Читать книгу Ryszard Kapuscinski - Artur Domoslawski - Страница 4

Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life.

Gabriel García Márquez to his biographer, Gerald Martin

All sorts of biographies enjoy great popularity (every bookshop has a large, separate biographical section). It implies a sort of self-defence reaction against the advancing anonymity of the world. People still have a need to commune (if only through reading) with someone specific, an individual who has a name, a face, habits and desires. The appeal of biography also comes from the fact that people would like to see how this great person achieved greatness, they’d like to get an inside look at his style.

Ryszard Kapuściński, Lapidarium

The merit of writers’ biographies continues to be disputed. For some, the work is all we need to know. Others say they love the books, so they want to know more about the people who wrote them. Then there is always the possibility that the life will throw light on the books and deepen our understanding of them.

Ian Buruma, writer and journalist

The lives of writers are a legitimate subject of inquiry; and the truth should not be skimped. It may well be, in fact, that a full account of a writer’s life might in the end be more a work of literature and more illuminating – of a cultural or historical moment – than the writer’s books.

V. S. Naipaul, writer, Nobel Prize winner, 2001

A biography can never fully reveal the source of its subject. The commonplace that a biographer has found the ‘key’ to a person’s life is implausible. People are too complicated and inconsistent for this to be true. The best a biographer can hope for is to illuminate aspects of a life and seek to give glimpses of the subject, and that way tell a story.

Patrick French, biographer of V. S. Naipaul