Friends with Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Salman Rushdie and J.M. Coetzee, witness to 27 revolutions, and journalist of the century in his native Poland–Ryszard Kapuscinski, many believe, was unlucky not to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature before his death in 2007.
However this once unimpeachable legacy has been shaken in recent times by Kapuscinski’s former protégé turned biographer, Artur Domosławski. Now a journalist for the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza, Domosławski has become a pariah amongst some in the country’s literary establishment by asserting in his recent biography, Kapuscinski: Non-Fiction, that his mentor’s books of ‘literary reportage’ contain more fiction than fact.
As a reporter for the Polish Press Agency during the 1960s and ’70s Kapuscinski kept two notebooks– one for his reports home to Communist-controlled Poland and another trying to make sense of it all. In his own words this was for all the “agitated rivers of people… shouted orders, conversations, monologues and faces” which he encountered along the way. Later it was to these recollections that Kapuscinski would turn when writing his most famous books, Imperium, Another Day of Life, Shah of Shahs, The Emperor, The Soccer War, Travels with Herodotus and The Shadow of the Sun.
The problem, insists Domosławski, is that Kapuscinski so embroidered these works with unverified quotes, anecdotes, and figures that some now belong “in the category of novels rather than strict reportage.”
Zuzanna Ładyga, a lecturer at Warsaw University’s Institute of English Studies has welcomed the publication of Kapuscinski: Non-fiction as a means of dispelling the naiveté with which she claims the Polish public have previously read Kapuscinski. According to Ładyga, Kapuscinski’s books allowed Poles to replace their conception of themselves as “the Christ of nations” with an image that instead posited them as “the most sensitive of all explorers of the other worlds.” When I suggested this to Domosławski, he agreed that Poland has historically been deficient in criticizing its national heroes and predicts that some foreigners may wonder what all the fuss was about when the book is released in English-translation in 2012.
In an interview with the New York Times Domosławski claimed that what is really at stake here is a sense of fairness to the reader, arguing that “if journalism crosses the border with literature and goes too far it pays a big price: credibility.”
And so it does matter that the fish in Uganda’s Lake Victoria grew fat eating smaller fish, and not by feasting on the victims of Idi Amin, as Kapuscinski had claimed. Professor (and former Iranian political prisoner) Abbas Milani told Domosławski that he could select a page at random from Kapuscinski’s 1982 Shah of Shahs and find numerous inaccuracies. For example, Milani claims Kapuscinski’s figure of hundreds of millions of dollars stolen by corrupt officials would have been “impossible” in a country like Iran.
In Kapuscinski: Non-Fiction we begin to discover the cost of truly experiential reporting may be, as Domosławski claims, “credibility.” But this is true only if we go in search of the facts alone. What we gain in return for Kapuscinski’s embellishments may make up for our initial disillusionment.
His vignettes on the effects of war on the human condition from Another Day of Life rival Hemingway, while insights into the conditions necessary for revolution in Shah of Shahs bear all the astuteness of an Orlando Figes. It is this intoxicating mix of socio/historical analysis, reportage, and literature which has led Domosławski himself to suggest a separate category, “Neither fiction, nor nonfiction, but just a shelf called ‘Kapuscinski’.” Proof if any was required, of the enduring power of an iconoclast.
