The Illuminated Letters Of a Polish Journalist

Maybe there's something about those brutal winters on the high northern plains of Eastern Europe, stuck defenseless between Berlin and Moscow, the peasant huts and concrete apartments smelling of dank clothes, lost hope and boiled cabbage.

Maybe there's something that, every so often, kicks a young writer in the gut, and produces great wanderlust or literary genius or, in the case of Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski and his literary predecessor Joseph Conrad, both.

Kapuscinski died back home in Warsaw yesterday. He was 74. He wrote stuff you just couldn't believe. (Perhaps literally. We'll get to that.) He was a journalist, sort of.

"The reporter . . . must experience everything at his own cost," he wrote while stuck in Lagos with blood poisoning.

He was a deity in Poland, where I lived and reported for about half of the 1990s, and he was a deity among correspondents in Africa, where I spent the rest of the decade. Correspondents in Africa have two authors on their shelves: Graham Greene and Kapuscinski.

He filed dispatches from upheavals in dozens of countries across Africa and Latin America, plus the Mideast, then turned them into diamond-perfect books such as "The Soccer War," "The Emperor" and "The Shah of Shahs." These are about totalitarian despair and poverty and maybe human nature. You hold them to the light, I swear they glitter.

Kapuscinski used his Polishness as a lens to look at the rest of the world. Poland is a nation that has appeared and disappeared on the maps. It can be more a state of mind than a political reality. Kapuscinski translated its effect on the soul to the Third World nations he wrote about, and thus both the source and product of his particular brand of insight.

Example:

"I must explain to you, my friend, that in those days thinking was a painful inconvenience and a troubling deformity."

That's one of the palace workers speaking in "The Emperor," a book about Haile Selassie's Ethiopia. He was describing insane totalitarianism to Kapuscinski. He might as well have been describing Poland during its post-World War II communist rule. Poles reading Kapuscinski understood that nuance and delighted in its subversive insight. Kapuscinski didn't just write on one level. The great ones never do.

He was born in Pinsk, which was then in Poland and is now in Belarus (see above, "Poland is a state of mind"). His parents were schoolteachers. When they moved to Warsaw, they lived near the Jewish ghetto. He saw executions, his father was active in the underground and young Ryszard wound up writing for communist journals.

Officially, he often worked for the Polish Press Agency, PAP, which was sort of a down-market Pravda. Beginning in the 1960s, they sent him to cover things in Africa and Latin America -- the end of colonialism and defeat of the Evil West and such. He was the foreign bureau -- their only correspondent. Off he went, working with a budget just a little bit less than what you might expect official state journalists from Eastern Europe to have in, say, Luanda.