–15, 248 Herling-Grudziński, Gustaw, 126, 234 Herodotus of Halicarnasus, 243, 248, 268–71, 275 Hitchens, Christopher, 343n53 Hitler, Adolf, 39 Hłasko, Marek, 54 Hochschild, Adam, 245 Hoelterhoff, Manuela, 216 Hofman, Michał, 69, 106 Hołda, Edward, 27 Homer, 183 Horodecka, Magdalena, 335n6, 347n36 Horodyński, Dominik, 129 Hudson, Richard, 213 Hugo-Bader, Jacek, 290, 292 Huntington, Samuel, 271 Husák, Gustáv, 214 Hussein, Saddam, 283 Hutek, Jerzy, 171, 316–17, 336n14 Ibsen, Henryk, 281 Ikonowicz, Mirosław, 146

360

Index of Names

Irzykowski, Karol, 234 Iwaszkiewicz, Jarosław, 54 Jabłoński, Henryk, 32, 308 Jagielski, Wojciech, 288, 290–2 Jagiełło, Krystyna, 192, 198, 339n11 Jankowska, Janina, 339n11 Janson, Horst Woldemar, 278 Janta-Połczyński, Aleksander, 45 Jarzębski, Jerzy, 348n11, 352n23 Jastrun, Tomasz, 236 John Paul II, 280, 302 Joyce, James, 247, 281 Juńczyk-Ziomecka, Ewa, 194, 291, 316, Kaczorowski, Aleksander, 285, 330 Kafka, Franz, 154, 206, 208, 276, 281 Kąkolewski, Krzysztof, 27, 33, 48 Kałużyński, Zygmunt, 27 Kamshad, H., 343 Kanik, Stefan, 50 Kapuścińska, Alicja, xviii, 277–8, 285, 328n4, 329n21 Kapuścińska, Maria, 12–13, 15, 305–6 Kapuściński, Józef, 7–8, 11, 13, 305–6 Karaś, Romuald, 296 Karasek, Krzysztof, 234 Kärkkäinen, Tapani, 343 Karpiuk, Małgorzata, 288 Karume, Abeide Amani, 81 Kasa-Vubu, Joseph, 79, 85, 312 Kaufman, Michael T., 282 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 214 Khomeini, Ruhollah Musavi, 130, 173–5, 177, 180, 211–12 Khrushchev, Nikita S., 353n28 Kinaszewski, Adam, 198 Kisch, Egon Erwin, 208, 217 Kisiel, Joanna, 230, 232–3 Klee, Paul, 278–9 Knade, Tadeusz, 192 Knightley, Philip, 208 Kobosko, Michał, 285

Kołakowski, Leszek, 32, 164, 242, 295 Koliński, Gustaw, 206 Konwicki, Tadeusz, 29, 40, 158 Kopelev, Lev, 325n4 Kot, Wiesław, 235 Kozicki, Stefan, 27, 129, 190, 192 Krajewski, Aleksander, 107, 313 Krall, Hanna, 94, 126, 219 Krasucki, Wojciech, 27 Krauze, Enrique, 287 Krzemiński, Adam, 209–10, 220, 355n62 Kunce, Aleksandra, 331n37 Kuncewiczowa, Maria, 234 Kurihara, Sadako, 325n4 Kuśmierek, Józef, 129 Kuzuhiro, Yamada, 343n46 Lancaster, Burt, 108 Lasota, Grzegorz, 27 Laub, Gabriel, 210 Leach, Edmund, 273 Lem, Stanisław, 221 Levi, Paolo, 343n53 Levinas, Emmanuel, 272 Lindberg, Ib, 343n46 Lis, Tomasz, 353n20 Lisowska, Elżbieta, 178, 337 Lovell, Jerzy, 94 Low, Adam, 318, 334n60 Lumumba, Patrice, 61, 63, 66, 81, 113, 156, 158 Łąkowski, Paweł, 202 Łopieńska, Barbara N., 129, 246 Łoziński, Jerzy, 239 Łoziński, Marcel, 200 Mach, Wilhelm, 55 Machiavelli, Niccoló, 208 Maciąg, Włodzimierz, 55 Mackiewicz, Józef, 7 Mączak, Antoni, 32 Magris, Claudio, 294 Mahler, Gustav, 276

Index of Names Mailer, Norman, 208 Makarios III (Mihalis Christodoulou Mouskos), 141 Malinowski, Bronisław, 248, 251, 270–6, 281, 349n18 Malraux, André, 54, 56 Mamet, David, 343n53 Mandelstam, Osip, 281 Mann, Thomas, 248 Mao Zedong, 45, 79, 214 Márai, Sándor, 279 Marcel, Gabriel, 272 Marcos (pseud.), 287 Marley, Bob (Robert Nesta Marley), 341n29 Masłoń, Krzysztof, 353n28 Mauriac, François, 54 Mauss, Marcel, 271 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 24, 30, 307 Maziarski, Wojciech, 330n23 Mazowiecki, Tadeusz, 26, 191 McCarron, Ace, 213 Meloch, Katarzyna, 161, 334n12 Melville, Herman, 158, 254 Mengistu (Mengistu Haile Mariam), 130, 207 Miazga, Zbigniew, 338n9 Michelet, Jules, 248 Miciński, Bolesław, 241 Mickiewicz, Adam, 283 Miecugow, Grzegorz, 355n68 Mikołajewski, Jarosław, 232, 350n28 Milam, Lorenzo W., 215 Miller, Chris, 340n15 Miller, Jonathan, 212–14, 318, 341n28 Miller, Marek, 39, 126, 163, 203, 226, 229, 325n6 Miłosz, Czesław, 234 Miodek, Jan, 284 Mitchum, Robert, 216 Mo, Ettore, 285, 287 Mobutu Sese Seko, 62, 63, 66, 85, 312 Mommsen, Theodor, 248

361

Mondlane, Eduard, 77, 137 Monsiváis, Carlos, 287 Morales, Pablo, 110 Morawski, Jerzy, 33 Mosaddegh, Mohammad, 179 Mroczkowska-Brand, Katarzyna, 206, 317, 340n16 Mroziewicz, Krzysztof, 129 Mugabe, Robert, 76–7 Muhammed, Murtala, 139 Mularczyk, Andrzej, 129 Muñoz, Mario, 206 Murrow, Edward R., 215 Nagorski, Andrzej, 285 Naipaul, V.S., 215 Nałkowska, Zofia, 29, 246 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 62, 79 Nathan, Paul, 216, 342n46 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 42 Nemere, István, 206 Neto, António Agostinho, 145, 148, 150 Nicastro, Andrea, 283 Niedenthal, Chris, 225–6, 319, 344n5, 345n6 Niemen, Czesław and Małgorzata, 225, 344n5 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 259 Nitsch, Kazimierz, 350 Nixon, Richard, 115 Nkomo, Joshua, 77 Nkrumah, Kwame, 58–9, 79, 85, 113, 158, 312 Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg), 7 Nowacki, Robert, 289–90, 325n3, 354n40 Nowak, Izabella, 77, 80, 310 Nowak, Jerzy, 77, 80, 82–3, 285, 300–1, 310 Nowak, Kazimierz, 281 Nowak-Jeziorański, Jan, 280, 302 Nowakowski, Marek, 222

362

Index of Names

Nowakowski, Tadeusz, 209 Nycz, Ryszard, 158 Nyerere, Julius, 79 Obote, Milton, 77, 79, 85, 312 Ochman, Wiesław, 225 Ochnio, Woody, 225–6, 319 Oginga Odinga, Jaramogi, 79 Olszewska-Dyoniziak, Barbara, 273 Onichimowski, Leon, 325n4 Orwell, George (Eric Arthur Blair), 214–16 Orzeszek, Agata, 288, 354n35 Osęka, Andrzej, 28 Osiatyński, Wiktor, 285 Osiecka, Agnieszka, 33 Osmańczyk, Edmund, 106–7, 313 Pacholak, Krzysztof, 289 Paczkowski, Andrzej, 285 Pahlavi, Reza, 130, 173, 179 Pamuk, Orhan, 280 Pańska, Roma, 106 Passent, Daniel, 28, 75, 221 Pasternak, Boris, 207 Patočka, Jan, 303, 355n72 Paul, Werner, 209 Pawlak, Beata, 292 Pawłowski, Roman, 226 Pawluczuk, Andrzej W., 159, 171–2, 199, 220, 316 Paz, Octavio, 287 Pellizzari, Valerio, 285, 287, 353n30 Picasso, Pablo, 325n6 Pilch, Jerzy, 240, 282, 284, 353n28 Pinochet, Augusto, 117, 123 Plato, 304 Pollack, Martin, xxiv, 217–18, 325n4, 343n50 Pomian, Krzysztof, 32 Popowski, Sławomir, 280 Poprzeczko, Jacek, 194, 316 Potocki, Jan, 208

Prescott, Peter, 208 Procopius of Caesarea, 166 Proust, Marcel, 248, 281 Provazník, Dušan, 339n1 Provazníkova, Pavla, 339n1 Pruszyński, Ksawery, 7, 38, 291 Przyboś, Julian, 55, 234 Pushkin, Aleksander, 28 Putrament, Jerzy, 55, 94 Queenan, Joe, 216 Rakowski, Mieczysław F., 28, 61, 75 Raksa, Pola, 225 Ranke, Leopold von, 248 Rasz, Nina, 198 Rawicz, Marian, 107 Reagan, Ronald, 175, 214 Redlich, Jerzy, 94 Redliński, Edward, 129 Reed, John, 38 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 281 Roberto, Holden Álvaro, 145, 148 Rockefeller, Nelson, 115 Rodak, Paweł, 236 Rogowska, Sąsiadka, 242 Rolicki, Janusz, 129 Rose, David, 210, 336n9 Rosenzweig, Franz, 272 Roszkowski, Janusz, 127 Różewicz, Tadeusz, 158 Rudziński, Cezary, 194, 316 Rumiz, Paolo, 285, 287 Rushdie, Salman, 208, 215, 219, 242, 294, 343n53 Ryciak, Igor, 285, 330n23 Rylski, Eustachy, 284 Sacks, Oliver, 343n53 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, 54, 56, 248 Sajenczuk, Elżbieta, 220 Salazar, António de Oliveira, 214 Sallinen, Aulius, 336n13

Index of Names Samsonowicz, Henryk, 32 San Martín, José, 112 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 54 Savimbi, Jonas, 145 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 184 Seierstad, Åsne, 287 Sekielski, Tomasz, 288 Selassie I, Haile, 79, 92, 168–9, 209–10, 215, 315, 335n2, 335n5, 341n29 Selberg, Ole Michael, 343n23 Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 79, 89 Shakespeare, William, 86, 89, 139, 215 Shulman, Milton, 342n32 Siedlecka, Joanna, 129 Siemek, Józef, 94 Simenon, Georges, 207 Skalski, Ernest, 194, 285, 316, 330, 353n29 Skarga, Barbara, 300 Skórczewski, Maciej, 289–90, 354n40 Skrobiszewski, Stefan, 73–4, 307 Sławek, Tadeusz, 230, 270, 300 Słojewski, Jan Z., 28 Słonimski, Antoni, 55 Smoleński, Paweł, 290 Smolorz, Michał, 172 Soglo, Nicéphore, 85, 312 Socrates, 304 Sontag, Susan, 212, 219, 242, 280 Sowińska, Beata, 94 Spreti, Karl von, 117, 134, 159, 314 Staff, Leopold, 29 Stafford-Clark, Max, 212 Stalin, Joseph, 17, 103, 209, 246, 261 Stanisławska, Olga, 290, 292 Stasiuk, Andrzej, 296 Stefański, Lech, 192, 194, 316 Stempowski, Jerzy, 234 Sten, Maria, 109, 332n48 Stojowski, Andrzej, 18 Strączek, Krystyna, 252–3, 320–1 Strumff, Tadeusz, 339n11 Surdykowski, Jerzy, 186, 194, 339n11

363

Swift, Jonathan, 208 Symotiuk, Stefan, 97 Szczygieł, Mariusz, 290, 294 Szejnert, Małgorzata, 194, 296, 316 Szeliga, Zygmunt, 27 Szkołut, Tadeusz, 235 Szpakowska, Małgorzata, 335n7 Szymańska, Ewa, 129 Szymków, Magdalena, 224, 229, 344n4, 349n25 Tafawa Balewa, Abubakar, 79 Tarłowska, Irena, 33, 36 Tazbir, Janusz, 32 Terzani, Tiziani, 285, 287 Timur (Tamerlane), 102 Tischner, Józef, 272 Tochman, Wojciech, 219, 290–1 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 166 Toeplitz, Krzysztof T., 28 Toffler, Alvin, 207, 219, 242 Toffler, Heidi, 219, 242 Tolstoy, Leo, 281 Torańska, Teresa, 129, 203, 285, 291 Torres, Camilo, 131 Touré, Sékou, 79, 85, 312 Toynbee, Arnold J., 249 Trifonov, Yuri, 31 Trujillo, Molina Rafael Leónidas, 120 Trybek, Zbigniew, 193 Turski, Marian, 27 Tuwim, Julian, 29 Tyszkiewicz, Beata, 225 Umer, Magda, 225 Updike, John, 208, 294, 325n6 Urban, Jerzy, 28, 203, 220–1 Velasco Alvarado, Juan, 112 Venclova, Tomas, 280 Verdiani, Vera, 294, 354n50 Viaux, Robert, 107 Voltaire (François Marie Arouet), 208

364 Waloch, Jacek, 220 Wańkowicz, Melchior, 7, 38, 291 Wayne, Helena, 350n29 Ważyk, Adam, 30, 35–6 Wierbanowicz, Włodzimierz, 8 Wierbanowicz-Kindler, Anna, 8 Wiernikowska, Maria, 290 Wierzyński, Kazimierz, 24, 296 Wierzyński, Maciej, 128 Wildstein, Bronisław, 353n29 Wilhelmi, Janusz, 129 Wilk, Mariusz, 348n10 Wiśniowski, Ryszard, 36 Witkiewicz, Stanisław Ignacy, 274 Wojciechowska, Izabela, 225 Wójcik, Ryszard, 28 Wolff, Helen, 206–7 Wolicki, Krzysztof, 27 Woroszylski, Wiktor, 26, 28–9, 30, 40–1, 47

Index of Names Woźniak, Tadeusz, 194 Wróblewski, Andrzej K., 28 Yesenin, Sergei, 28 Zaid, Gabriel, 287 Żakowski, Jacek, 106–7, 332n43, 333n66 Zaleski, Marek, 235 Zalewski, Witold, 29 Załuski, Piotr, 283, 320 Zarzycki, Janusz, 224 Zdanowski, Henryk, 93 Zembrzuski, Stanisław, 174 Zieleński, Jerzy, 27 Ziemkiewicz, Rafał A., 253n28 Ziomecki, Mariusz, 129, 194, 316 Żłobin, Edward, 325n3, 325n5 Żuliński, Leszek, 235