Page "Ryszard Kapuściński" Paragraph 13

Kapuściński did not think much of his early poetic output, on the other hand, dismissing it as " production-line Mayakovskyism " ( produkcyjna majakowszczyzna ) and later in life congratulating himself on having avoided publishing his collected juvenilia in book form.

Such demurrals may have been self-interested, as his early poems are said to include Stalinist panegyrics, including an ode, entitled " Brygada Dzierżyńskiego " ( The Dzerzhinsky Brigade ), extolling the " acumen for vigilance " of the first Bolshevik secret-police chief, Felix Dzerzhinsky, a figure particularly notorious in the annals of totalitarian oppression and genocide.

However, in Autoportret reportera (" A Reporter's Self-portrait "; 2003 ), Kapuściński credits his early beginnings as a poet for his becoming a journalist in the end: " I wrote poems the early part of my life, but they were all very bad (...) ' occasional ' pieces (...) but it is precisely those poems that led me to journalism ".

Notwithstanding such self-judgements, it is untrue that all of Kapuściński's early verses were " very bad ": some of them ( to be sure, likewise not all ) reveal a level of prosodic finesse and a degree of genuinely poetic sensibility and conceptual sophistication of which a schoolboy could be rightfully proud ; the poem entitled " Uzdrowienie " ( Healing ), with its expertly codified trope of Christ, published in the periodical Dziś i jutro in August 1949 when Kapuściński was 17, could be cited as an example.

Kapuściński was the hero ( not entirely unjustifiably ) of the article published in the weekly periodical Odrodzenie on the morrow of his 18th birthday ( 5 March 1950 ) reporting on a poetry conference organised at his high school, in which the teenager's poems were compared to those of some of the best-known European poets ( including Mayakovsky and Wierzyński ).

The desire to consign all of his juvenilia to oblivion appears to have been dictated by the embarrassment engendered ( post-1956 ) by the objectionable subject matter of the explicitly Stalinist among those pieces, rather than by the unsatisfactory level of their technical craftsmanship.