Echoes of Artur Domosławski’s biography Kapuściński non-fiction

Abstract

In 2010, Polish journalist and reporter Artur Domosławski started a long-‑running dispute in the Polish national media by publishing a biography about his mentor and friend Ryszard Kapuściński. In this article, selected fragments of both sides of the aforementioned dispute are presented as an argument for the thesis that one of the outcomes of the debate surrounding the biography Kapuściński non-fiction in the Polish public discourse was the need to reflect on two important and interconnected issues. Firstly, the alleged controversies were interpreted as a kind of a cultural phenomenon, in the centre of which was the demystification of Kapuściński as a great national figure and infallible reporter. Harsh criticism and tendentious remarks regarding Domosławski’s allegedly controversial text were analysed in the context of the Polish national need to mystify and heroise the figure of Ryszard Kapuściński, i.e. to maintain the so-called »gilding« on the monument of an unquestionably great and important author. Consequently, the article argues that the revisionist aim of Domosławski’s book was to reflect on the rules by which contemporary Polish biographers are guided, especially taking into account their tendency of approaching certain public figures in uncritical and biased manner. While some believe that Domosławski in some way revolutionised Polish biography and extended the authority of the biographer himself, others claim that he abused his role and broke the rules of biographical writing. Secondly, an attempt was made to show how Domosławski, by analysing Kapuściński’s specific poetics in his biography, contributed to an already existing polemic about Polish literary reportage and its duality between fictional and factual discourse. The fact that the Kapuściński non-fiction dispute gave rise to two opposing sides can also be understood as the existence of two separate schools of thought when it comes to the »craft« of writing literary reportage, a form that has, due to Kapuściński, been moved from the strictly journalistic domain into the realm of literature.