Author draws criticism

Even before it appeared, the biography of Poland's most celebrated journalist was the subject of attempts to ban its publication.

Ryszard Kapuscinski's widow, Alicja, unsuccessfully sought a court order to block the publication, saying it was damaging to her reputation and Kapuscinski's memory.

A publishing house, which was originally to release the book, also pulled out.

Though much respected in Poland, Kapuscinski has already been accused of spying for the communists on his travels to the world's trouble spots at a time when it was nearly impossible to leave Poland without signing a cooperation declaration.

In an interview for Reuters in 2007 Alicja Kapuscinska said her husband was not a spy, but contracts with the regime were the "price he had to pay" for travelling the world under communism, which was toppled in Poland in 1989.

It isn't the first time Kapuscinski has also been accused of embellishing his reports. A 2007 article in Slate magazine told of " fabrications, errors, and fictions" in his work, and concluded, "Nice try, but no journalism."

Kapuscinski is the latest in a long line of public figures whose reputations have been tarnished by allegations of collaboration with Poland's communist regime.

Former Solidarity union leader Lech Walesa, whose strikes in the Gdansk shipyards helped topple Poland's Communist regime, was accused of being a communist spy in Walesa and the Security Service, released in June 2008.

Walesa's defenders saw the accusations as driven by political motives or jealousy.

Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, a government minister and a survivor of the Auschwitz Nazi death camp, condemned author Artur Domoslawski, saying his book had violated journalistic ethics by applying a tabloid approach to Kapuscinski's private life.

Domoslawski said he sought to start a debate over how far Poland remained haunted by its communist past.

"I think my book is fair. The strange thing is I was writing with sympathy about Kapuscinski. I wrote it with big empathy," he said.

- AGENCIES