Ini merupakan tudingan tentang pemberitaan yang kemungkinan dicampur dengan fantasi:

Ryszard Kapuscinski was considered to be one of the most fearless journalists of his time. As the only foreign correspondent for PAP, the Polish news agency, in the 1960s and '70s, he covered some 27 coups and revolutions around the world, survived firing squads in Africa and befriended the likes of Che Guevara. Much of his reporting formed the basis for widely acclaimed books such as The Emperor, about the life of the eccentric Ethiopian leader Haile Selassie, Shah of Shahs, about the fall of the Iranian ruler Reza Pahlavi and Imperium, on the last days of the Soviet Union. Salman Rushdie once said of Kapuscinski: "He is worth a thousand whimpering and fantasizing scribblers."

Now, three years after Kapuscinski's death at the age of 74, fresh questions have emerged about whether the journalist's works are based more in fiction than in fact, causing a firestorm in Poland where Kapuscinski is considered a national hero. In a new 600-page biography entitled Kapuscinski Non-Fiction, the Polish journalist Artur Domoslawski says that Kapuscinski repeatedly crossed the boundary between reporting and fiction writing during his career, claiming to have witnessed events where he hadn't actually been present and inventing images in order to heighten the dramatic effect of his stories. (See the top 10 fiction books of 2009.)

In the book, for instance, Domoslawski writes that Kapuscinski never actually met Guevara or Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese freedom fighter who became the Democratic Republic of Congo's first Prime Minister in 1960. He also says Kapuscinski never received an 11th hour reprieve from a firing squad in Congo in the 1960s and that his father had never been a Soviet prisoner of war, as Kapuscinski had claimed. In addition, Domoslawski, who is a journalist at Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's largest paper, claims that Kapuscinski served as a spy for the communists on his travels around the world, noting that it was nearly impossible to leave Poland at that time without signing a cooperation declaration.

Domoslawski's book has been widely condemned in Poland, in part because of Kapuscinski's nearly god-like status in the country, but also because Kapuscinski had been Domoslawski's mentor and close friend. Kapuscinski's widow, Alicja, who unsuccessfully sought a court order to block the publication of the book, likened Domoslawski's work to patricide. "He wanted to precipitate the removal from the pedestal of the one who promoted him, valued him, encouraged him and recommended him," she said in an interview with the newspaper Polska The Times. "Such things should be published several dozen years after the death of the subject, not when his wife and daughter are still around." (See pictures of the Polish Woodstock.)

Others have been more blunt in their criticism of the book. Former Polish Foreign Minister Wladyslaw Bartoszewski has compared the biography's publishers to "purveyors of brothel guides." Polish author Tomasz Lubienski says Domoslawski crossed the line when he decided to publicly challenge the reputation of his mentor. "Domoslawski was not a good disciple of Kapuscinski, who was a refined man," Lubienski wrote in Gazeta Wyborcza. "[His book is] about the private life of the man who wrote The Emperor. That's unnecessary and it pushes the book into the gutter." Says another writer, Andrzej Stasiuk, in defense of Kapuscinski: "Would we care about the truth if it was served up in a dull, pretentious way? I read Kapuscinski for the pleasure of reading Kapuscinski. I read his works for the sentences, paragraphs, fragments, the history he creates by pulling together details, second-long observations, crumbs. But is this the truth? I don't care."

Domoslawski maintains that he didn't set out to destroy a man he still considers to be a great writer. In fact, he said in an interview with Polska The Times that he wrote the book with "empathy" for his old friend. "He has been a myth and an icon," the biographer said. "Perhaps now we will look at him as a human being in his all complexity." And some commentators outside Poland have praised Domoslawski's work for its honest portrayal of the man. "I find that the author tries to be fair, allowing many different voices to speak," the British historian Timothy Garton Ash writes in the Guardian newspaper. "He captures the Ryszard I knew, starting with a brilliant evocation of his warm, nut-brown, disarming smile. ... But this book is the protracted cry of a worried and even a disappointed disciple — one who, in his nearly three-year journey of investigation, found things that deeply disturbed him." (Read a TIME piece on Kapuscinski.)

In the last years of his life, Kapuscinski himself openly acknowledged that his work was not straight news reporting. "I aim to create such a way of writing which is not possible to categorize and which I call for my own use 'a new text,'" he said in an interview with Poland's Dziennik newspaper. "I simply want to write a text, which to my best conviction and experience is the closest and most faithful to what surrounds me. It is an experiment and I do not care what category it will fall into." For his many fans, it may not matter if his works are put in the nonfiction or fiction section of the bookstore. As the writer once suggested, perhaps bookstores need to come up with a new category marked simply "Kapuscinski."