S6E9 and all video recordings are available on our YouTube.

Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature is a video series for anyone interested in literature and the culture of books and reading. Each month, host David A. Goldfarb will present a new topic in conversation with an expert on that author or book or movement in Polish literature. More about the Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature series and the timeline.

Ryszard Kapuściński (1932-2007), was born in Pinsk, today part of Belarus, survived the Second World War as a child, died in Warsaw, and in between traveled extensively as a journalist throughout Africa, Asia, the Soviet Union, the Middle East, and South America. Kapuściński shaped the postwar future of reportage in Poland and around the world through his use of allegory, irony, absurdist humor, mały realizm or the use of minor figures to illustrate larger issues, his crafting of characters who speak in their own voices on the basis of interviews, and through the sheer poetry of his language. He tried to remove explicit references to himself from the narrative as much as possible, using objectivity and his subjects’ voices as a shield from censorship, and wrote about power relations in his own country indirectly through people on the fringes of power in other countries, but the combined effect of these literary techniques created a unique style that is persuasive, universal, and immediately identifiable as Kapuściński.

In this episode we talk with American longform journalist, David Samuels, about some of the ways that Ryszard Kapuściński influenced his own writing and the writing of other journalists in the U.S., especially in the era of the “New Journalism” or creative non-fiction. We try to understand the lasting universal appeal beyond the immediate news value of Kapuściński’s accounts of now long dead empires that may have once been allegorical critiques of another long dead empire, and we try to uncover some of what they reveal about political power and how it works.

Ryszard Kapuściński in English translation and recommended resources:

Domosławski, Artur. Ryszard Kapuściński: A Life. Tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones. New York: Verso, 2012.

Kapuściński, Ryszard.  All works published in English by Random House.

David Samuels has had a long career as a staff and contract writer for The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The Point, and other magazines, on subjects including dog tracks, music festivals, blimp pilots, serial impostors, jewel thieves, pigeon racing, and the art of bringing down large buildings with explosives. Most recently he is editor and co-founder of County Highway, a broadsheet print newspaper featuring longform journalism.

David A. Goldfarb, Host & Producer
Bartek Remisko, Curator and Executive Producer
Natalia Iyudin, Produce