Kapuściński was himself accused of being an agent shortly before his death in 2007 Domosławski gives details of his espionage, in particular the notorious case of him spying on the academic and reporter Maria Sten in Mexico. The other considers the system simply as criminal and those who worked within it as traitors – traitors who should be tried. One is to regard the communist regime as illegitimate, but something after which we can draw a "thick line" between the past and the present. Politics in Poland is still largely determined by the past, and after 1989 there have been only two acceptable ways of looking at the postwar era. In engaging with all this, Domosławski has produced a rare and subtle portrait of the People's Republic of Poland. But more important than these revelations was Domosławskii's confirmation of the reporter's close connection with various aspects of the communist order, including the intelligence services his belief in socialist ideology and his uneasy adaptation to post-1989 realities. Kapuściński's widow tried to stop the book's publication because of its unembellished descriptions of the writer's private life (in particular, his extramarital affairs). (The Guardian ran numerous pieces in his defence, including by Neal Ascherson and Timothy Garton Ash.) In Poland, the issues were different. For foreign commentators, the main interest was in discovering how its subject had embroidered the truth in service to style or politics – the fabulations involved his meetings with Che Guevara, Patrice Lumumba, Idi Amin and Salvador Allende. The book caused much controversy when it was published in Poland two years ago (with the title Kapuściński – Non-Fiction). Both the author and his "hero", friend and mentor stand out from what was acceptable during the cold war, and today. His wasn't the typical way of writing journalism and, similarly, Artur Domosławski's book is not a conventional biography. His vivid literary reporting of the uses and misuses of power, in the books The Emperor, The Soccer War and Shah of Shahs, was widely read in the 1980s and beyond, partly because of the author's unique position (a star reporter emerging from the darkness of communist Poland, then in the midst of martial law after a failed workers revolt) but mainly for its unusual style – personal, meticulous, literary, digressive. "K apuściński" has long been one of Poland's few internationally recognised names, comparable to "Miłosz" or "Polanski".
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