Regardless of the best efforts of his widow to crush it, a new autobiography of Ryszard Kapuscinski has been revealed in Poland which describes the writer as a liar and a commie spy. The precise details are hard to find out unless you read Polish I do not but his memoirist, Artur Domoslavski, has been quoted as pronouncing that Kapuscinski “consciously built on his status as a legend” and “extended the limits of reportage far into the field of literature”.
To explain, that he made things up about himself and the events he said to have witnessed. As an example, it’s a “self-important fantasy” that during the 1960s he’d had an eleventh-hour reprieve from a firing squad’s bullets in the Congo, or that he’d ever met Che Guevara or Patrice Lumumba. The general drift of these claims isn’t particularly new. Critics were challenging Kapuscinski’s sincerity long before he bought the farm in 2007, as well as wondering about his links with Poland’s Commie regime. But if Domoslavski is to be credited, the degree of his invention went well past the claims of even his most unsympathetic reader.