Artur Domosławski

Kapuściński: The Non-Fiction

This is the first full-length biography of Ryszard Kapuściński, the Polish reporter and master of non-fiction who died three years ago. As one of the mottoes at the start of the book Domosławski has included the following remark made by Gabriel Garcia Marquez to his biographer: “Every man has three lives – public, private and secret”. Domosławski aims to do a complete job by describing all three of his subject’s lives.
He reconstructs Kapuściński’s entire professional and personal course: from a small town on the eastern borders of pre-war Poland and wartime wanderings with his parents and younger sister, via the smoke-filled committee rooms of the Stalinist revolution in the 1950s, the corridors of the Central Committee, travels as a reporter in Africa during the collapse of colonialism and Latin America in the era of the military dictators, to worldwide fame and the literary salons of New York, London, Barcelona and Mexico.
Domosławski interviewed over a hundred people, including Kapuściński’s family, closest friends and colleagues from various places where he worked, his old party comrades, decision-makers of the communist era, and also the heroes of his reports from Africa and Latin America. Following in his subject’s tracks, he travelled to Ethiopia, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Angola, Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico, Spain, Canada and the USA. He discovered many unknown, sometimes sensational facts about the life of the famous Polish reporter.
With great empathy for Kapuściński, but without avoiding any controversy or difficult truths, Domosławski shows what a price Kapuściński paid for his fame and greatness. He presents a man who sometimes demonstrates human weakness, lack of confidence and loss of direction, who at the end of his life was raised – as he put it – “onto a pedestal piled with laurel leaves and spontaneous rapture”, which often did not go hand in hand with the deep thought that went into his work. In Domosławski’s book, Kapuściński comes down from his monument and becomes a human being again, entangled in his own era full of tricky dilemmas and choices.
I think Artur Domosławski has some difficult moments ahead of him, as criticism showers down from various directions. He has had the courage to describe not just the smile Kapuściński wore to meet his readers, but the anxieties and weaknesses that he hid behind it. For those who loved and adored Ryszard, there will be too much black in this picture of their idol, and for those who were keen to expose Kapuściński’s communist-era involvement, judge and accuse him, there will be too much white.

Teresa Torańska

Artur Domosławski (born 1967) is a journalist and publicist, and has published four books to date. His main areas of interest are Latin America, anti-globalist movements and social conflict. He was a pupil and friend of Ryszard Kapuściński.