Author: Izabella Sariusz-Skapska. Source: Znak no. 3/1994. Published: 1994-03-01

The material for describing the Empire was supplied to Ryszard Kapuściński by notes from several journeys, begun at a time when even the greatest dreamers had not dared imagine they would live to hear the Soviet Union referred to in the past tense. Kapuściński describes his encounters with that world in three acts, so to speak. The First Encounter (1939–1967) begins with the entry of Soviet troops into the author’s hometown, Pinsk in Polesie. The Second Encounter contains the section A Bird’s-Eye View (1989–1991), set at the twilight of the communist colossus, when Kapuściński, like “an ubiquitous reporter,” traversed many republics — the counter on those expeditions clicking over “some 60,000 kilometres.” And finally — the third act: The Sequel Continues (1992–1993). In other words: is the succession after the Empire still up for grabs? Or is this ending simply a journalist’s trick — never closing a topic? A threatening memento…

The author himself warns of the “polyphonic” construction of the book, in which motifs and threads glimpsed at different times and — more importantly — in different political and, more broadly, cultural contexts will recur. But does the declared polyphony actually convince the reader of the author’s thesis that the very construction of the text mirrors what was (and is) really happening? Kapuściński does not undertake a re-construction of the Empire’s edifice; on the contrary, as one reads on, one watches the narrative itself disintegrate — because, the author claims, it follows the real disintegration of its subject. Was this truly so, and — more critically — is this an acceptable way to write about the Empire? That doubt pursues the reader.

The first contact with the Soviets in September 1939 is barely an episode, a foretaste of a true initiation into the Empire’s mysteries. The second encounter takes place deep in the continent, during a Trans-Siberian journey. The traveller is captivated by reading the geography of the passing lands, tracing the route on a map, scarcely able to believe how a scrap of paper can contain such magnificent spaces. The account faithfully follows the stages of the route: Zabaikalsk, Chita, Ulan-Ude, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Chelyabinsk, Kazan, and finally Moscow. The country seen from the train beckons with mystery — but it is a menacing mystery; the year is 1958, not long after the “thaw,” too shallow and superficial to annihilate the “other” world of the camps, whose presence is marked by the barbed-wire fences stretching for hundreds and thousands of kilometres along the Trans-Siberian tracks.

One cannot, however, forget that this Polish traveller has entered roads along which his compatriots have wandered for several centuries; naturally, romantic clichés revive in the memory — Mickiewicz’s Paris lectures come to mind, as do the passages he quoted from the memoirs of General Kopeć, captured at Maciejowice and transported in a kibitka to Kamchatka as a Russian prisoner of war. Such is the nature of a Polish visitor — as Alexander Wat once wrote — moving forward in space through the vast Russian terrain, he moves backward in time, penetrating history, remembering.

The whiteness of snowbound plains, the feeling of boundlessness — how literary, how often captured in writing! — the sense of being unable to find oneself in the face of Russia’s vastness. And the reading always somehow the same: starting, naturally, with Cendrars’s Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne of France. The traveller is astonished to find how constantly mental stereotypes impose themselves, how a European passing through this country is seized by the feeling of sinking, of dissolving into the immensity — and simultaneously into an unreal world of literary associations, rarely enriched by any deeper reflection. Though one can always summon Berdyaev and his studies on the influence of boundless, vast space on the Russian soul.

On subsequent journeys — it is now 1967 — the Polish journalist abandons the east-west direction and heads south. And here a surprise: in the southern lands, the literary standards of greyness, of limitlessness and passivity supposedly typical of the Empire, prove inapplicable. The beauty of the small states enchants him. The Soviet straitjacket is here — oppressive, crushing, terrifying, to be sure — but only a façade. The Soviet south is, in the words of the enchanted author, a true “eastern carpet,” and everything associated with that metaphor: the exoticism of colours, shapes, fragrances. The Empire is, after all, a patchwork of peoples and cultures. The Polish visitor proves to be a careful observer and good listener, rewarded accordingly — with magnificent views and harrowing stories.

In Georgia he will view the suppers painted by a local “Nikifor,” Niko Pirosmani, who painted “the dreams of Nakhаlovka” — dreams of a land flowing with milk and honey. He will also learn, naturally, the secrets of making Georgian cognac. From Armenia he brings memories of walks through Yerevan; he also records the story of the Armenian Chopin, the monk Komitas, saved from the Armenian massacre by the Sultan’s daughter. This true fairy tale has no fairy-tale happy ending: the solitary singer who gave his people their songs and liturgies still sung in Armenian churches today, after that miraculous rescue from the pogrom, never sang again — he chose silence, or rather madness. Armenians in general fascinate Kapuściński; he devotes much space to the history and traditions of a people that preserves its memory of itself in books, the greatest treasure of this ancient nation. “A people without a state — he writes in a margin note on Armenia — seeks salvation in symbols. Defending a symbol is as important to them as defending borders.” We might hastily agree — we too know what it means to defend symbols. But the history of the Armenians furnishes examples that would shame a Polish patriot. Armenian fidelity has an unmatched tradition, measured not in decades or a handful of generations, because “Armenians — Kapuściński notes — have a different measure of time. Their first partition occurred 2,500 years ago. Their Renaissance falls in the fourth century of our era. They adopted Christianity seven centuries before us. Ten centuries before us they began writing in their own language. But Armenia shared the drama typical of this part of the world — the drama of ancient Egypt, the Sumerians, and Byzantium: the absence of historical continuity, the sudden appearance of blank chapters in the textbook of their own state’s history.”

The account of The South, ‘67 contains several more such sketches; the map of successively visited republics grows dense with descriptions of passing cities, supplemented by hastily summarised histories of lands and the peoples who inhabit them. We learn of the “sickness of a great yesterday” gnawing at Azerbaijan; then comes the true “gateway to Central Asia” — Turkmenia and a story of the “war of desert and oasis” waged there for centuries. After this homage to the civilisation of desert peoples come scenes from Tajikistan and Kirghizia, and the southern journey ends in Uzbekistan, where one cannot forget “brown Bukhara” and “blue Samarkand.”

In the First Encounter there are few signs that would foreshadow the drama that is the subject of the second part — seen A Bird’s-Eye View — unfolding in the years 1989–1991. This time the plan is to travel “far from Moscow” and, since it is the era of loud talk about perestroika, to see how much of all that talk about change has reached the peripheries. Note: the question is not whether perestroika is or is not real, or what its leaders’ true intentions and chances of success might be. Kapuściński states plainly that “Kremlinology,” which excites (especially Western) sorcerers of Sovietological ideas, cannot be a branch of history or philosophy — it is more akin to meteorology, where from the movements of Moscow’s colossus of power, like readings from precise seismographs or other complex instruments probing the hidden movements of the earth, one draws inferences about the behaviour of the entire “continent.”

At this point we know for certain what could be guessed from the book’s opening pages: one cannot speak about Russia — tsarist, Soviet, or post-Soviet — without situating oneself within a general “dispute about Russia.” One of the defining features of this dispute — put most briefly — is the standpoint from which Russia is observed; several are available. First: from above, with “European” (“Western”?) superiority — unfortunately the most popular. Second: from below, from fear of “not provoking the eastern (Asian!) bear” — fashionable especially in politics. Third: face to face, without any “-philia” or “-phobia,” but with the conviction that one must first know Russia before passing judgement — or even having the right to adjudicate.

Unfortunately, Kapuściński lacks consistency in maintaining precisely this last stance. His account is too hurried to leave room for anything more than — vivid, yes, brilliantly captured — but ultimately only scenes. Fine as a collection of reportage pieces, but gathering them in a book bearing, moreover, such a sweeping title, disappoints the reader.

So what does the Empire look like seen merely A Bird’s-Eye View? The indefatigable Polish traveller circles between Moscow and the southern republics, and ventures to the far north. Speaking of Moscow, he leafs through the journals of Chateaubriand, who visited it together with Napoleon; his description is one of the last before the great fire that forced the French — “conquerors of a single day” — to abandon their prize. There are memories drawn from Russian classic literature; the images conjured there interweave with descriptions of the sad post-revolutionary capital and of Moscow A.D. 1989, whose streets are drunk on words now freed from some of the shackles of censorship, as the Empire’s inhabitants begin the process of reclaiming memory of their tragic history. The Moscow thread is supplemented by an account of the construction, Byzantine splendour, and destruction of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour (The Temple and the Palace) and a visit to the Kremlin — the enchanted mountain.

The Polish reporter also returns, after more than twenty years, to the southern republics that once captivated him with their exoticism. Now, glimpsed at the threshold of the 1990s, these lands reveal above all the dramas of their peoples. A different Yerevan, a different Tbilisi, a different Baku. Yerevan has ceased to enchant with its “eastern yet exotic disorder”; in the streets one sees representatives of national armies; the fates of Azerbaijanis and Armenians are again intertwined. No different in Georgia, where the drama of the Abkhazians and Georgians unfolds. The riddles of the map, incomprehensible to a Western European, insoluble to politicians, are known here by every child. (And the same process of the awakening of national consciousness could be described through the example of the Bashkirs, the Buryats, the Chechens, the Ingush, the Chuvash, the Koryaks, the Tatars, the Mordvins, the Yakuts…)

This is what the Polish journalist comes to understand. And the harder he tries to fathom the essence of local conflicts, the more he is overtaken by the conviction that the most powerful force among the quarrelling peoples is “ancient judgements,” awakened national resentments — in short, the “tyranny of stereotypes.” Kapuściński abandons attempts at understanding, settles for fragmentary notes; memories from years past appear alongside fragments of conversations and even scraps of the most varied reading — Quo Vadis is even cited. As a result, the pages are populated by literary figures rather than living people. Effective, but in greater concentration — simply tedious.

In the lands of the disintegrating Empire, the central problem is self-identification among people entangled in national conflicts for generations. What is more, writes Kapuściński, many inhabitants of the Empire feel no connection with any nationality. “This is precisely the homo sovieticus — not on account of a type of consciousness or attitude, but because his only social coordinate was membership of the Soviet state. After that state’s collapse, these people are today searching for a new identity (those who think about it at all)” (p. 138). The reason for this situation is obvious: there is probably no other country in the world where, in so short a time, so large a proportion of the population abandoned their homes. First there were movements caused by war, then by revolution, then migrations in search of bread — and the most tragic of all: deportations. Deportations of entire peoples. Resettlements. The pre-war and wartime expulsions of peoples “guilty” before the communist ruler (Poles, Greeks, Germans, Kalmyks…).

When the dramas of entire nations seem incomprehensible, individual fates speak more powerfully to the imagination. The story of Yusuf Samedoglu, a Baku writer who spent his whole life writing in Cyrillic and in whose homeland tendencies toward a return to roots are now prevailing — and who, regardless of whether Arabic or Latin script wins out, will be left a writer without a body of work — has the force of a symbol. Who will translate his books? Will he live to see it? Will he still have readers?

Kapuściński also visits lands whose very names evoke a chapter of the Empire’s drama known as the Gulag. There is a description of Vorkuta, where people still live in the former camp barracks. The terrifying longevity of the Gulag’s “other world” consists partly in the fact that former prisoners often had nowhere to return, so they transformed the old zones into housing settlements. For Kapuściński the expedition to Vorkuta was prompted by a miners’ strike — but it is simultaneously, once more, something of a pilgrimage along a Polish trail. Hence, alongside the Russian classics of camp literature, quotations from Polish Gulag witnesses appear. The shadow of the Gulag returns in the account of the journey to Yakutsk and further — to Kolyma. Here, perhaps most clearly, Kapuściński’s storytelling technique reveals itself: observation of the present is overwhelmed by the weight of historical and literary knowledge about Kolyma (Conquest, Shalamov, Weissberg-Cybulski all recur). In telegraphic shorthand the beginnings of Magadan are recalled — the legendary port in Nagayevo Bay where ships arrived with slaves destined for Kolyma’s gold mines — and the notorious figures of Kolyma’s executioners: General Eduard Berzin, director of Dalstroy, and his successors Colonels Karp Pavlov and Stepan Garanin. Quotations from the most varied literatures mingle with the ghosts of real figures; Herbert G. Wells appears alongside Roy Medvedev, Milovan Djilas alongside Nikita Khrushchev.

The reporter tries to discover in the real, passing world and in the people he meets there, traits of which he knows from books. This justifies the flood of quotations: Evgenia Ginzburg is invoked, and Vasily Grossman, and Ivan Solonevich — but as if that were not enough, the author draws Popper and Ingarden into the discourse, even Leonardo da Vinci has his corner. I admit that this section of the book is the least successful — pretentious in places, as is the bibliography of quoted texts appended to it.

So it goes throughout the book. Admittedly, certain passages hold the reader in suspense: the western-style chapter about The Trap — an excursion from Yerevan to Nagorno-Karabakh undertaken by Kapuściński in 1990 — or the “ecological” narrative about the destruction of the Aral Sea. The Second Encounter with the Empire is also richer for a journey to Ukraine and to the lands of the former eastern borderlands of the Second Polish Republic. So there is Drohobych, and the return to the author’s native Pinsk.

Polyphony? Yes — if by that Bakhtinian term we understand a blending of voices, or rather a recording of echoes and half-words tossed here and there into the air. No — if we were genuinely hoping to learn something about the Empire as a total phenomenon. The vivid scenes Kapuściński has noted are excellent subjects for reportage, but they are mere sketches that would need to be filled with some actual content. Unfortunately, there is no time for that; the rushed pace of the narrative mirrors the rushed pace of the visits and, worse, justifies the hastiness of judgements and the superficiality of generalisations.

The third part, the shortest, confirms that The Sequel Continues, but it is a hurried record of just a few episodes from 1992 and 1993 — when the collapse of the Empire became a fact that Western Sovietologists had failed to predict, having in recent times, according to Kapuściński, promoted the thesis of Soviet stability. Now Sovietological futurology has lost its prestige, and so the author employs reportorial poetics: as if in a wire-service dispatch, he recalls the rapid succession of unfolding events. Contrary to the author’s intention, however, this last section of the book is the least necessary, because every month following its publication has added and continues to add further chapters. But is this still the history of the same Empire? And what “sequel” will follow?

Author: Izabella Sariusz-Skapska

IZABELLA SARIUSZ-SKAPSKA, born 1964, PhD, graduate of Polish philology at the Jagiellonian University. Published in, among others, W drodze, Tygodnik Powszechny, Znak. Since 1992, editor of Znak.

source: kapuscinski.info