Imperium

Kapuscinski is the wisest and most humane travel writer I have ever read. His elegant, perceptive analysis has transported me through the many countries, revolts and repressions he has recorded. Whether he is writing about the poisoning and destruction of the Aral Sea, the beauty of snow capped mountains or the plight of one poor individual his accounts leave vivid pictures in your mind. A wonderful writer.

Not a mere travel document! but more a meditation on the story of the old Soviet empire. They were years of terror and tragedy for many of the peoples involved. Kapuscinski was a man of deep understanding and compassion, who had a compulsion to travel, search, talk to those people, and tell the story to the world. I confess I was startled by some remarkably prescient observations. I think anyone who is interested in their fellow human being would want to read this book.

This is the very best book to encourage any interest in the former USSR it is a truly truly amazing book. It starts in Pinsk, Poland in an area now called Belarus which was occupied by the Soviets during Ryziards childhood and he describes the cruel deportation of 200 000 people to Siberia and how his family avoided it, with his mother staying awake all night long to alert the children if necessary to go into hiding, moving and poignant. He then moves around to different parts of the USSR and there is always a great tale to tell about places most of us havent heard of from the oil fields of Azerbejan to the desert of Turkmenestan. Snippets of information, stories, anecdotes, for example how Stalin demolished the beautiful cathedral next to the Kremlin with a plan to build a skyscraper 5 times the size of the empire state building with a statue of Lenin atop. So bizarre, so interesting. Funny, sad, gripping and so true to life in desciptions of human nature. Do read this if you are even vaguely interested in the USSR, it is great.

This is the very best book to encourage any interest in the former USSR it is a truly truly amazing book. It starts in Pinsk, Poland in an area now called Belarus which was occupied by the Soviets during Ryziard's childhood and he describes the cruel deportation of 200 000 people to Siberia and how his family managed to avoid it, with his mother staying awake all night long to alert the children if necessary to go into hiding, moving and poignant. I nearly cried when he told of the time when his teacher said the sweet shop was closing and they were giving away free sweets. All the children queued all night in the wind and snow to wait for the shop to open only to be given the empty sweet jars - just one each. In his position as the only foreign correspondent in Poland he moves around to different parts of the USSR and there is always a great tale to tell about places most of us haven't heard of from the oil fields of Azerbejan to the desert of Turkmenestan. Snippets of information, stories, anecdotes, for example how Stalin in his madness, demolished the beautiful cathedral next to the Kremlin that had taken over 40 years to build, with a plan to build a skyscraper 5 times the size of the empire state building with a statue of Lenin atop. So bizarre, so interesting. Funny, sad, gripping and so true to life in descriptions of human nature. Do read this if you are even vaguely interested in the USSR, it is great. Permalink | Why no voting buttons?

.... or is it the Impressionist as Historian? With Ryzsard Kapuscinski, the two modes are inseparably fused. One senses his painterly involvement in every factual account, but then one detects his historian's detachment in the pointillism of his elegant prose. In fact, Kapuscinski is not a historian in methodology. Not really a journalist, either. He's a "travel writer", and a great one, in the special generic tradition of great travelers, from Herodotus to V.S. Naipaul. His is the same method as theirs; he goes where he goes, not knowing what he'll learn there, and he somehow encounters ordinary people who turn out to have extraordinary things to tell him. The comparison to Naipaul is extremely close; the structures of their travel accounts are almost parallel, and both have the art of making grim depictions and painful implications highly readable. Most of Kapuscinski's travels have traversed the "southern" land masses, the tropics and deserts of Africa, South America, and "Asia Minor". Though born in Pinsk, now part of Belarus, and writing in Polish for a Polish readership for most of his journalistic career, Kapuscinski explains in his preface to "Imperium" that he had felt a disinterest to the USSR - a range of feelings actually, from aversion to apathy - and had stayed away from the Imperium (his term for the Czarist/Communist empire of the Russians) as long as he could. Even the three sections of this `report from the Imperium' focus almost entirely on the peripheries of empire, the `colonized' regions of the five "-stans", the Ukraine, and Siberia. The disparity and disconnectedness between Moscow and all the rest of the Empire are among his prinicipal themes of analysis. The imperial structure of both Czarist and Communist governance, in which all authority rested in the supreme leader perched so far above the people that that could both worship and despise Him, is one of the unchanging historical `givens' that have determined the course of all Russian history. That and the immensity of the Imperium .... ... but Kapuscinski, as I said, is less a historian than an impressionist, and it is his impressions of Soviet-era realities at the ground level that make this book powerfully revealing. Yes, from the outside and from the elevations of international politics and economics, we all knew that Stalin was a beast, that Brezhnev was another, that the Five-Year Plans were a gigantic Potemkin hoax, that repression was fearsome and people were fearful. With the deftest words, however, and with absolute credibility, Kapuscinski shows us a USSR more backward, corrupt, degraded, and nonsensical than we ever imagined. The gulags, for instance: we thought we'd peered into their horrors in the novels of Solzhenitsyn, but Kapuscinski exposes the muck and mass graves upon which they were built. Without relying on fictional artistry, without p...