Imperium - Hardcover

Kapuscinski, Ryszard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679426191 ISBN 13: 9780679426196

Publisher: Knopf, 1994

Synopsis

Ryszard Kapuscinski's last book, The Soccer War -a revelation of the contemporary experience of war -- prompted John le Carre to call the author "the conjurer extraordinary of modern reportage." Now, in Imperium, Kapuscinski gives us a work of equal emotional force and evocative power: a personal, brilliantly detailed exploration of the almost unfathomably complex Soviet empire in our time.

He begins with his own childhood memories of the postwar Soviet occupation of Pinsk, in what was then Poland's eastern frontier ("something dreadful and incomprehensible...in this world that I enter at seven years of age"), and takes us up to 1967, when, as a journalist just starting out, he traveled across a snow-covered and desolate Siberia, and through the Soviet Union's seven southern and Central Asian republics, territories whose individual histories, cultures, and religions he found thriving even within the "stiff, rigorous corset of Soviet power."

Between 1989 and 1991, Kapuscinski made a series of extended journeys through the disintegrating Soviet empire, and his account of these forms the heart of the book. Bypassing official institutions and itineraries, he traversed the Soviet territory alone, from the border of Poland to the site of the most infamous gulags in far-eastern Siberia (where "nature pals it up with the executioner"), from above the Arctic Circle to the edge of Afghanistan, visiting dozens of cities and towns and outposts, traveling more than 40,000 miles, venturing into the individual lives of men, women, and children in order to Understand the collapsing but still various larger life of the empire.

Bringing the book to a close is a collection of notes which, Kapuscinski writes, "arose in the margins of my journeys" -- reflections on the state of the ex-USSR and on his experience of having watched its fate unfold "on the screen of a television set...as well as on the screen of the country's ordinary, daily reality, which surrounded me during my travels." It is this "schizophrenic perception in two different dimensions" that enabled Kapuscinski to discover and illuminate the most telling features of a society in dire turmoil.

Imperium is a remarkable work from one of the most original and sharply perceptive interpreters of our world -- galvanizing narrative deeply informed by Kapuscinski's limitless curiosity and his passion for truth, and suffused with his vivid sense of the overwhelming importance of history as it is lived, and of our constantly shifting places within it.

About this title

About the Author

Ryszard Kapuscinski was born in eastern Poland in 1932. His earlier books, which include Shah of Shahs, The Emperor, and The Soccer War, have been translated into nineteen languages.

From the Back Cover

The Soccer War

"Kapuscinski is the conjuror extraordinary of modern reportage. The soccer War is a splendid example of his magic."

-- John Le Carre

"Here is perhaps the most essential of the century's figures -- the wandering dissident, who is always on the side of emancipation but who has had to find a way of getting his point not only past the censors but into the indifferent skulls of the readers as well."

-- Christopher Hitchens, New York Newsday

Shah Of Shahs

"[This] is a book of great economy and power. It has its author's skill with vivid imagery, a breathless way of writing that carries the reader along, a supreme sense of the absurd."

Fouad Ajami, The New Republic

"Kapuscinski's last book was The Emperor, a superb evocation of the decay of Haile Selassie's court. Now he has written an equally evocative description of the end of the Shah of Iran. It is wonderful."

-- William Shawcross

The Emperor

Kapuscinski's writing, always wonderfully concrete and observant, conjures marvels of meaning out of minutiae. And his book transcends reportage, becoming a nightmare of power...that reads as if Italo Calvino had rewritten Machiavelli...An unforgettable, fiercely comic, and finally compassionate book."

-- Salman Rushdie

"Kapuscinski has delivered to us what may be the last message from a time when societies did not change... [A] sensitive, powerful, and surprisingly merciful book."

-- Neal Ascherson, The New York Review of Books

From the Inside Flap

scinski's last book, The Soccer War -a revelation of the contemporary experience of war -- prompted John le Carre to call the author "the conjurer extraordinary of modern reportage." Now, in Imperium, Kapuscinski gives us a work of equal emotional force and evocative power: a personal, brilliantly detailed exploration of the almost unfathomably complex Soviet empire in our time.<br><br>He begins with his own childhood memories of the postwar Soviet occupation of Pinsk, in what was then Poland's eastern frontier ("something dreadful and incomprehensible...in this world that I enter at seven years of age"), and takes us up to 1967, when, as a journalist just starting out, he traveled across a snow-covered and desolate Siberia, and through the Soviet Union's seven southern and Central Asian republics, territories whose individual histories, cultures, and religions he found thriving even within the "stiff, rigorous corset of Soviet power."<br><br>Between 1989 and

Reviews

Journalist Kapuscinski ( The Soccer War ) wandered across the Soviet Union from 1989 to 1991. His rewarding, sharply observed travelogue illuminates the tragedy of 20th-century Soviet history and the positive forces struggling against demoralization, poverty, rising crime and a government/military/KGB bureaucracy entrenched amid the disintegration of "the last colonial empire on earth." He describes his return to Pinsk, his Polish hometown that is now part of Byelorussia, which Soviet troops invaded in 1939 when he was seven, killing or deporting almost the entire intelligentsia. With mordant irony and photographic vividness, Kapuscinski journeys from the streets of Moscow to Siberia and across the Central Asian republics, meeting people from all walks of life and pondering the difficulty of democratizing a crumbling empire created through centuries of conquest and annexation. These dispatches from the borderline of Soviet catastrophe make compelling reading. Author tour.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A Polish journalist (The Soccer War, 1991, etc.) who has written extensively on the Third World turns a discriminating eye on the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, showing once again that Russia is ``a country utterly without precedent.'' The book is based partly on his boyhood experiences of the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, partly on his travels (particularly in the period of decline and disintegration, 198991), and partly on his reflections. He brings a sharp perspective even to well-traveled routes: the customs officer sifting with meticulous care through sack after sack of grain, spread out on his table, to see that nothing has been concealed; the death camps of Kolyma, where three million people died, today displaying only the ``rusty carcasses of ships, rotting watchtowers, deep holes from which some kind of ore was once extracted''; the swimming pool where once stood the Temple of Christ the Savior, 30 stories high, which was built with exquisite care by successive czars to commemorate the defeat of Napoleon and which was demolished by Stalin. Kapuciski's political judgments are also fresh: He notes acidly that not one American political scientist predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that some indeed saw it as a model system. Nor does he believe that Gorbachev brought about the break-up of a flourishing USSR, but just the opposite; the USSR had been disintegrating for a long time, and Gorbachev extended its life for as long as possible. It has left a heritage of poverty, deep memories of terror, staggering demoralization, and ecological disaster. The author's prognosis is not reassuring: He quotes Nicholas driving his troika over the fields in Tolstoy's War and Peace, ``Heaven only knows where we are going, and heaven knows what is happening to us.'' Sensitive and searching. (First serial to the New Yorker) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Journalist and author of several critically acclaimed books, among them The Soccer War (LJ 4/15/91), Kapus'cin'ski here chronicles the life of the Soviet Union. He divides his book into three sections: "First Encounters (1939-1967)"; "From a Bird's-Eye View (1989-1991)"; and "The Sequel Continues (1992-1993)." As such, he covers the relative zenith and dramatic decline of the one-time superpower. Movingly written, eloquently translated, and replete with literary nuances, Imperium is thought-provoking and fascinating. The subject matter is vast, but Kapus'cin'ski manages to provide enough detail to satisfy inquisitive readers while at the same time not creating a burdensome work. Because of his keen attention to detail, historical knowledge, and powerful writing skills, Kapus'cin'ski's Imperium is a chilling and enthralling record of the decline of an empire and the brutality and inhumanity that frequently characterized it. Highly recommended.
Joseph P. Parsons, Columbia Coll., Chicago
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In an odd but honest recommendation of his own book, the peripatetic Kapuscinski, last seen traveling around Africa (The Soccer War, 1991), writes that his text "disintegrates and falls apart." How apt, considering his destinations, the restive borderlands of the USSR circa 1989. From the Caucasus Mountains to Central Asia, across Siberia, and arriving in cheerless, treeless Kolyma at the very end of the gulag archipelago, Kapuscinski combines his ornate impressions of the present with historical and literary vignettes of the past. Yet this unifying compositional concept becomes fairly haggard before long. Disquisitions on Armenia's ancient manuscripts lead up to the author's adventurous subterfuge to get himself to the war-torn town of Stepanakert. A visit to the fast-evaporating Aral Sea is serviceable, but his account of sneaking around the Kremlin (with events such as Beria's arrest thrown in), while mildly interesting, simply overexalts trivial details. Though episodic in character, this work manages to showcase the author's acuteness of observation of the empire's waning days, a dramatic period in itself. Gilbert Taylor

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679426191
• ISBN 13: 9780679426196
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 331