Author: Newsweek. Source: Newsweek. Date of publication: 2005-03-01

“Manuscripts don’t burn” — wrote Mikhail Bulgakov in “The Master and Margarita”. And since then we often repeat that sentence, seeking in it confirmation of our faith that literary truth always triumphs, that it is stronger than the inattention of readers, than the persecutions of dictators. Even — than the passage of time" — so begins the preface to the Newsweek Polska supplement “235 Books of the Century”, authored by Piotr Bratkowski. It presents a proposal for the library of the contemporary intellectual. It includes titles from the last sixty years, among them: The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz, A World Apart by Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, Rising ‘44 by Norman Davies, and The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuściński.

Ryszard Kapuściński with this book definitively crossed the Rubicon separating reportage from literature. And gained worldwide fame.

In the 1970s people in Poland often predicted the end of the novel and the takeover of its cognitive functions by non-fiction literature.

Indeed — at that time reportage flourished in the socio-cultural press. The art of circumventing censorship was mastered excellently by authors who, unable to attack the system head-on, exposed its mechanisms by showing some peripheral fragment of reality.

And readers, who without difficulty reconstructed the meaning of these metaphors. The work of Kapuściński (born 1932) had a special place in this context, if only because the reporter — after his debut Bush po polsku — ceased to concern himself with the domestic reality and wrote revelatory books about Angola, El Salvador, and other flashpoints of the world.

The Emperor proved to be Kapuściński’s passport to the world elite of reporters. It described the fall of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, eaten away by nepotism and corruption, and the rapid degeneration of the revolutionaries who had overthrown him. In Poland, The Emperor was of course read through the prism of analogies with the team of Edward Gierek; the book’s universal message about the corruption of all power was also perceived.

Did non-fiction literature thus win over classical prose? Not entirely, because Kapuściński “narrated” the material he had gathered by means typical of literary fiction. And from the time of The Emperor’s success, people less and less often called him a “reporter”, and more and more often — a “writer”.

source: kapuscinski.info