Ryszard Kapuściński with Angolan soldiers in 1975

A 600-page biography of the Polish writer Ryszard KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski accuses the late journalist of collaborating with Poland’c Communist government and weaving fiction into his reportage. According to a report in The Telegraph, biographer Artur Domoslawski claimsin Kapuscinski Non-fiction that “Kapuscinski, famed for books including The Soccer War, never met Che Guevara and many other famous figures he claimed to have befriended as he sent dispatches from his travels around the developing world.”

Numerous government officials have condemned the book, its original publisher pulled out, and KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski’s wife Alicja KapuÅ›ciÅ„ska sought to block its publication with an injunction. She explains that “her husband was not a spy, but that contracts with the regime were the “price he had to pay” for travelling the world under communism …. ”

In a report at the Guardian, Luke Harding talks to Artur Domoslawski, who says he was surprised by the effort to ban the book, and points out that Alicja KapuÅ›ciÅ„ska even allowed him to use KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski’s private archive. He says he considered the writer his “mentor,” and KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski in turn “treated me as a kind of disciple.” He says, “I think my book is fair. The strange thing is I was writing with sympathy about KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski. I wrote it with big empathy.”

“Sometimes the literary idea conquered him. In one passage, for example, he writes that the fish in Lake Victoria in Uganda had grown big from feasting on people killed by Idi Amin. It’s a colourful and terrifying metaphor. In fact, the fish got larger after eating smaller fish from the Nile.”

He added: “KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski was experimenting in journalism. He wasn’t aware he had crossed the line between journalism and literature. I still think his books are wonderful and precious. But ultimately, they belong to fiction.”

In a commentary at the Guardian, Neal Ascherson mounts a defense of Kapuściński:

Artur Domoslawski’s book, from what is reported about it, suggests that KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski was a dishonest reporter who made up stories about events he hadn’t seen, and invented quotes. This is to confuse his journalism with his books. Almost all journalists, except for a handful of saints, do on occasion sharpen up quotes or slightly shift around times and places to heighten effect. Perhaps they should not, but they — we — do. A few of us go beyond the unwritten rules of what is tolerable, and send our papers eyewitness accounts of events we never saw because we were somewhere else. That, in the profession’s general view, is right off the reservation — not on.

But this is not the problem with KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski’s journalism. None of the doubts, as far as I can see, are about the despatches and features he sent to newspapers, or to the Polish Press Agency. They are about his books. The adventures and encounters he describes in his books are on a different level of veracity. Like his friend Gabriel García Márquez, KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski used to talk about “literary reportage”. You’re meant to believe what you are being told, but not in every literal detail. I think that any well-known journalist who does that has a duty to make the distinction clear to the reader,  warning her or him that this narrative is not news reporting but one man’s perception of a truth illuminated by imagination. KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski did not make that distinction clear, and I wish that he had.