Hugo-Bader. Wanderlust

Reporters can be divided into those who are serious or frivolous, writing for either a highbrow or a mainstream audience. Jacek Hugo-Bader is the most famous Polish representative of real-life adventure writing. He’s the king of undercover reporting, a witty chronicler of the Polish political transformation and a tireless explorer of the decaying Imperium. He’s a daredevil and joker. Over the years, he has earned a fair number of detractors who scrutinize his texts for errors and inaccuracies, as well as devoted fans who are captivated by his honesty and uncompromising approach, and who admire his courage to step into other people’s shoes and gaze at the world ‘from an ant’s perspective’. “If we view reportage as the fruit of a mésalliance between literature and tabloids, then this child has inherited very little from his brutal father in flip-flops, boxer shorts and an undershirt,” Hugo-Bader wrote about Remigiusz Ryziński’s book “Foucault in Warsaw”. His own journalistic ‘children’ would be a cross between a nonchalant backpacker and Ryszard Kapuściński after drinking a few glasses of Russian vodka.

The topos of a vagabond as the predominant interpretational mode for his books, in which he describes his own personal adventures, was suggested by Hugo-Bader himself in numerous texts that make reference to the motif of a ‘wandering dog’. In exploring the literary potential inherent in vagabondism, Izabella Adamczewska-Baranowska draws on the writings of Rebecca Solnit and the traditions of plebeian and picaresque literature, using certain techniques developed in literary studies as a response to what has become known as the ‘spatial turn’. The idea for the book’s structure is based on opposite concepts (centre/the provinces, East/West, underground movements/euphoric states). Not only is this book the first attempt to comprehensively present Hugo-Bader’s achievements as a reporter, but it’s also a partial biography of the author, who doesn’t like to talk about himself or provide readers with much of his own biography, although glimpses of his family life sometimes make their way into his texts. Adamczewska-Baranowska doesn’t conduct the kind of sleuthing undertaken by Artur Domosławski in his ‘investigation’ of Kapuściński, or Bill Steigerwald, who set out on Steinbeck’s trail. Her intention is neither to do an audit nor to focus on journalistic or personal ‘blunders’. It’s a presentation of a literary performance by a joculator – an itinerant actor, conjuror and trickster of Polish reportage. (transl. Scotia Gilroy)