Magic Journalism

Author: Adam Hochschild
Source: The New York Review of Books, November 3, 1994
Link: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1994/11/03/magic-journalism/

Editorial summary by kapuscinski.info. The text below is a summary based on the original article. The full article is available at The New York Review of Books (a subscription may be required).

Hochschild’s essay — by an outstanding non-fiction author in his own right — was a review of Imperium and became one of the most important English-language accounts of Kapuscinski’s method.

Hochschild says it plainly: if by a journalist one means someone who scrupulously records verifiable facts, Kapuscinski is not one. What he created instead was a genre of his own, which Hochschild named “magic journalism” — a nod to magical realism, applied to reportage.

He offers specifics: Kapuscinski infiltrating Nagorno-Karabakh disguised as an Aeroflot pilot; the mystical corridors of fog in Yakutsk and the elaborate traditions of Georgian brandy-making in Imperium — details impossible to verify. Kapuscinski also composes the interior monologues of his Soviet characters.

Hochschild’s key argument: Kapuscinski’s Polish childhood — the experience of Soviet oppression in Pinsk — gave him a moral optic that let him recognise the mechanics of any autocracy, from Moscow to Tehran to Johannesburg. That personal experience is the foundation of his “deeper truth”, the kind that does not depend on verifiable fact.

The essay set the terms of the English-language debate about Kapuscinski a decade before Domoslawski’s biography appeared.