Ryszard Kapuściński

Ryszard Kapuściński
Born	March 4, 1932(1932-03-04) Pińsk, Poland (now in Brest Voblast, Belarus).
Died	January 23, 2007(2007-01-23) (aged 74) Warsaw, Poland
Occupation	historian & journalist
Ethnicity	Polish

Ryszard Kapuściński (Polish pronunciation: [ˈrɨʂart kapuɕˈt͡ɕiɲski] ( listen); March 4, 1932 – January 23, 2007) was a Polish journalist and writer whose dispatches in book form brought him a global reputation. Also a photographer and poet, he was born in Pińsk — now in Belarus — in the Kresy Wschodnie or eastern borderlands of the second Polish Republic, into poverty: he would say later that he felt at home in Africa as "food was scarce there too and everyone was also barefoot". Kapuściński himself called his work "literary reportage", and reportage d'auteur. In the English-speaking world, his genre is sometimes characterised as "magic journalism" (in counterpoint to magic realism), a term coined for him by Adam Hochschild in 1994. More recently, during the period since his death, scholars have indicated the similarities between Kapuściński’s style of writing and the traditional Polish form known as the gawęda szlachecka. He was one of the top Polish writers most frequently translated into foreign languages, having been surpassed on this count only by the Nobel Prize-winner, Wisława Szymborska.

The man, his Third World reportage and other work

An altar boy in a Roman Catholic church in his childhood, Kapuściński in his adolescence became an amateur (bantamweight) boxer of some note and an award-winning poet who attracted two magazine prizes in 1950.

“	The [Communist] Party has given me everything, it is shaping me up, its cause has become the cause of my life. I would like, with all of myself, to serve, as a member of the Party, the immortal idea of Stalin who has bestowed upon all of us the task of bringing his work to completion. To contribute as much as possible, as far as lies within me, to the fulfilment of this testament — this is my most sacred desire.	”
—Ryszard Kapuściński, Application for Party membership, April 9, 1953

While still in high school, in 1948, Kapuściński joined the official Communist youth organisa­tion — the ZMP — and served as the head of its local cell (a position in which, despite his tender age, he earned a reputation for being a fanatical disciplinarian). In this capacity he participated in the Youth Festival in East Berlin staged in August 1951 as a propaganda event for the Communist Germany. (This was, to all appearance, his first foreign trip.) During the period from 1953 to 1981 — the year of the imposition of the martial law in Poland — Kapu­ściń­ski was a member of the Communist Party (the PZPR), having lodged his original application for candidate membership of the Party in 1952, at the age of 20, during the Stalinist period. His subsequent application for full membership, written a month after the death of Stalin and dated 9 April 1953, Kapu­ściń­ski buttressed with the avowal to "serve, with all of myself, the immortal idea of Stalin". His membership of the Communist Party had been sponsored by Bronisław Geremek who, while praising in his letter of recommendation Kapu­ściń­ski's Communist aptitude, also noted the Candidate's lack of capacity for self-criticism. Kapu­ściń­ski claimed, in response to a question posed by Adam Michnik, that his attitude to Communism changed early on, "the decisive moment having come in the year 1956" (presumably a reference to the events of Poznań June and the process of de-Stalinisation brought about by the Thaw of Gomułka, and the Hungarian Uprising), although he remained a loyal member of the Party until December 1981 and never spoke out against it afterwards, including during the period of the Third Republic following the Party's self-dissolution in January 1990.

“	...within the picture of Nowa Huta, in its interior, there are things disturbing and evil. These things are many. Too many. As you scrutinise them, probe them, investigate them, there start piling up questions without answers, and your indignation grows, giving rise to dissent. You cry out: Take ye a closer look at Nowa Huta, a closer one! This will be an instructive lesson for you. Harm to others, villainies, heartlessness, deceit... Do you know what defines the moral norms here? The cash. Literally!... Because on occasion the red tape reaches in Nowa Huta the level of barbarity...	”
—From Kapuściński’s article about Nowa Huta, Sztandar Młodych, 30 September 1955

In his early youth Kapu­ściń­ski started writing for the Sztandar Młodych, a nationwide newspaper founded in 1950 as the organ of the central organisa­tion of the Communist youth, the ZMP, of which he was a member. After publishing, in September 1955, a critical article about the construction of Nowa Huta, a Cracow conurbation built on a site chosen by Soviet "advisors" as the "first socialist municipality in Po­land", which brought to light the inhuman working and living conditions of the labourers involved in the venture — a story which oc­ca­sion­ed consternation before even­tu­al­ly winning favour with the Communist authorities unsure at first how to react to a fault-finding depiction of their pet project by one of their own — Kapu­ściń­ski was awarded the Golden Cross of Merit at the age of 23. The newspaper article having been a commissioned piece, the outcome of the incident was a function, ultimately, of the infighting of competing factions within the Communist Party, Jerzy Morawski (b. 1918), one of the leaders of the Pulavian Faction and a secretary of the Central Committee, being instrumental in bringing the matter to a resolution successful for Kapu­ściń­ski. Independently, the text of the article itself contained a form of "higher insurance" against Kapu­ściński's professional self-destruction: even while censuring (rightly) Polish Communist officials, in the same passage it offered praise to Khrushchev, setting him up as the model of humanity to be emulated by them. Thus, what could have been for Kapuściński the end of his journalistic career, became its most visible commencement. Armed with powerful backers and a state dec­o­ra­tion, Kapuściński demanded of his newspaper to be sent abroad (later in life claiming that what he had had in mind was Czecho­slo­va­kia). His word being now their com­mand, Kapuściński was sent via Italy to India (taking in Pakistan and Afghanistan en route de retour), and the next year (1957) again to China and Japan. Beginning with that journey to India undertaken in 1956, at the age of 24, without any foreign-language skills (he is said to have learned English only afterwards – by reading, with the help of a dictionary, a copy of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls purchased serendip­i­tous­ly at the Rome airport), he travelled across the developing world, at first producing "essays in frustration and ignorance" (in the words of Colin Thubron, b. 1939), though later reporting more knowledgeably on wars, coups and revolutions in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas; including the Football War — a "bloody, scarcely believable conflict that Honduras and El Salvador waged in 1969 over a pair of soccer games."

“	Question: How have you explained to yourself the fact that your first books had been overlooked by readers? Kapuściński: Reaching back to those years, I remember the look of the bookshop across from my office in Warsaw. On my return from one of my successive trips, I noticed its being choked with unsold copies of my collection of domestic reportage, Busz po polsku. The sight of this sent me into blind panic.	”
—From an interview with Kapuściński published in Press magazine, 2006

Between the years 1958 and 1962 Kapuściński was the domestic correspondent of the weekly Polityka, a (periodical) organ of the Com­mu­nist Party (newly founded in 1957 by a decision of the Central Committee as a counterpart to their main daily organ, the Try­buna Lu­du). The result of his work for the weekly was the book Busz po polsku (a title which could be loosely translated as "The Bush in Polish Edition"; 1962), a collection of his articles from the "Polish wilderness" that he went into to relate "the perspectives of forgotten, invisible, marginal people and so to record a living history of those seldom deemed worthy to enter the annals of official history" (in the words of Diana Kuprel, b. 1963, the literary scholar and translator of Kapuściński's works). He was aggrieved at the indifference of the reading public towards the majority of his early books. In 1962 Kapuściński joined the Polish press agency, the PAP, and after honing his skills on domestic stories was appointed "its only foreign correspondent, and for the next ten years he was 'responsible' for fifty coun­tries." (Although a correspondent of an official state press agency, he never in his life asked a single question at any press conference that he attended.) When he finally returned to Poland, he had lived through twenty-seven revolutions and coups, been jailed 40 times and survived four death sentences. In the English-speaking world, Kapuściński is best known for his reporting from Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, when he witnessed first-hand the end of the European colonial empires on that continent. He made his first trip to Africa in the winter of 1959–60, visiting the West African countries of Ghana, Niger, and what was then called Dahomey (now Benin).

“	Kapuściński: Nella mia vita ho incontrato centinaia di grandi, meravigliosi giornalisti, di diversi paesi e in epoche differenti. Nessuno di loro era un cinico. Al contrario, erano persone molto legate a ciò che stavano facendo, molto serie, in generale persone molto umane. [In my life, at different times, I have met hundreds of great, wonderful journalists of different countries. None of them was a cynic. On the contrary, they were people very dedicated to the work they were doing, very serious, and all things considered, very human.]	”
—From Ryszard Kapuściński, Il cinico non è adatto a questo mestiere, 2000

According to some, Italian journalist Tiziano Terzani and Ryszard Kapuściński shared a similar vision of journalism. Both Terzani and Kapuściński had been accused of espionage, though with diametrically opposite moral implications of the fact (Terzani having been arrested in China in February 1984, and subsequently expelled from that country, on the charge of promoting democracy). Jaime Abello Banfi, the friend and associate of Gabriel García Márquez, reports that García Márquez and Kapuściński, unbeknownst to each other, shared the opinion that the way to good journalism led through poetry (on account of the fact that it inculcates both the conciseness of expression and its aptness). Others considered Curzio Malaparte and Melchior Wańkowicz (with their championing of the effect of minor detail imbued with the force of a metaphor) to have been Kapuściński's literary models and stylistic precursors within a genre that in Poland had pre­vi­ous­ly such eminent exponents as Ksawery Pruszyński (1907–1950), Zbigniew Uniłowski (1909–1937), and Maria Sten (1917–2007). Pruszyński indeed, together with Franciszek Gil (1917–1960), were the two literary personages whom Kapuściński himself invoked as unattainable ideals for any journalist. On some level, Pruszyński and Wańkowicz shared a very similar approach to facts with Kapuściński, believing that the general picture of the story can be glued from bits and pieces to reveal a truth as a wholly independent construct. Students of Kapuściński's work observed correspondences between his work and that of J. M. Coetzee in that both writers were supposedly beholden to the theory of "the responsibility of witness" formulated by the French war correspondent, Patrick Chauvel (b. 1949), in his 2003 book Rapporteur de guerre. One reviewer saw in Kapuściński's mixing of subtle psychological reflection with vivid description an invitation to a comparison with Joseph Conrad; Binyavanga Wainaina and Aleksandar Hemon made the same comparison, if for other, less laudatory reasons. Kapuściński confirmed to Bill Deedes the fact that Conrad was one of his literary inspirations. Neal Ascherson, Kapuściński's contemporary and a connoisseur of his work (b. 1932), likened him to Egon Erwin Kisch (1885–1948), the German-speaking left-leaning citizen of Czechoslovakia considered the father of literary reportage, "who travelled the globe to stimulate the fantasies" of his readers (and who, like Kapuściński, spent a number of years in Mexico). Kapuściński himself cites Kisch with approval as the "classic of reportage" who dealt a death blow to traditional forms of reporting by putting the person of the reporter at centre stage. Certainly, neither Kisch nor Kapuściński believed in what might be called "journalistic objectivity": whereas Kisch thought it necessary for a (Communist) reporter to "engage politically" with his subject, Kapuściński would put objectivity as a concept out of court altogether, stating explicitly, "I don't believe in unbiased journalism (bezstronne dziennikarstwo), in formal objectivity: a journalist can never be a disinterested witness".

In a 2006 interview with Reuters, Kapuściński said that he wrote for "people everywhere still young enough to be curious about the world." Kapuściński died on 23 January 2007 of a heart attack suffered in a Warsaw hospital where he was being treated for unrelated ailments.

Author

From the early 1960s onwards, Kapuściński published books of increasing literary craftsmanship characterized by sophisticated narrative technique, psychological portraits of characters, a wealth of stylization and metaphor and unusual imagery that serves as means of interpreting the perceived world. Kapuściński's best-known book, The Emperor, concerns itself with the decline of Haile Selassie's anachronistic régime in Ethiopia. Shah of Shahs, on the fall of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, and Imperium, about the last days of the Soviet Union, have enjoyed similar success.

“	Kapuściński: We know everything about the global problem of poverty. What we can’t figure out is how to reduce it in practical terms. [The moment we try] there appear obstacles that cannot be surmounted, and interests one cannot go against.	”
—From an interview with Kapuściński published in Press magazine, 2006

Kapuściński was fascinated by the humanity he found in different worlds and people, as well as the books of these worlds and people: he approached foreign countries first through literature, spending months reading before each trip. He was skilled in listening to the diverse people he met, but he was also capable of "reading" the hidden sense of the scenes he encountered: the way the Europeans moved out of Angola, a discussion regarding alimony in the Tanganyikan parliament, the reconstruction of frescoes in the new Russia — he turned each of these vignettes into a metaphor of historical transformation. This tendency to process private adventures into a greater social synthesis made Kapuściński an eminent thinker, and the volumes of the ongoing Lapidarium series are a fascinating record of the shaping of a reporter's observations into philosophical reflections on the world, its people and their suffering. Adam Michnik (b. 1946) has remarked on his great compassion for "the poor, the victimised, and the debased".

Censorship

The American edition of Shah of Shahs, issued in the United States in 1985 by the San Diego publishers, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, in the translation of William R. Brand (b. 1953) and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand, was censored — by having references to CIA involvement in the 1953 overthrow of Iran's prime minister Mossadegh (or about 15 pages) excised. (The censorship of the American edition, ironic in a book that deals in part with the terror of pervasive censorship unleashed on the people of Iran by the Shah's security agency, the SAVAK, has never been satisfactorily explained, and is not fully elucidated even in Domosławski's latest biography of Kapuściński (see section "Controversial biography", below).) A respected Polish journalist, Monika Olejnik (b. 1956), attributes this instance of censorship to Kapuściński himself, who was allegedly motivated by his own scruples.

A film-script adaptation of Kapuściński's The Emperor, written by Marcel Łoziński for the film-director Andrzej Wajda in 1979, has never reached the production stage, having been banned by Communist censors. (Kapuściński's original book was not affected.)

Poet

“	Poverty poverty in the evening tipsy poverty	”
—Ryszard Kapuściński, "L u d z i e n a p r z y s t a n k u p r z y u l i c y W o l s k i e j", ["People at the Bus Stop in Wolska Street"]; from Notes, 1986

In Poland, since 1986 (the year which saw the publication of Notes; see "Selected bibliography", below), Kapuściński was also known as a poet: he privately confided in his Swedish translator, Anders Bodegård (b. 1944), that he considered this to be his primary identity. In November 2007 the Canadian publishing house, Biblioasis, published Kapuściński's selected poems in English, I Wrote Stone, bringing this aspect of Kapuściński's work to an English audience for the first time. His verse has been described as thoughtful and philosophic, with aphoristic overtones in diction and structure, "and as one would expect, engaged politically, morally and viscerally with the world around him".

Poetic juvenilia

Kapuściński did not think much of his early poetic output, on the other hand, dismissing it as "transmission-line Mayakovskyism" (produkcyjna majakowszczyzna) and later in life congratulating himself on having avoided publishing his collected juvenilia in book form. Such demurrals may have been self-interested, as his early poems are said to include Stalinist panegyrics, including an ode, entitled "Brygada Dzier­żyń­skie­go" (The Dzerzhinsky Brigade), extolling the "acumen for vigilance" of the first Bolshevik secret-police chief, Felix Dzerzhinsky, a figure particularly notorious in the annals of totalitarian oppression and genocide. However, in Autoportret reportera ("A Reporter's Self-portrait"; 2003), Kapuściński credits his early beginnings as a poet for his becoming a journalist in the end: "I wrote poems [in the early part of my life], but they were all very bad (...) 'occasional' pieces (...) but it is precisely those poems that led me to journalism". Notwithstanding such self-judgements, it is untrue that all of Kapuściński's early verses were "very bad": some of them (to be sure, likewise not all) reveal a level of prosodic finesse and a degree of genuinely poetic sensibility and conceptual sophistication of which a schoolboy could be rightfully proud; the poem entitled "Uzdrowienie" (Healing), with its expertly codified trope of Christ, published in the periodical Dziś i jutro in August 1949 when Kapuściński was 17, could be cited as an example. Kapuściński was the hero (not entirely unjustifiably) of the article published in the weekly periodical Odrodzenie on the morrow of his 18th birthday (5 March 1950) reporting on a poetry conference organised at his high school, in which the teenager's poems were compared to those of some of the best-known European poets (including Mayakovsky and Wierzyński). The desire to consign all of his juvenilia to oblivion appears to have been dictated by the embarrassment engendered (post-1956) by the objectionable subject matter of the explicitly Stalinist among those pieces, rather than by the unsatisfactory level of their technical craftsmanship.

Photographer

Kapuściński debuted as a photographer in the year 2000 with the publication of the album entitled Ryszard Kapuściński z Afryki ("Ryszard Kapuściński out of Africa"), a photographic harvest of his journeys in that continent. "Every snapshot is a recollection, a remembrance," he writes in the introduction, "and nothing can sensitise us more to the fragility of time, to its impermanent and fleeting nature — than photography." A sequel, entitled Ze świata ("Out of the World", published in November 2008 with the introduction of John Updike), comprising a cross-section of Kapuściński's photographs from all parts of the world, contains some truly outstanding shots.

Posthumous and non-reportage works

The posthumously published Ho dato voce ai poveri: dialogo con i giovani ("I Gave a Voice to the Poor: Conversations with the Youth"; Trent, Il Margine, 2007; subsequently published in Poland as Dałem głos ubogim. Rozmowy z młodzieżą; Cracow, Znak, 2008) is a record of Kapuściński's interactions with the students of the University of Bolzano in Italy in October 2006; while Rwący nurt historii. Zapiski o XX i XXI wieku ("In the Whirlpools of History: Jottings on the 20th and the 21st Centuries"; Cracow, Znak, 2007) is a compilation of interviews and lectures, reflecting Kapuściński's training as a historian and dealing with contemporary issues and their historical and cross-cultural parallels (including such issues as globalisation, Islam, the birth of the Third World, and the dawn of the Pacific civilisation).

“	Question: Is it possible to describe a war on terror? Kapuściński: No; it's a web. Its structure is immensely difficult of scrutiny. We have to concede that there are many things in the world which it is impossible to delineate.	”
—From an interview with Kapuściński published in Press magazine, 2006

Kapuściński's pronouncements on current affairs were noteworthy: he thought that the causes of the 9/11 tragedy, for example, were too complex to lend themselves to an exhaustively thorough analysis at present, although he offered an extensive and sophisticated exposition of some of the key elements of the puzzle in "Zderzenie cywilizacji" (The Clash of Civilisations); he told a BBC interviewer right after the attacks: "I greatly fear that we will waste this moment. That instead of meaningful dialogue, it will just be gates and metal detectors". In an interview granted in 2002 to the well-known Mexican writer and (the then) editor-in-chief of the monthly Letras Libres, Ricardo Cayuela Gally (b. 1969), Kapuściński opined that the war on terror, owing to the asymmetrical character of the combatants engaged in it, could only be won — and indeed easily, within a month — through a (re)introduction of "Stalinism", a method undesirable for the sole reason that it would leave the world under the permanent "hegemony" of the United States, a circumstance that would spell the end of "the free society". In the end, he pinned all his hopes for a better future on the intellectual traditions of Europe rather than those of America, for "in the strength of her thought, only Europe is capable of self-criticism...[:] only Europe has produced a Reformation, a Renaissance, an Enlightenment". Some (limited) light has been thrown on Kapuściński's life-long visceral anti-Americanism by Monroe Edwin Price (b. 1938), professor in the University of Pennsylvania, in his book Television, the Public Sphere, and National Identity published in 1995, but in general nowhere in his writings does Kapuściński respond to or engage in any remotely sophisticated way with the classic exposition of the reasons for anti-Americanism formulated in various publications by the French philosopher, Jean-François Revel (for whom Kapuściński would seem to have served as a case study). Kapuściński seems to have anticipated the Arab Spring revolutions of 2011 in positing a concept of "global society" (społeczeństwo planetarne), in effect a body of "6 billion people whom nobody can insinuate anything, on whom nobody can impose anything".

Translator and revolutionary

In 1969 Kapuściński edited and translated from the Spanish El diario del Che en Bolivia, the final literary bequest of Che Guevara's, first published in Havana and, separately, in Mexico City in 1968, with the introduction by Fidel Castro.

According to Newsweek magazine, Kapuściński served — secretly — as translator to the Soviet "advisors" supporting the pro-Soviet, communist MPLA faction in the Angolan conflicts of the 1970s. Indeed, by Kapuściński's own admission (made in an interview given to the Communist youth newspaper, the Sztandar Młodych, in August 1977), corroborated by the recollections of his comrades-in-arms debriefed more recently, he on occasion himself participated in armed combat in Angola on the side of the MPLA.

“	As several practitioners of reportage acknowledge, participation is essential to fulfil the hermeneutic function of reporters for it allows them to identify with the otherness they relate. As Kapuściński sums this belief up: "Words are incomprehensible if one has not lived through that about which one writes. If it hasn't penetrated through the blood"...	”
—Diana Kuprel, "Literary Reportage: Between and Beyond Art and Fact"

“	Question: How much were you aware of the machinations of the [Polish Communist] government at the time? Of how its members had been trained in Moscow during the war, or of the rigged election in 1947? Kapuściński: Well, I was an activist at the time. We were all activists... I can’t think of anyone who wasn’t. I myself had joined one of the communist youth organizations in 1948... We all thought we were doing the right thing, and we were very committed, very enthusiastic.	”
—From an interview with Kapuściński published in Granta, 1987

At the same time, Kapuściński never revealed in his public reporting on the Angolan conflict the presence in Angola of Cuban "instructors" and the participation of units of Cuban soldiers in the armed combat on the side of the MPLA (making only veiled references to the fact with expressions like, "the MPLA is not bereft of all support"), while at the same time expatiating on the Egyptian, Portuguese, and South African mercenaries fighting on the side of FNLA and UNITA. When, towards the end of the decade of the 1980s, during a book-launch ceremony for one of the foreign editions of Another Day of Life, someone asked Kapuściński whether, in the interests of impartiality, he had explored the motivations of the other players in the Angolan conflict, specifically the points of view of UNITA and of FNLA, he replied: "Nobody gave me an opportunity to do so" (reported in Artur Domosławski, Kapuściński non-fiction).

When asked by Bill Buford in 1987 about his cognisance in his youth of the Communists' illegitimate seizure of power in Poland through the rigged elections of 1947, Kapuściński implied his connivance in the events by responding: "Well, I was an activist at the time. We were all activists. (...) We all thought we were doing the right thing..."

Praise, honours and critiques — and the writer's credo

Salman Rushdie wrote about him: "One Kapuściński is worth more than a thousand whimpering and fantasizing scribblers. His exceptional combination of journalism and art allows us to feel so close to what Kapuściński calls the inexpressible true image of war".

“	I do not consider myself a man possessed of any particular talent.	”
—Ryszard Kapuściński, Autoportret reportera, 2003

Although he was frequently mentioned as a favorite to win the Nobel Prize in literature, it was never awarded to him. Kapuściński's candidature for the Nobel Prize was spearheaded by Józef Czyrek (b. 1928), member of the Communist Party's Politburo and Minister of Foreign Affairs during the dictatorship of General Jaruzelski. Jaruzelski himself has reportedly given the nod to the proposal. Kapuściński's dying before he could be awarded the Prize was bemoaned in the Swedish press as late as October 2010. Since his death he has been offered many epitaphs in the press, such as, "The master of modern journalism", "Translator of the World" and "The Greatest Reporter in the World", "Herodotus of our times", "Third World chronicler".

His work has been criticised, however, for factual inaccuracies and for the unfaithful image he creates of Africa, at once "more thrilling and more accessible to the western imagination" than the actual reality on the ground. John Ryle, professor of anthropology at Bard College (known for his studies of the Dinka people of the Southern Sudan), saw in this a manifestation of a certain "variety of latter-day literary colo­ni­al­ism". Aleksandar Hemon (b. 1964), the Bosnian-American novelist (who had previously oppugned Robert Kaplan's stereotyping of "the Balkan mind"), in a devastating critique of Kapuściński's Africa writings published in The Village Voice, accused Kapuściński's enthralled readers of turning a blind eye to "the underlying proto-racist essentialism" that informs his vision of and his approach to the cultures of the continent: "[Kapuściński] fumes against the racism absurdly based on skin colour, and would probably be shocked if told that his obsessive listing of essential differences [between "the African mind" and "the European mind"] is essentially racist".

“	Question: I take your work to be that of a witness to the way the world is rather than an endeavour of its trans­formation. Kapuściński: I treat my occupation as that of a translator of one culture into another. Because I have always been struck by the complete incomprehension of each culture by the next.	”
—From an interview with Kapuściński published in Press magazine, 2006

The American writer with African experience to his name, Andrew Rice (b. 1975), saw in Kapuściński the same crude predilection for casting people into facile stereotypes: "Ultimately, Kapuściński sees the world as composed of tribes, and for all his travels among them, he doesn't believe that they can ever really communicate with one another". Another American writer with African experience to his name, William Finnegan (b. 1952), echoed such objections with his own reservations: "The magnificent sympathy that Kapuściński has brought to reporting on the third world simply deserts him in certain pieces... The low point, analytically speaking, of The Shadow of the Sun is reached when Africa's troubles are attributed to a lack of 'critical spirit'" by an author self-congratulatory in his Europeanism. Prom­i­nent, unimpeachable authorities in the field of African studies, such as Richard Pankhurst (b. 1927) and Edward Ullendorff (1920–2011), have broadly corroborated the factual premises on which some of such criticisms were based. Perhaps most important of all, well-known African writers have controverted Kapuściński's understanding of Africa and "the African", seeing in his approach and basic instincts the same cultural conditioning that once might have hampered the empathy of a Joseph Conrad or a Karen Blixen, and perhaps even greater deficiencies than theirs, more likely to evoke consternation than to inspire admiration for Kapuściński. While Remi Raji (b. 1961), the renowned poet of Nigeria and visiting professor at numerous Western universities, complained of the "viral claims of journalese pretending... [to be] great literature, at the expense of a race, the othered members of humanity" in Kapuściński's writings, the award-winning Kenyan author, Binyavanga Wainaina (b. 1971), who memorably wrote on how not to write about Africa, says of Kapuściński:

any African knows the particular flavour and danger of his kind of language [as employed by Kapuściński]. It is responsible for many deaths. It is the language that seeks to justify your incapacity, to distance your humanity from his centre. Now, much of what he [Kapuściński] says (...) and this is where the threat of Kap is at its most dangerous: that even though a twelve-year-old African would laugh at some of his propositions, the very nature of his language is compelling to the exact person he wants... [among the core of his] readership: the liberal European, [the] American who has never been to Africa, and who has deep inside him, inbuilt by the ideas of Conrad and Blixen and CNN and [the] countless made-for-television dramas, an idea that 'Yes, the African is indeed a strange being, maybe even a child who needs a firm (but loving) hand'.

“	A century ago, imperialist British eccentrics made similarly dangerous journeys into the same parts of Africa and returned to write scarcely believable narratives of their ordeals. Kapuściński is no imperialist, but otherwise not much has changed. Like Sir Richard Burton, Evelyn Waugh and Mungo Park, he makes literature of journalism...	”
—"Kapuściński's Adentures", Newsweek, 15 April 1991

Likewise, the British-Nigerian writer, Adewale Maja-Pearce (b. 1953), while commending Kapuściński for his human touch and eloquent pen, took exception to the superficial generalisations about Africa that Kapuściński is prone to, which tend unhelpfully to muddle the picture of Africa's problems rather than throwing light on them. The general hostility of African intellectuals towards the writings of Ryszard Kapuściński during his lifetime has been accentuated by the total silence with which Africa, the continent with which he had been most prominently associated, greeted his death away in 2007.

The Economist magazine put it all rather more circumspectly: "...[Kapuściński] creates an Africa of his own. It is a fascinating place. Wheth­er it ever existed as he tells it is another matter altogether." (On the other hand, his understanding of the Soviet Union as an empire crumbling under its own weight has been appreciated by the same magazine for its unique insights.)

“	It is possible for us to speak untruth not because we want to lie, but because our memory is imperfect, our recollections incomplete, or our emotions confused.	”
—Ryszard Kapuściński, Autoportret reportera, 2003

Kapuściński himself seems to bear out The Economist's and all similar critiques based on considerations of factual accuracy: his collection of poetry, Notes ("The Note­book"), published in Poland in 1986, is said to contain his literary credo, according to which "only he survives who creates his own world"; the truth, on this view, is not the goal, for the voice of truth is apt to get drowned out by the general cacophony of words (both true and false): therefore one need not be a speaker of truth but a creator, like God, of one's own world in order to stand out... Elsewhere, in a seminal interview published in the Tygodnik Powszechny in 2001, Kapuściński (then aged 69) would say explicitly that "ambitious jour­nal­ism — as in the case of literary reportage for example — has been forced out [of the commercialised mass media] into the regions of literature"; when the interviewer presses on, "But surely what the mass media are all about is information...", Kapuściński counters resolutely: "No. The media are more than information. The media are transmitters. But we transmit not only information." Thus he posits "literary reportage" as a category closer to fiction than fact. Later in the same interview, as if in self-defence, Kapuściński goes on to point out that, in Latin America, "the difference between a journalist and a writer has been substantially abolished": there, important writers such as "Fuentes, Llosa [i.e. Vargas Llosa], Marquez" (i.e. García Márquez), all maintain active connections to journalism and "customarily take a stand on the sociopolitical issues" of their day. Fiction writers who fail to adopt this model "get marginalised". He cites a "recently published" book of Régis Debray (perhaps L'Emprise, although he doesn't name the title) which documents the shift in the French opinion-making centre from the erstwhile dominant intellectual elite — that is, "people of the likes of Sartre and Camus" — to the journalistic class who have now taken over the "priestly functions" once monopolised at the church pulpit, the power "to condemn, to damn [perpetually], and also to praise, to enlighten", thereby implying that, in this day and age, fiction-writing cannot command any real power of impact without some sort of connection to journalism. At the end of the interview Kapuściński touches upon his "vision of Africa", which according to the interviewer differs from that to which one is accustomed; Kapuściński responds:

The laws of optics incorporate the phenomenon of distortion. The lens [of the camera] is responsible for selecting a slice of reality, but it is the viewer of the image who extrapolates this slice on to his own comprehensive picture, thinking that the whole world looks like that. This goes to show that in a world of total information it is possible to practice total disinformation.

“	Question: Isn’t this the reason why you are being asked whether you are a writer or a journalist? Kapuściński: The question is an anachronistic one in our day. It has long been established that we are living in an epoch of miscegenation of genres. When they ask me what it is exactly that I am writing I respond that what I am writing is a text.	”
—From an interview with Kapuściński published in Press magazine, 2006

“	The insights scattered throughout his [V. S. Naipaul's] work, particularly the travel writing, are based on intuition and a profound sense of the presence of the past in daily life, but not on thorough research (in this, Naipaul is much like his exact contemporary, Ryszard Kapuściński; a writer who also wrote about faraway places with a keen eye, and with a weakness for generalisation).	”
—Jack Sexton, "Man of the World", Quadrant, September 2008

Yet Kapuściński's position on the nature of his literary craft, staked out in ways that could be described as indirect and allusive and pres­ent­ed in publications that could be described as recondite, was largely unknown to the general public, who continued to regard him to the end as nothing more and nothing less than a reporter in the conventional sense, one reporting fascinating stories from an exotic and some­times incomprehensibly alien — but none the less really existing world. In this popular vein, Claus Christian Malzahn (b. 1963) described him, incautiously, in an obituary published in Der Spiegel, as "one of the most credible journalists the world has ever seen". Never­the­less, on this count alone (racism and espionage activities apart), charges of untruthfulness as a key feature of his "magic jour­nal­ism" framed by pundits during his lifetime and after his death, literary scholars, professional reviewers and biographers who should all have known better, do not seem entirely justified. For, if he had broken an unspoken pact with his readers, who are entitled to "know what kind of text they are reading" (so Domosławski; see section "Controversial biography", below), this was due more to his audience's wilful ignorance of his stance than to his dissembling of it. As far back as 1987, in an interview with Bill Buford published in the British magazine Granta, Kapuściński made a clean breast of it, confessing that "New Journalism was the beginning, in liquidating the border between fact and fiction. (...) I think we have gone beyond all that... [My genre] is not a New Journalism, but a New Literature" altogether: "I feel sometimes that I am working in a completely new field of literature, in an area that is both unoccupied and unexplored". In the plain words of Robert Looby, professor in the University of Lublin, "He himself often repeated that he was a writer more than a reporter" — a fact not lost on experts in Polish literature, such as Francesco M. Cataluccio (b. 1955), the Italian writer who has led the Bruno Mondadori and the Bollati Boringhieri publishing houses in Italy, and other astute observers of the literary scene, such as Jason Cowley (b. 1966), the editor of the New Statesman, or Timothy Garton Ash (b. 1955), who wrote in 2002 that it was enough to open a Kapuściński book at random to conclude that the frontier between the literature of fact and the literature of fiction was both open and unmarked. Marcel Cornis-Pope (b. 1946), professor in the Virginia Commonwealth University, makes an extremely interesting observation with regard to the dissociation of reality in writers whose careers evolved in totalitarian environments dominated by doublespeak, and on their sublimating such an unnatural situation into a literary genre that "[problematises] both fact and fiction", a characteristic observable not only in Kapuściński's work but also in the work of the Romanian writer Mircea Nedelciu (1950–1999) and that of the Slovene Miško Kranjec (1908–1983). But even the casual reader of average intelligence should have been able to tell what Kapuściński's texts were all about: "A properly doctored photograph is dishonest but one where the artifice is visible — where the Russian president’s head is superimposed onto a bear, for instance — cannot be fairly accused of deception".

“	Question: You sometimes say that a reporter vouches for the veracity of his texts with his own person. What is to be said then when he happens to mix up the facts or deliberately to alter them? Kapuściński: I do not produce fiction. If I were to write fiction I would be able to avoid the taxing exertions of a reporter. (...) I cannot invent anything by myself. I have to go into the field.	”
—From an interview with Kapuściński published in Press magazine, 2006

Among the people who are able to read Kapuściński in the original, Andrzej Stasiuk (b. 1960), one of the most prominent contemporary Polish writers (not an uncritical defender of Kapuściński), observes in connection with what has now come to be known as The Kapu­ściń­ski Affair: "All writing — apart from stenography and police dossiers — breaches, and is bound to breach, the borderlines of fiction. I have always read Kapuściński's books as one reads fiction. For the way the sentences are turned out, for the language, for the narrative beauty. I have never sought 'truth' in them. Searching for objective truth in literature is a mark of naïveté." Many other writers familiar with Kapuściński from translations only take him as a belletrist par excellence, Daniel Alarcón, the Peruvian-American novelist (b. 1977), citing him as a formative influence together with Dostoyevsky. The French writer, Jean Lacouture (b. 1921), who began his literary career in journalism, observes that a journalist has the right to his own subjective interpretation of facts but not to their outright manufacture, and consequently his admiration for Kapuściński will now have to be tempered: "Still, a lie can be a literary masterpiece: Chateaubriand, in his Voyage en Amérique [a sequel to his exotic novel Les Natchez written as a result of his journey to North America undertaken in 1791], describes Washington, a city he had never visited. But how magnificently he does it!" By the same token, Kapuściński also, faced with animadversions concerning the credibility of his reportage, "continues to stand his ground as a writer". And Robert Oakeshott, an old Africa hand capable of seeing through the factual inaccuracies in Kapuściński's narratives — as for example in his claim, made in The Shadow of the Sun, that John Okello had seized power in Zanzibar within three hours of the territory's transfer from British into Arab hands, when in fact he did it in a time frame of thirty-four days — does not find himself thereby prevented from appreciating the personal insights on Africa offered by Kapuściński, who "is at his best when describing the commonplaces of African experience as he observed them" (over a quarter of Oakeshott's article in The Spectator is taken up with illustrative quotations). Similarly, the legendary American journalist and reportage-writer, Richard Bernstein (b. 1944), saw value in the "penetrating intelligence" of Kapuściński's vision and in his "crystallised descriptive" style of writing. No less an authority on the Rwandan conflict than Lord Deedes (1913–2007), who had witnessed it first-hand, could say of Kapuściński that what he "writes about Africa is authoritative as well as attractive. His account of how the Hutus and the Tutsis were drawn into that dark night of genocide in Rwanda is the most enlightening I have read anywhere" — even while, at the same time, proclaiming that it was Kapuściński who had "transformed jour­nal­ism into literature in his writings about Africa". Professor Philip Melling of Swansea University concurs with this opinion, citing Kapuściński as an authority on the Rwandan conflict.

“	Already in the 1960s the Americans introduced the concept of New Journalism, and perhaps this term — according to the way it was being defined by them — lies closest to my writing.	”
—Ryszard Kapuściński, Autoportret reportera, 2003

In general, much of the censure meted out to Kapuściński on the grounds of factual inaccuracy and distortion in his reportage (a charge which underpins above all the strictures of John Ryle) is uncannily rem­i­nis­cent of the criticism directed in 1965 at Tom Wolfe (b. 1931), Kapuściński's contemporary, and at his brand of New Journalism, by Dwight Macdonald (1906–1982), who coined (disparagingly) the term "para­jour­nal­ism" to define Tom Wolfe's style of reportage (much the same way in which Adam Hochschild (b. 1942) coined the term "magic journalism" to define Kapuściński's): "Parajournalism seems to be journalism — 'the collection and dissemination of current news' — but the appearance is deceptive. It is a bastard form, having it both ways, exploiting the factual authority of journalism and the atmospheric licence of fiction. Entertainment rather than information is the aim of its producers, and the hope of its consumers": it is a genre "in which rational forms are used to express delusions". Kapuściński anticipated virtually every word in this critique, rejoining that market demand for what he dubbed reportage d'auteur (reportaż autorski) — where, in his words, the subject matter is filtered through the author's personality and chiselled into his shape — is its sole vindication and raison d'être. For the same reason (the lack of market demand) the traditional forms of reportage have already seen their demise. But Dwight Macdonald's critique of Tom Wolfe was separately, and diversely, rebutted thirty years after it was published, in 1995, by David Remnick (b. 1958), who wrote instead: "A few months later, [William] Shawn made mush of Wolfe and Macdonald both, publishing virtually every word of what remains a classic of nonfiction writing, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood". Likewise, the literary problematics of the Kapuściński affair exhibit kinship with the questions surrounding the concept of "non-fiction novel" and "faction writing" (sic). The term reportaż antymedialny ("anti-media reportage"), in the sense parallel on a certain level with that of "magic journalism", has been coined in Poland by the academic and literary critic, Zbigniew Bauer (b. 1952), to fit the bill of the critique of Kapuściński's work.

“	Question: How do you feel when a reader points out a factual error in your writing? Kapuściński: A clarification doesn’t bother me. Question: Will you have it corrected in subsequent editions? Kapuściński: The subsequent editions will be exactly the same.	”
—From an interview with Kapuściński published in Press magazine, 2006

“	When I sit down to write I never know what I shall write, before me there is only a blank sheet... Writing is a happening. That is one of its values... I do not deliberate whether the outcome should be a short story [opowiadanie], an essay, or a piece of reportage.	”
—Ryszard Kapuściński, Autoportret reportera, 2003

Kapuściński himself showed on occasion a remarkable lack of appreciation for the issues involved in determining his style of writing, the nature of his product. When queried on the subject by the journalist Andrzej Skworz (b. 1963) during a 2006 interview, Kapuściński inconsistently and illogically insisted that his genre was in fact "reportage" just because the sheer amount of effort that went into the production of his books exceeded that customarily expended on their works by novelists, "who are in a comfortable situation" (being able to "stay at home and write"). "Reportage books are often unjustly treated as novels", he complained: what people do not understand is that a work of reportage "demands of its author an enormous effort, sacrifice, and risk-taking". What differentiated his works from "novels" was, on his telling, not the intrinsic nature of the end-prod­uct of a creative process, but the external factors determining the nature of the creative process itself. It was, in the end, his own confusion about what his project was all about, with protestations of accuracy and reliability going hand in hand with avowals of rejection of all principles of accuracy and reliability, that proved Kapuściński's undoing. As the author Michela Wrong (b. 1961) puts it, "Kapuściński would have helped his own case if he had been more consistent, and modest, about what he offered. If you present your work as 'magical journalism', of the García Márquez genre, best not simultaneously lecture a younger generation of journalists, as he did, on their imprecision. And if your prime years in the field were largely confined to the Cold War, best not present yourself as an eternal sage on the subject."

Convergences with the gawęda szlachecka genre

Nevertheless, it has been resolved for Kapuściński that he could not have in any case violated the unspoken rules of reportage because he never practised the genre at all. The category within which his writings fall is instead that of gawęda szlachecka (as distinct from the gawęda pure and simple), a traditional Polish anecdotal narrative exercised throughout the literary history of the 17th to the 19th centuries by segments of lower nobility, more or less exemplified by the writings of Henryk Rzewuski (1791–1866; e.g. the Pamiątki Soplicy cy­cle) and Zygmunt Kaczkowski (1825–1896; e.g. the Ostatni z Nieczujów cy­cle) and some­times referred to by the irreverent as the art of elegant mendacity. It is often fabulistically associated with the (real) personages of the Princes Panie Kochanku and Mikołaj Bazyli Potocki as its (fictional) subjects. Just as the gawęda szlachecka depended upon historical personages, facts, and situations as raw material for its literary confabulations (a device by means of which it conveyed broader truths about the national condition, character, and fate), so also Kapuściński depended upon field-work to gather material for his. The analysis made by the Argentine sociologist, Roberto Herrscher (b. 1962), of the ways in which Kapuściński draws his characters, especially in his eschewing of the analysis of the individual motivations lying behind "their ways of seeing, feeling, and acting", is broadly consistent with the techniques of the gawęda szlachecka. Other features of the gawęda szlachecka, such as a sharp eye for a detail fraught with a wider significance to the story and rapid shifts in focus to reveal a broader panorama with a great economy of words, easily discernible for example in Kaczkowski's Bitwa o chorążankę ("The Battle for the Daughter of the Standard-bearer"; 1851; a gawęda szlachecka counted among his masterpieces), are uncannily reminiscent of Kapuściński's own methods of narration. Kapuściński prided himself on his studies of old Polish literature in preparation for couching the style of his books, even if he did not reveal the real paradigms that stood him in good stead as his literary models. Already his early article about Nowa Huta, written at 23 and crucially pivotal to his entire career, had archaising elements (e.g. the antiphonal refrains, "Take ye a closer look at Nowa Huta, a closer one!"), unusual in newspaper journalism but pointing to the models of preference that an inexperienced writer chose to reach to for help. And, as pointed out by the writer, Bohdan Urbankowski (b. 1943), of the two previously named prac­ti­tion­ers of the gawęda szlachecka — both regarded in their day as the most eminent representatives of Polish literature — Kaczkowski was also a spy.

But then, as noted by the Scottish writer, Iain Bamforth (b. 1959), in the context of a review of a Kapuściński book, Herodotus himself, "although the 'father of history', was also accused in his day of being a terrible fibber."

Literary prizes and honours

“	In Kapuściński, the personal search for authenticity is always linked to his relationship to those around him. In his writings, he always seeks the universal in the particular, a trait that John Merrill’s ideological opposite in U.S. academic circles, University of Illinois media scholar Clifford G. Christians, would applaud. Truth, Christians has written, is “reason radiated by love”, thus individual authenticity must be contingent on links to the other, the “I” always defined by its relationship to “Thou”.	”
—Joseph B. Atkins and Bernard Nežmah, “Ryszard Kapuściński: The Empathetic Existentialist”, 2002

Over the years, particularly since 1983 when The Emperor was named Book of the Year by The Sunday Times of London, Kapuściński was the laureate of many international literary prizes that brought recognition to his creative oeuvre: these included, for example, the biennial Hanseatic Goethe Prize awarded by the Hamburg-based foundation, the Alfred Toepfer Stiftung, which he received in 1999; or the Italian Elsa Morante Prize (Premio Elsa Morante, Sezione Culture D’Europa) in 2005, for his Travels with Herodotus (the new category of the Premio Elsa Morante, called "Cultures of Europe", in effect a separate prize awarded by the same jury, having apparently been created specially for him). In 2001 Kapuściński received the literary Prix Tropiques of the French Development Agency for his book The Shadow of the Sun, published in France under the title Ébène: Aventures africaines, which had a year earlier been named the best book of the year by the French literary monthly, Lire; the book also won the Italian literary award, Feudo Di Maida Prize (in full, Premio Letterario Inter­na­zio­na­le Feudo Di Maida), for the year 2000. That same year (2000) Kapuściński was honoured with the prestigious Premio Inter­na­zio­na­le Viareggio-Versilia, as well as having received the Creola Prize (Premio Creola) in Bologna (awarded for travel books and facilitation of inter­cultural en­coun­ters), and the "Premio Letterario 'Della Resistenza'" of the Piedmontese city of Omegna (Premio Omegna). In 2003 Kapuściński received the (now defunct) Premio Grinzane Cavour per la Lettura in Turin; shared the Prince of Asturias Award (in the category "Communications and Humanities") with the Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez; and was awarded the Kreisky Prize (Bruno-Kreisky-Preis für das politische Buch) for the entirety of his work ("Sonderpreis für das publizistische Gesamt­werk"; the award ceremony having taken place in Vienna in May of the following year). As the doyen of literary reportage, he was the keynote speaker at the inaugural ceremony, held in Berlin in October 2003, for the Lettre Ulysses Awards for the Art of Reportage, although he apparently never attained the distinction of being the recipient of the prize himself. None the less, he was celebrated in his day by other practitioners of the genre, the acclaimed Italian reportage-writer, Tiziano Terzani, and Gabriel García Márquez having both accorded him the title "Maestro". In 2005 the Italian edition of Kapuściński's poems (which appeared in print the previous year as Taccuino d'appunti in the translation of Silvano De Fanti) won the state-funded Naples Prize (Premio Napoli). To complete the round-up of Italian prizes, the next year Kapuściński was awarded a special category of the Ilaria Alpi Prize for the entirety of his career (Premio Ilaria Alpi alla carriera), one of the best-known of Italian journalistic awards, named for an Italian investigative reporter murdered in Somalia in 1994 (although the scope of the prize is limited to TV journalism, special categories of prizes for which he would not otherwise qualify — as also for example in the case of the Elsa Morante Prize — have been created for Kapuściński). In June 2005 Kapuściński was invested with an honorary doctorate by the private Ramon Llull University of Barcelona, Spain; and in May 2006, just eight months before his death, he received a similar degree from the University of Udine in Italy, a country where he continues to have many admirers and supporters in the ongoing posthumous controversies.

Criticism of journalistic standards and of collaboration with communist secret service

Specific elements of Kapuściński's writings have been questioned (see section "Critiques", above).

Barely three months after Kapuściński's death, in its issue of May 20, 2007, the Polish edition of Newsweek magazine revealed that Kapuściński worked for the Communist Polish secret service from 1965 to 1972 or 1977, and that he had reported on several of his colleagues.

“	Question: Polish journalists are forced to contend with history on learning that some of their colleagues have collaborated with the Służba Bezpieczeństwa [Communist secret service]. Does a reporter’s evil past automatically vitiate good journalism? Kapuściński: Not necessarily. In literature there are many superb writers laden with such an inglorious record.	”
—From an interview with Kapuściński published in Press magazine, 2006

Parallels with the case of Zygmunt Kaczkowski

The case of Kapuściński has been assessed against that of another Polish writer, Zygmunt Kaczkowski (1825–1896), one of the "absent greats" of Polish literature, an able writer across several genres, includ­ing (but not limited to) the ga­wę­da szlachecka, a category to which the works of Kapuściński have also been ascribed. One of the most important works of Kaczkowski was Olbrachtowi rycerze ("Olbracht and the Knights"; Paris, 1889), a historical novel in three volumes written, it is said, in response to the famous Trilogy of the Nobel Prize winner, Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846–1916), a writer with whom in his day he was esteemed as an equal. (Although published in his mature period, Olbrachtowi rycerze was likely written when Kaczkowski was in his twenties.) If Kapuściński was a precocious genius, so also was Kaczkowski, who in his early teens penned a dissertation on Cicero in Latin, his first literary work, and when aged about 20 wrote a drama in five acts, in German, a work that was read with appreciation by the academic community of Lwów where he studied. If Kapuściński was a published poet in his youth, so also was Kaczkowski, whose patriotic verses evince preoccupation with the same subject matter that exercised Kapuściński. If Kapuściński was, in his own words quoted above, "an activist at the time [of his youth]... doing the right thing..." in the cause of his chosen political destiny, so also was Kaczkowski who, while still a 13-year-old child was so permeated with revolutionary fever for the independence of Poland that his father was obliged to pull him out of school and place him under the supervision of relatives in a different town for his own good, a measure which didn't prevent him from being sentenced to death by the Austrians for revolutionary activity at the age of 22. If Kapuściński, from the beginning, cultivated connections at the highest echelons of power in the Communist Poland with an eye to aiding his career, so also Kaczkowski sought out early on well-positioned friends in Vienna's imperial circles — the centre of power in his day — whose influence he might find useful later in life. If Kapuściński exaggerated and made false claims of acquaintance with famous people, so also did Kaczkowski, who was wont to write articles reviewing the art scenes of Paris and Berlin before he ever visited those places, dropping the names of famous stage actresses whom he supposedly admired there. If Kapuściński on occasion translated texts (like the aforementioned Bolivian diary of Che Guevara) to which he felt ideologically attuned, so also did Kaczkowski, who translated the feminist play, the Adrienne Lecouvreur by Legouvé and Scribe, which was staged in his version just two years after its Paris premiere, with the famous actress, Aniela Aszpergerowa (the great-grandmother of John Gielgud), in the leading role. If Kapuściński the writer, as noted above, was "at his best when describing the commonplaces of African experience as he observed them", so also Kaczkowski's strengths lay in presenting "loosely ordered images" of the life in the Terra Sanociensis that pulsated with intensity and plastic vividness. (Where Kapuściński — whose early works were ignored — differed from Kaczkowski was in the quality and volume of literary output, Kaczkowski's remarkable faithfulness to the regional, detailed, ungeneralised realities of the szlachta whose life he depicted having been a merit noticed and praised by informed readers, one that made him sensationally sought-after as a publicist at an early age and nationally famous as the author of some fifty books before he reached the age of 32.) Both writers, throughout their lives, maintained extensive and wide-ranging ties to newspapers and journalism (in Kaczkowski's case, not only as a contributor but, for a brief period of several months, also as the editor-in-chief of a Lwów daily). Neither man was a champion of multiparty democracy, Kapuściński as a committed communist for the better part of his life, Kaczkowski as a right-winger to the bone (for whom democracy was "sedition-mongering against the glory of mankind in the interests of partisanship"). Even their love-lives seem to have run a parallel course, the names of their respective mistresses and the concurrent multiplicity of their liaisons having been the talk of the towns where they lived, Warsaw in Kapuściński's case, Lwów in Kaczkowski's. Kaczkowski was also a secret agent working for years on end in the 1860s for the Imperial Austria, one of the Par­ti­tion­ing Powers. His cover was blown in December 1863 when a partly encrypted diplomatic cable (sc. letter) sent from Lwów to the central government in Vienna by Count Mensdorff-Pouilly, the Austrian steward of Galicia, was intercepted at the Lwów post-office and deciphered by the Polish underground, supposedly revealing the surname "Kaczkowski" (encoded with a monoalphabetic substitution cipher, without the first name being indicated) in the context of certain payments to be made to a person of that name. Although ready to defend himself, Kaczkowski was put on trial in absentia by the provincial Lwów organs of the insurrectionist Provisional National Government of Poland — his judges unwilling to confront him face to face and thereby to reveal their identities — in seeming violation of the principle audi alteram partem of natural justice. By this authority, and in this way, he was declared guilty of espionage and sentenced to banishment from all Polish lands ("on pain of death") in January 1864, at the age of 38. Kaczkowski complied and left Polish territory within four days, as commanded by the writ of the sentence, but he never ceased — to his last day — consistently to maintain his innocence, vigorously denying the charges levelled against him in various forums, public and private — including through the publication of a book in which he complained of judicial victimisation, observing that the degree of harm caused by defamation was "exponentially proportional to the degree of fame originally enjoyed by the victim". Indeed, the verdict against him was itself very promptly rescinded on appeal by the highest organs of the (underground) national government in Warsaw, and although a review of the case never took place, he lived out his days, chiefly in Paris, a man exonerated by default. After his death, on his tombstone at the Champeaux cemetery in Montmorency — a place where once reposed the remains of Adam Mickiewicz and Delfina Potocka — there were inscribed, in Polish and in French, the words: "A combattu toute sa vie par la plume pour la cause de sa Patrie" (All his life fought with his pen for his Fatherland). However, after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in the following century, during the interbellum period when the secret archives of the state by then no longer in existence were finally opened to researchers, his role as a secret agent for the Austrians was indeed unequivocally demonstrated by the documents in his dossier examined by the historian, Eugeniusz Barwiński (1874–1947), the results of whose investigations were published in book form in 1920. There is a consensus of opinion that this accomplished writer is today a forgotten figure of Polish literature, virtually erased from national consciousness (one of the "absent greats" — wielcy nieobecni), on account of the non-literary aspects of his biography.

In an article in Slate Magazine, writer Jack Shafer decried the general belief that Kapuściński was a genius, calling him a fabulist who did not adhere to the basic rules of journalism. As part of his criticism, Shafer cited a compendium of Kapuściński's misinformation and exaggeration by the anthropology professor, John Ryle. His condemnation was rebutted by Meghan O'Rourke in Slate five days later; O'Rourke contended that Kapuściński's invention of petty details to reveal a larger truth did not make him a bad journalist.

Much more attention has been drawn recently to numerous exaggerations or half-truths by Kapuściński. For example, he apparently claimed to have met Che Guevara at a time when Che was already dead. In Autoportret reportera ("A Reporter's Self-portrait"; 2003), his collection of autobiographical reminiscences published during the mature period of his latter years, Kapuściński claims to have "known personally" the legendary Polish littérateur and reportage-writer Ksawery Pruszyński, the supreme paragon for many a member of the "reportage" school, although Pruszyński died in Germany when Kapuściński was 18 (and by his own admission was at the time more interested in football than in literature), having spent most of the last eleven years of his life abroad. (A similar claim of personal connection Kapuściński made ibidem with respect to Melchior Wańkowicz appears more plausible.) There was an obvious persistent need in Kapuściński to associate his person in the public eye with the (intellectually) rich and famous, an integral part of his project of constructing what Francesco M. Cataluccio called a self-aggrandising "legend about his own person", an observation shared by others, e.g. the literary critic and poet, Piotr Bratkowski (b. 1955). This megalomania reaches its apogee, according to the American author, Andrew Rice (b. 1975), in his Travels with Herodotus where Kapuściński employs the grandiose device of (mis)appropriating the authority of the classical Greek historian of the book's title in order to set forth a veiled apologia for his own failings as a reporter. On the other hand, despite the fact that in Autoportret reportera he cites a plethora of other writers in his field, some so obscure as to be familiar only to a specialist, all of whom he recognises for their achievement, nowhere in the book does he mention the name of the illustrious reportage-writer, Maria Sten (1917–2007), the author of Trzy barwy Meksyku ("Three Colours of Mexico"; 1961), Dialog z Coatlicue ("A Dialogue with the Mother of Gods"; 1963), De Varsovia a Oaxaca: impresiones del viaje ("From Warsaw to Oaxaca: Impressions from a Journey"; 1974) and many other works, although records exist testifying to their personal acquaintance. There are special, unedifying reasons for this omission (see below, "Controversial biography").

Although he was not the sole model for the role, Kapuściński was given an unflattering portrayal as the main character in Andrzej Wajda's little-known 1978 film Without Anaesthesia, the story of a popular journalist named Jerzy Michałowski who falls victim to the very choices he had freely made in his life (screened at the 1979 Cannes Festival and acclaimed for the performance of the leading actors).

Assessment by posterity

In the final analysis, the general assessment of Kapuściński as a journalist and a person by the public opinion in his native land tends to be negative (see below, esp. the last paragraph of this section): apart from questions attending upon the veracity of his reports from the field which were never presented as anything other than journalism, the questions concerning his collaboration with the secret services, which bear on his foreign travels as having been undertaken in the capacity of the intelligence officer in the service of communist (Polish and by extension Soviet) intelligence apparatus – those questions tend to overshadow whatever literary merit there may lie in his prose. It has been asserted by experts that without his collaboration with Communist intelligence none of his most important books could have possibly come into existence. Some, like the Polish Senator Władysław Sidorowicz (b. 1945), have singled out Kapuściński's role in Angola (see above) for special condemnation, on account of the egregiousness of the perversion of journalistic principles evident in his reporting from the conflict region in question.

In Poland Kapuściński has his defenders, who can roughly be divided into two camps: first, those who sympathise with Kapuściński on account of their own pricks of conscience over their past, and second, those who, like Adam Michnik (b. 1946), view Kapuściński's entire oeuvre nationalistically as both cultural patrimony and a bonum utile that is the chief guarantor of "Polish presence at the heights of contemporary world literature" — and who consequently regard its creator as untouchable by raison d'état. (Interestingly enough, precisely the same argument had been used previously in the case of the aforementioned writer, Zygmunt Kaczkowski (1825–1896), convicted in 1864 of espionage by an underground court, in response to which fact the voice was heard of the eminent jurist and professor in Lwów University, Maurycy Kabat (1814–1890), calling for leniency for Kaczkowski on the grounds of his being a "literary luminary of the nation".) Moreover, in the capitalist society of present-day Poland, the work of Ryszard Kapu­ściń­ski has spawned a whole new business benefiting a lot of people (loosely associated with what Artur Domosławski referred to by the terms Kapumania and Kapumafia), for whom the preservation of the myth of the master is a vested interest. Bronisław Wildstein (b. 1952), a well-known right-leaning journalist and commentator of the Polish media, argued persuasively that overlooking the ethical transgressions and methodical wrongdoing of prominent individuals like Kapuściński ("the saints of the literary salons") on account of their achievement in other areas would amount to falsification of history. Wildstein explains:

Let's call a spade a spade: the guy agreed to commit abominations against others in return for the right to write books. (...) I have known very many talented people who couldn't pursue such a career precisely because they recoiled from striking such a deal: they did not want to harm others in order to achieve personal self-realisation. That is why Kapuściński is not justified by the nature of the epoch in which he lived. He made a choice. But no one held a knife to his neck. He did it for the benefit of his own career.

“	All journalism is a kind of spycraft, which is one reason intelligence agencies everywhere try to recruit foreign correspondents. And in some ways, Kapuściński — or at least the identity he created in his books — resembles a character from a pulp paperback.	”
—Andrew Rice, "The Passenger", The Nation, 1 October 2007

The opinion that the choices Kapuściński had made are attributable to his own free will is shared by others, among them the Cra­cow Uni­ver­si­ty aca­demic and the Institute of National Remembrance's historian, Antoni Dudek (b. 1966), who pointedly adds that Kapuściński's active collaboration with the Communist régime was not necessarily indispensable to the furtherance of his career: in documented cases of suc­cess­ful resistance mounted against attempts of recruitment into espionage, the punishment was only a temporary foreign-travel ban (in most cases lasting just one year or so), which would not have harmed Kapuściński mortally either as a journalist or as a writer. The acclaimed journalist and writer, Jacek Żakowski (b. 1957), stated publicly that he had repulsed attempts to recruit him by the Communist secret services (attempts which involved blackmail) without any adverse consequences whatever. The poet and philosopher and a pro­lif­ic author, Bohdan Urbankowski (b. 1943), concurs with these views: it is simply not true, he writes, that all successful writers have at the time compromised themselves by collaboration; what is certain is that those, like Kapuściński, who did, in fact, do so had chosen "to tread over the bodies of those more honest than they, who were frequently also more talented". Similarly, according to the politician and publicist, Janusz Korwin-Mikke (b. 1942), Kapuściński could rise to prominence as a reporter because the field had been cleared for him of virtually all competition during the Communist period. While he could have practised his métier unimpeded in any case, subsidised travels around the world would have been out of the question for Kapuściński without some form of collaboration, according to the poet and essayist, Tomasz Jastrun (b. 1950), the son of Mieczysław Jastrun. Jastrun also notes the suspicions that were aroused in the post-independence period by Kapuściński's scrupulous avoidance of the subject of lustration, the practice of vetting for past dealings with the totalitarian régime. Leszek Żebrowski, another prominent Polish historian (specialising in the military history of the NSZ), observed that Kapuściński never came to terms with any aspect of his Communist past, either with respect to his support for Stalinism and the Communist Party, or with respect to his collaboration with secret services: his silence lasted not only until the collapse of Communism in Poland in 1989 (when it could have been explained circumstantially), but inexplicably continued for the nearly two decades of his life that followed that event. To make matters more enigmatic, the president of the Instytut Pamięci Narodowej or IPN, Janusz Kurtyka (1960–2010) who died in the infamous crash of the pres­i­den­tial airplane and who had access to the complete set of unredacted documents in Kapuściński's dossier that once reposed in the archives of the Communist secret service, made the point, which raises more questions than it answers, that Kapuściński's collaboration with the Communist intelligence, bad as it was, was only "one aspect" of the biography of a man who was multifariously entangled in the structures of the Communist State on many levels and in many ways. As Bratkowski paints him, Kapuściński, a man rather unskilled in solving practical problems of life, had mastered to a remarkable degree the art of navigating the labyrinths of Communist power, acquiring — and abandoning without regret — connections at the highest levels as it suited him. Bratkowski takes this a step further, however, drawing a parallel between Kapuściński's Weltanschauung and that of Jacek Kuroń (1934–2004), also at one point a Party member but a man of a much cleaner biography overall; as well as sharing Kuroń's world view, Kapuściński could have shared with him his chosen path of life during the 1960s: he would have thereby conquered a higher moral ground for himself while depriving the rest of "us of a few outstanding books" to read. The dilemma is resolved by Andrzej Stasiuk (b. 1960), a major figure in contemporary Polish literature who decreed that Kapuściński has now forfeited his fame.

Controversial biography

On March 3, 2010, a critical biography of Kapuściński was published in Poland: Kapuściński Non-Fiction, written by Artur Domosławski (b. 1967), a Polish journalist and a personal friend of the subject. Kapuściński's widow, Alicja Kapuścińska (b. 1933), had unsuccessfully sought an injunction against publication of the biography, claiming defamation and invasion of privacy. In particular, the biography reports on Kapuściński's alleged extramarital affairs and on his strained relationship with his daughter. The Foreign Service of the Polish National Radio (Polskie Radio dla Zagranicy) reported in February 2010 that "Domoslawski also addresses Kapuscinski’s alleged cooperation with Soviet intelligence, based on information from the Institute of National Remembrance" (a governmental body, with broad police powers, created in 1999 for the purpose of documenting and prosecuting crimes committed by the Nazi and the Communist régimes in Poland).

As a secret agent Kapuściński operated under the code-names of "Poeta" and "Vera Cruz". His intelligence activities, it transpires, were not all innocuous and included reports on and denunciations of private individuals, most notoriously in the case of the Polish émigré intellectual, Maria Sten (1917–2007), sometime professor in the National Autonomous University of Mexico, a Sorbonne-educated expert in the cultures of the pre-Columbian Americas and a distinguished reportage-writer in her own right, on whom Kapuściński spied in Mexico in 1969 (this being an instance of wrongdoing on Kapuściński's part which even Kapuściński's supporters, such as the writer, Tomasz Łubieński (b. 1938), deem "catastrophic" to his reputation). The dispatches he sent to his spymasters (at least in Maria Sten’s case) read as if taken straight from the script of the best James Bond film, except for the unsavoury “reverse translations” Kapuściński sycophantically appends for the benefit of his handlers – translations from the normal speech recorded of Maria Sten into the version of Orwellian doublespeak invented by the Soviet Block during the anti-Jewish purges of the 1960s – as if anxious that, without such annotations of his own, Communist operatives might not fully understand ordinary language expressed in the direct quotations he adduces and might require pointers to obfuscatory jargon for clarity — this also to highlight his own credentials (political as well as linguistic). It is in such small, parenthetical detail of his personal authorship testifying to his mental alignment with the ideological essence of an evil régime that Kapuściński's moral culpability comes into full view, producing what Tomasz Łubieński called "a disastrous impression" (fatalne wrażenie). Kapuściński derived financial benefits from such activities. Although in his intelligence agency's (the Służba Bezpieczeństwa's) final assessment of his multiple years of collaboration his overall contribution was characterized as without substantive value, his attitude to his espionage assignments was at the same time summed up as having been "brimming with great eagerness" (wykazywał dużo chęci).

It is unclear why the IPN dossier on Kapuściński had not been made public earlier, during the eight years of the IPN's existence in Kapuściński's lifetime, and this circumstance has been criticised both by Kapuściński's supporters and by his detractors: Kapuściński's supporters claim that this deprived him of the opportunity to answer the charges personally and possibly to refute them; while his detractors point out that it unfairly spared him the embarrassment of the lustration procedures and possible prosecution. It may also have deprived him of the opportunity to offer an apology to Maria Sten, who died on 17 January 2007 in Mexico City, six days before Kapuściński died in Warsaw. For it is extremely difficult to see how Kapuściński's intelligence activities could possibly be defended: indeed, his own widow said more recently that when Kapuściński had learned of his name's figuring on Wildstein's List, which did come to light during his life — and which flagged the existence of the IPN dossier without revealing its contents, he simply "shrugged his shoulders" rather than defended himself, proceeding to trivialise the significance of his dealings with the SB rather than to impugn the authenticity of the report. There are indications instead that Kapuściński spent the last period of his life in mortal fear of being exposed. Domosławski reports that in his personal contacts with Kapuściński he discerned in him a growing sense of impending doom gradually increasing in intensity since 2005 onwards. (There has been speculation in the Polish press that it was this fear that ultimately killed Kapuściński, who died of heart attack at the age of 74. Moreover, the journalist and novelist, Mariusz Cieślik (b. 1971), writing in the Polish edition of Newsweek magazine, reported that in addition to the dossier awaiting Kapuściński at the IPN, there was another, in Moscow.) The distortions and inaccuracies of Kapuściński's "literary reportage" have been excused by being tagged with the label of "magic journalism"; his intelligence reports on the other hand are so precise, accurate, and exact, and deal with the lives of people so real and well-identified, that it would be impossible to write them off as "magic espionage".

“	Question: Whence the title Kapuściński Non-Fiction? Artur Domosławski: Kapuściński produced in his life two types of works. One category comprises works of reportage that have become great literature treating about mechanisms of power, of revolution, and about the excluded. The second type is a story of his own self, which he had been constructing with the help of facts and partly of legends.	”
—From an interview with Domosławski published in Polityka, 2010

The biography is considered controversial by Polish standards because its warts-and-all treatment, more characteristic of the contemporary Anglo-Saxon approach to biography, marks a departure from the typical Polish approach to biography as quasi-hagiography. As The Guardian put it, "Four previous biographies painted him in an entirely flattering light." Reportedly, Alicja Kapuścińska also attempted to block publication of any translations of the new biography by threatening to withdraw rights to publish Kapuściński's works from foreign publishers who consider publishing Domosławski's book. In a written statement issued to the press through her counsel on 2 March 2010, however, Kapuścińska denied having made any such threats against foreign publishers. (She has also professed to have never read the book.) Nevertheless, the Zurich literary agency, Liepman AG, which represents the estate of Ryszard Kapuściński (shared by the widow and her daughter), has since clarified that while there has been no "pressure" as such exerted on foreign publishers, "Liepman AG... was authorised to communicate the Estate's disapproval of this biography as well as the Estate's intent to take legal action against it". Upon being questioned, sharply, in a subsequent interview, Kapuścińska admitted that there have been enquiries, address­ed to the literary agency, from "at least ten leading international publishers of Kapuściński's works" concerning Domosławski's biography, but their interest in acquiring the title for their catalogues flagged upon being told that the book is "impossible to rec­om­mend". She has at the same time gone so far as to term the book "an act of patricide" on Domosławski's part. (Kapuścińska would have been accompanying her husband in Mexico when the worst of his espionage excesses, that against Maria Sten, was committed in March 1969.) Although the 600-page work has met with independent criticism (the Dublin Review of Books noted that "Domosławski... has a habit of posing questions when the reader might prefer answers", and of lapsing "into a nasty, insinuating tone in places" where he is short on facts), it did become a bestseller, selling 45,000 copies through advance orders before the official release date, and subsequently continuing at the top of the bestseller lists; a Spanish edition was published in November 2010 (see below, "Secondary sources"); Italian, French, British and US editions, inter alia, are in preparation (in all cases, apparently, involving publishers without links to Kapuściński's titles). The book, dubbed the transkapuścińskian journey by the journalist Roman Kurkiewicz (b. 1962), was commended for its breaking of various types of taboos, including the professional ones obtaining among journalists, and in the words of the critic and poet, Piotr Bratkowski (b. 1955), it spelled the definitive end of "a certain fairytale".

The author of the biography, Artur Domosławski, has meanwhile been honoured for Kapuściński Non-Fiction, his fifth published book, with the Grand Press prize, the most prestigious journalistic award in Poland, and the corresponding title "Journalist of the Year 2010", the citation mentioning specifically "the questions asked [by the book]... and the uncompromising search for truth in answering them".

The same prize, together with the accompanying title "Journalist of the Century", had been accorded eleven years earlier, in 1999, to Ryszard Kapuściński.

Selected bibliography

Works available in English

• Another Day of Life (Jeszcze dzień życia) (1976)
• The Soccer War (Wojna futbolowa) (1978)
• The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat (Cesarz) (1978)
• Shah of Shahs (Szachinszach) (1982)
• Imperium (Imperium) (1993)
• The Shadow of the Sun (Heban) (2001)
• Our Responsibilities in a Multicultural World (Powinności obywatela świata wielokulturowego) (2002)
• Travels with Herodotus (Podróże z Herodotem) (2007)
• Encountering the Other: The Challenge for the Twenty-first Century — The Inaugural Lecture of the Thirty-six[th] Annual School of Polish Language and Culture at the Jagiellonian University, July 5, 2005 (Spotkanie z Innym jako wyzwanie XXI wieku: wykład z okazji otwarcia 36. Szkoły Języka i Kultury Polskiej Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego) (2005)
• Inside an Iceberg (Wewnątrz góry lodowej; extract from The Shadow of the Sun) (2007)
• I Wrote Stone: The Selected Poetry of Ryszard Kapuściński (2007)
• The Cobra’s Heart (extract from The Shadow of the Sun) (2007)
• The Other (Ten Inny) (2008) – A collection of the author's lectures.

Works currently unavailable in English

• The Polish Bush (Busz po polsku) (1962) – A collection of early essays.
• Black Stars (Czarne gwiazdy) (1963) – A book which focuses on Kwame Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba.
• The Kirghiz Dismounts (Kirgiz schodzi z konia) (1968) – Essays and articles about seven of the Caucasian and Central Asian republics of the (then) Soviet Union (some of the material subsequently incorporated in Imperium).
• If All Africa... (Gdyby cała Afryka) (1969) – A collection of essays and articles about Africa.
• Why Karl Von Spreti Died (Dlaczego zginął Karl von Spreti) (1970) – A book about Guatemala during the 1960s and 1970s, in the background of the assassination of Karl von Spreti.
• Christ With a Rifle on His Shoulder (Chrystus z karabinem na ramieniu) (1975) – A book which focuses on the partisan movements in Africa, Latin America and Middle East.
• An Invitation to Georgia (Zaproszenie do Gruzji) (1983)
• The Notebook (Notes) (1986) – First collection of the author's poetry.
• Lapidarium (1990)
• Lapidarium II (1995)
• Lapidarium III (1997)
• Lapidarium IV (2000)
• Out of Africa (2000) – The author's first photo album.
• A Cynic wouldn't Suit This Profession: Conversations about Good Journalism (Il cinico non è adatto a questo mestiere: conversazioni sul buon giornalismo) (2000) – Includes a previously unpublished dialogue with John Berger.
• Lapidarium V (2002)
• A Reporter's Self Portrait (Autoportret reportera) (2003) – A collection of interviews with and quotes by Kapuściński.
• The Laws of Nature (Prawa natury) (2006) – Second collection of the author's poetry
• I Gave a Voice to the Poor: Conversations with the Youth (Ho dato voce ai poveri: dialogo con i giovani) (2007) – A collection of interactions with Italian students.
• Kapuściński: I cannot Encompass the World (Kapuściński: nie ogarniam świata) (2007) – A collection of seven interviews with Kapuściński conducted by journalists of the Tygodnik Powszechny between 1991 and 2006.
• Lapidarium VI (2007)
• Collected Poetry (Wiersze zebrane) (2008)
• Hospital Diary (Zapiski szpitalne) (2008) – Kapuściński's last writings.

Magazine contributions in English (by issue)

• Granta 15: The Fall of Saigon
• Granta 16: Science
• Granta 20: In Trouble Again
• Granta 21: The Story-Teller
• Granta 26: Travel
• Granta 28: Birthday Special!
• Granta 33: What Went Wrong?
• Granta 48: Africa
• Granta 73: Necessary Journeys
• Granta 88: Mothers
• see also, in book form: Ryszard Kapuściński [et al.], The Best of Granta Reportage, London, Granta, 1993.

Photography

• Ryszard Kapuściński out of Africa (Ryszard Kapuściński z Afryki) (2000) – The author's first photo album.
• Ryszard Kapuściński: Fragment (2002) – Catalogue of the author's photography exhibition held at the Opus Gallery in Wrocław in May 2002.
• Out of the World (Ze świata) (2008) – A collection of the author's photographs from all over the world, with an introduction by John Updike (text in Polish).
• My Morning Walk (Spacer poranny) (2009) – A collection of the author's photographs from the Mokotów Field in Warsaw (text in English, German and Spanish, as well as Polish).

Other

• Krzysztof Masłoń, Miłość nie jest nam dana ("Love is not Our Lot"), Warsaw, Prószyński i S-ka, 2005 – Includes conversations with Kapuściński and other interlocutors.

Secondary sources

• Anders Bodegård (b. 1944) and Maria Söderberg (b. 1959), A Visit to Pinsk with Ryszard Kapuściński, tr. Frank Gabriel Perry, Enskede (Sweden), Maria Söderberg, 1999; ISBN 9163079127.
• Artur Domosławski, Kapuściński non-fiction, Warsaw, Świat Książki, 2010; 605 pp., 16 pp. of plates.
• Artur Domosławski, Kapuściński non-fiction: el hombre, el reportero y su época, tr. Francisco Javier Villaverde González and Agata Orzeszek, Barcelona, Galaxia Gutenberg/Círculo de Lectores, 2010.
• Adam Hochschild, Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels, Syracuse, N.Y., Syracuse University Press, 1997 ("Magic Journalism," pp. 241–250).

See also

• Travel writing
• Foreign correspondent
• Kazimierz Nowak
• V. S. Naipaul
• Herodotus
• Tiziano Terzani
• Ferdynand Ossendowski

External links

• Kapuscinski.info Unofficial Polish website
• John May interviews Kapuscinski, London, August 9, 1984
• John May interviews Kapuscinski, London, April 3, 1986
• Interview with Kapuscinski: Writing About Suffering, Journal of the International Institute, November, 1997
• Keynote speech, Herodotus and the Art of Noticing, during the inaugural ceremony for the Lettre Ulysses Awards, 2003
• Letras Libres interview with Kapuscinski in Spanish
• Documentary movie: A Poet on the Frontline: The Reportage of Ryszard Kapuscinski, 2004
• Review of Travels with Herodotus
• InfoPoland: Kapuściński links
• Press response in UK, US and Canada to Kapuscinski's death
• Ryszard Kapuściński and Tiziano Terzani
• 2,300-word excerpt from the biography of Ryszard Kapuściński written by Artur Domosławski, Kapuściński Non-Fiction (Warsaw, Świat Książki, 2010), made available by the publishers of the original book
• First five pages of the Spanish edition of the biography of Ryszard Kapuściński written by Artur Domosławski, Kapuściński Non-Fiction (Barcelona, Galaxia Gutenberg, November 2010), made available by the Madrid daily, El País
• Open Library. Works by Kapuscinski