I

“Russia has seen a great deal in the thousand years of its history. The only thing it has never seen is freedom” — Vasily Grossman.

On the whole, nearly all of us know that our close neighbour to the east is Russia. We also know that this is a neighbour with whom we have rarely been bound by ties of friendship. We remember that tsarist Russia was the primary initiator and executor of all three partitions of Poland; that in 1939 it struck Poland in alliance with Hitler’s Germany, annexing part of Poland’s eastern territories; and that after the Second World War it stood guard over Poland’s membership in the socialist camp it controlled. There is also a common view that Russia the state is one thing and Russians as people are another: in direct contact we find in them a brotherly, Slavic soul — they are kind, hospitable, sincere. But Russians are only part of a multinational state. Unfortunately, we know far too little about Russia as a whole; we have no conception of what an unfathomable and varied organism it is. We do not understand clearly how this immense, Euro-Asian superpower functions.

Not so long ago it bore the alien-sounding name of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — something resembling the United States of America. And only in their names do these two powers have anything in common. Under Mikhail Gorbachev the USSR underwent “perestroika,” intended to bring the country closer to Western ideals of free speech, civil rights, and a free market. Boris Yeltsin continued on this path. In 1991 the USSR designation was abandoned. Several Baltic republics, along with others on Poland’s border and in the Far East, managed to break free. The core of the old tsarist Russia remained unshaken. Russia stayed a superpower. We can still call it an empire.

And that is precisely the title the “immortal” Ryszard Kapuściński gave one of his best books. Imperium is the work of his life, born of extraordinarily courageous, repeatedly undertaken, long and arduous journeys through parts of the world that seemed never to have an end. The most important journey took place between 1989 and 1991 — at the twilight of the USSR — running from Brest to Magadan on the Pacific and from Vorkuta above the Arctic Circle to Termez on the Afghan border: some 60,000 kilometres in all. Easy to read, pleasant to follow on a map, where one can move a finger from west to east, or from south to north across Russia in the blink of an eye, as if in a rocket’s flight. The author of the book made that journey by ordinary means of transport available in the USSR — state and private — and sometimes on foot. As it turns out, such travel through this immeasurable, not entirely civilised country frequently bordered on the greatest risk.

What was Ryszard Kapuściński trying to accomplish? What was his goal?

It was not simply the fulfilment of a vagabond’s passion, the wanderlust of someone keen to see the world. As a journalist, publicist, and above all an outstanding writer, Kapuściński set out to find an answer to the question: how is it that a country so enormous in territory has existed for a thousand years without interruption, survived the tyranny of tsarism and then of communism, and still endures — though many enlightened people, politicians, and scholars have called Russia a colossus with feet of clay? The author of Imperium proceeded from the assumption that the answer must be sought in the human being. Only close, direct contact with the people inhabiting this vast area, a thorough knowledge of their living conditions, life philosophy, and mentality, would allow one to understand the essence of this remarkable state organism. To know the spirit of the people better, it is not enough to go to Moscow or the architecturally splendid St Petersburg. The heart of the problem lies in the person lost in the unfathomable depths of the taiga or the tundra, in the mountain terrain of the Caucasus, in the boundless expanses of Asian Russia stretching to Alaska and the Pacific.

Ryszard Kapuściński writes first in his book about his earliest contacts with Russia and Russians in his small hometown in eastern Poland, Pinsk. This took place in September 1939, when Red Army troops entered the city. These are memories of a small boy encountering for the first time an alien, hostile, incomprehensible power, and hearing of Siberia — where a train had departed, filled with imprisoned townspeople. Some years later, in 1958, the author makes his first journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway into the depths of Russia. The second encounter with the Empire takes place in the barely accessible spaces of Asia’s steppes and snows. Here is the first contact with Siberia: Chita, Ulan-Ude, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Chelyabinsk, Kazan, Moscow — the route of a journey of several days by train through the mostly virgin, uninhabited territories of Russia. “No road — only terrifying mountains and ravines.”

“While still a student I read an old book by Berdyaev in which he reflected on the influence of the Empire’s vast spaces on the Russian soul. Indeed, what does a Russian think about somewhere on the bank of the Yenisei or in the depths of the Amur taiga? Every road he takes seems to have no end. He could walk it for days and months and Russia would surround him still” — this is the prelude to further, extraordinarily interesting reflections by Kapuściński.

The core of the book, naturally, is the accounts of journeys and encounters with interesting people, undertaken by Ryszard Kapuściński considerably later, at the close of the USSR’s existence.

I will write about some of the curiosities from that part of the book in a later post, though I am well aware that nothing can replace reading the book itself. But it is precisely to its reading that I most warmly wish to encourage you. For me it is an inexhaustible fascination and an adventure.

II

“This is part of the secret of the ‘Kapuściński method’ … to write one sentence, you need to have read a thousand others” — Sławomir Popowski.

I share the opinion of the author just quoted, who wrote the introduction to Ryszard Kapuściński’s Imperium. The book astonishes with the wealth of knowledge and the accumulation of well-chosen details on every topic Kapuściński touches. It strikes one with an almost encyclopaedic command of its subject and familiarity with a rich literature, which the writer draws on with both hands. Sławomir Popowski reveals another secret of the author’s craft in Imperium: a kind of apoliticism — or perhaps more precisely, an avoidance of political commentary, an enormous distance from everything bound up with current politics. Kapuściński adopts the stance of an observer who, like an eighteenth-century traveller, tries to describe an unknown world and find in it what is characteristic. Years later it turns out that this has guaranteed him universality. And there is one further advantage of the book that cannot be overlooked: the literary talent of its author. It is on this last quality that I wish to focus in this blog post, as it arises from my personal inclination to celebrate books that can enchant with the beauty of their language and style.

One of the stages of the journey Ryszard Kapuściński describes was the seven southern Soviet republics: Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenia, Tajikistan, Kirghizia, Uzbekistan. The pace of that journey was punishing — only a few days were allotted to each republic. The harvest of that spontaneous excursion as it appears in the book may astonish even seasoned travellers. Everything Kapuściński writes is guided by a central idea: he endeavours to show the specificity of these non-Russian republics of the Empire of that era — their richness of tradition, originality of customs, dress, way of life, and the good humour of their inhabitants, so different from grey, monotonous Russia.

I thought for a long time about how best to convey the qualities of this book and draw out all its literary virtues. I do not feel equal to that aim in my own words. So I have selected a few passages that particularly struck me and that may illustrate the style of the narrative and its artistic value. I quietly hope that in this way I will best persuade readers of this blog that it is worth reaching for Ryszard Kapuściński’s work.

Here is what Kapuściński writes about a painting by “the Georgian Nikifor,” named Niko:

“Niko painted suppers like Veronese. Except that Niko’s suppers are Georgian and secular. Against a Georgian landscape — a bountiful table, Georgians eating and drinking around it. The table is in the foreground. This table is the most important thing. Niko is fascinated by food… Niko will show what he would like to eat and what he will not eat, neither today nor perhaps ever. Tables laden with food. Roasted sheep. Fat piglets. Wine red and heavy as calf’s blood. Juicy watermelons. Fragrant pomegranates. There is something masochistic in this painting, something like driving a knife into one’s own belly, although Niko’s art is cheerful, even funny.”

Elsewhere we find an artistic lecture on the subject of Georgian cognac:

“Not everyone knows how cognac is made. To make cognac you need four things: wine, sun, oak, and time. And besides — as in every art — you need taste. The rest goes as follows: in autumn, after the grape harvest, grape spirit is made. This spirit is poured into casks. The casks must be of oak…”

Let us spare ourselves the fuller disquisition on the properties of oak casks, the role and significance of the quality and age of the oak tree and the cooperage art of turning barrels, and finally the ageing process itself. I will quote the closing passage:

“Whether cognac is young or old, you can tell by the taste. Young cognac is sharp, quick, somehow impulsive. Its flavour is tart, rough. But an old one enters gently, softly. Only then does it begin to radiate. In old cognac there is much warmth and sun. It will go to your head calmly, without haste. But it will do its work.”

In Armenia, Ryszard Kapuściński visited a place of Armenian veneration — the museum at Matenadaran. There one can see ancient Armenian manuscripts, lying in display cases behind glass.

“In Armenian history the book was their national relic. Our guide (how beautiful she is!) speaks in a hushed voice: many of these manuscripts we can see were saved at the cost of human lives. These are pages stained with blood… A people without a state seeks salvation in symbols. Protecting symbols is as important to them as defending borders…

Armenian history is measured in thousands of years. We are in the part of the world customarily called the cradle of humanity.”

In Azerbaijan, on the Boulevard of Oil Workers, Kapuściński encountered a remarkable phytotherapy surgery. Flowers stand in rows in a glass house. To catch their scent one must stir the stem. A flower does not give off its scent of its own accord — it must feel that someone is interested in it; only then does it release its fragrance:

“Gulnara Guseinova treats people with the scent of flowers. Whoever has sclerosis sniffs laurel leaves. Whoever has high blood pressure — sniffs geranium. For asthma, rosemary is best. People come to Gulnara with a prescription from Professor Gasanov. On the prescription the professor prescribes the name of the flowers and the duration of the sniffing… Gulnara and I sit on the Boulevard of Oil Workers by the sea. From this spot Baku rises gently in stone terraces. The city lies in a bay, shaped like an amphitheatre, and is visible its entire length throughout one’s life… All styles parade here side by side in a grand pageant of fashions and architectural epochs.”

And one more interesting passage:

“The world-renowned poet of Azerbaijan was Nezami Ganjavi, who lived in the twelfth century. Like Kant, he never left his native city — Ganja, the present-day Kirovabad. Hegel said of Nezami’s poetry that it is soft and sweet. ‘At night,’ Nezami writes, ‘I draw out shining pearls of verse, burning my brain in a hundred fires.’ Wise is his observation that ’the space of words should be vast.’ Nezami was an epic poet and philosopher, occupied with logic, grammar, and even cosmogony.”

In Baku Kapuściński could experience an extraordinary adventure: the sight, from a high tower at night, of the Neft Daşları — the Oil Rocks — a city suspended on stone pillars out at sea. Such an illumination of the stormy sea stays with one for life.

Ashgabat in Turkmenia is a quiet city. Occasionally a Volga passes along the streets; now and then a donkey’s hooves click on the asphalt. At the Russian market, they sell hot tea. Here, tea is life:

“An old Turkmen takes a teapot, pours two bowls — one for himself, the other he pushes toward a small blond child… A Turkmen who has lived to see his beard go grey knows everything. His head is full of wisdom; his eyes read the book of life. When he got his first camel, he came to know the taste of wealth. When his flock of sheep died, he came to know misfortune. He has seen dried-up wells, and so he knows what despair is, and he has seen wells with water, and so he knows joy. He knows that the sun brings life, but he also knows that the sun brings death — something no European grasps. He knows what thirst is and what satiation is. He knows that in the heat one should dress warmly — in a khalat and a sheepskin cap — not undress to the skin, as white people do. A dressed man thinks; an undressed one does not. A naked man may commit any foolishness. Those who created great works were always dressed.”

I wrote at somewhat greater length about Turkmenia as seen through Kapuściński’s eyes in one of my earlier posts. I do not exclude the possibility of returning to Kapuściński’s Imperium, as well as to his other books, more than once. I hope that what I have written and quoted directly from the book has managed to persuade readers of this blog that it is worth seeking it out in a bookshop or library.

I can also assure you that as I write these words I am well wrapped from head to toe, not only because I am drawing lessons from the experience of the wise Turkmen, but also for reasons of economy: electricity has gone up in price again, and our cheap domestic shale gas is still a dream of the future.

P.S.

A great work demands fitting illustration. In this post I have once again drawn on the photo archive of Violetta Torbacka — photographs as fresh as yesterday’s bread, as yet unpublished anywhere, like most photographs by Robert Janusz and Viola Torbacka from the Foto CK Photo Club in Głuszyca.

From the editorial team of kapuscinski.info

The text was originally published on the blog of Stanisław (http://tujestmojdom.blogspot.com)

http://tujestmojdom.blogspot.com/2011/11/zycie-w-imperium-czi.html

http://tujestmojdom.blogspot.com/2011/11/zycie-w-imperium-cz-ii.html

source: kapuscinski.info