Ryszard Kapuściński on the book "Imperium"

I wrote Imperium instead of a different book. In the mid-1980s I had an idea to write a trilogy about dictators. The first volume was “The Emperor,” the second “Shah of Shahs,” and the third was meant to be about Amin — an extraordinarily cruel military dictator in Uganda in the 1970s. I had been there many times, gathering material and was preparing to write that book, when in 1985 Perestroika began in the USSR. It was a major world event. Amin was a completely marginal topic compared with what was happening in the East. I could not stay away — I knew I had to go there, see the USSR and try to describe it.

Initially I planned to follow the trail of my book “A Kirgiz Dismounts” — to visit the Transcaucasian and Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union and write about what had changed and what was happening there now. When I arrived, I realised it had a truly imperial dimension and that the narrow thread I had set for myself would not be enough to describe it all properly. I decided to undertake several long journeys across the whole Soviet Union. My colleagues, correspondents in Moscow, were enormously helpful in arranging tickets, planning routes and finding contacts. I travelled across the USSR for two years — from Brest to the Pacific Ocean, from the north all the way south to Dushanbe or Tashkent.

After returning, I read enormous amounts on what I had seen, and only then was I ready to write. I tried to present the collapse and disintegration of the Soviet monolith from the inside. It was very personal, as I myself am from the Eastern Borderlands, which from 1939 onwards were part of the Soviet empire. I therefore felt a certain sense of obligation to write this book.

Imperium is in essence an essay. My writing has gone through an evolution that I call the essayification of reportage. All good prose of the twentieth century is essay. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is an essay about time and history. The plot is merely a skeleton supporting its various parts. Prose is currently moving in two directions: essayification on the one hand, novelisation on the other. The same applies to reportage.