RYSZARD KAPUSCINSKI March 4, 1932 - January 23, 2007
Both Poland and the world lost one of their most original and influential writers when Ryszard Kapuscinski, who was long known to have had cancer, died of a heart attack in Warsaw just short of his 75th birthday. He was a foreign correspondent who turned a uniquely personal approach to reportage into a new literary genre, becoming one of the world's most honored writers for his ability to evoke from the microcosm of human details not only the essence of a broader political picture but a sense of the universal human condition. He could thus - after bringing to otherwise largely isolated Polish readers reports from the outside world, initially as the Polish Press Agency's only correspondent in Africa - appear to those readers, in later books about despotic regimes, to be revealing some of the very patterns of decline that characterized the regime at home, in such internationally acclaimed works as The Emperor, about the fall of Ethiopia's Haile Selassie, and Shah of Shahs, about the last Shah of Iran. Kapuscinski's writing, including such books as Another Day of Life (about ethnic and political conflict in Angola), The Soccer War (vignettes of conflict in Latin America and beyond), and the more recent Imperium, on the end of the Soviet Union, has been translated into 27 languages and won him countless awards and honorary degrees. And though he had never studied journalism, he became an inspiration the world over for practitioners of the New Journalism and literary non-fiction. Kapuscinski (kah-poosh-CHIN-ski) was born and raised in Pinsk in eastern pre-war Poland (now in Belarus), a poor but teeming ethnic mix of Poles, Jews, Russians, Belarussians, Ukrainians, and Armenians, who had little sense of national identity. To his childhood familiarity with the people of this region he attributed his empathy for the people of the post-colonial Third World - and to the fact that Poland itself, as he sometimes pointed out, had been colonized by its neighbors for an even longer stretch than the colonies of Africa. A modest man whom most would consider courageous to a fault, it was not some cocky, devil-may-care bravado but his pursuit of deeper human truths in the coverage of bloody conflict or political collapse in some 30 coups and revolutions around the world that came close to getting him killed almost as many times - by tuberculosis, cerebral malaria, combat, shipwreck, lions, a cobra, incineration, and four death sentences. When asked why he did not write novels, he has answered, "Because I have no imagination; I must see, touch, and smell what I am to write about." And yet, though he prepared for each assignment with voluminous research, he wrote more from memory than from notes, and some of his descriptive passages have a poetic quality that has been said to border on magical realism. Ryszard Kapuscinski is survived by his wife of more than 50 years, the pediatrician Alicja Mielczarek, and a daughter, Zofia. For more on Kapuscinski's life see the obituaries by Michael Kaufman in The New York Times, Andrew Nagorski in Newsweek, and Adam Bernstein in The Washington Post. There are also in Polish many articles and much biographical information available through Gazeta Wyborcza. And for links to a large selection of international write-ups on Kapuscinski visit Instytut Ksiazki.
