Ryszard Kapuscinski Goes Home : The verbally acrobatic travel writer makes fewer leaps when writing about his own country : IMPERIUM, <i> By Ryszard Kapuscinski (Alfred A. Knopf: $24; 331 pp.)</i>

“Imperium” is the name Ryszard Kapuscinski gives to the shadow that darkens his personal life and his life in history. In the United States we are not used to connecting the two: we may study history a little, but few of us think of ourselves as living in it. A D-day celebration is a date in our calendar of fuzzy remembrance shows. It belongs to June, the moonwalk belongs to July, Woodstock to August. Only upon a small number--veterans--did history fasten the bone-marrow grip that it has always exerted on Europeans.

In few parts of Europe has the grip been as wrenching as in Poland. “So far from God, so near to the United States,” Cubans and Mexicans will say of their countries; more in angry irony, perhaps, than in rage. Poland has never doubted she was near to God--whatever others may have thought--and it is less irony or rage than a doomed futility that follows upon the idea that even God hasn’t kept her from being near to Russia. For 300 years the Russians, with Germany and Austria assisting and occasionally taking the lead, trundled Poland’s borders back and forth, sometimes leaving a little bit in the middle, sometimes collapsing them entirely.

Kapuscinski is a transcendental journalist. By that I mean that he has traveled in distant and little-known places and used what he sees and hears simply as the mouth of the cave. He begins with appearances, for which he has uncommon gifts of poetry, irony and paradox; and clambers down them into essences. In his books on Ethiopia and Emperor Haile Selassie, on Iran and the Shah, and in a collection of pieces on Africa and Central America called “The Soccer Wars,” he unwrapped a strangeness and came upon himself inside it. He does not turn them into us , as explanatory journalism does; he turns us into them .

As I said, the places were all distant. Traveling, he could shed himself to find himself later. “Imperium”--the Soviet Union--allows him the mileage (Warsaw is farther from Vladivostok than from Tehran, Addis Ababa or Honduras) but it begins next door. Closer than next door: right on top of him and of his past and his country’s past. He is writing about the whale from inside its belly. It cramps him and distends him; it strains and constrains his talent. Except sometimes.

At the beginning of this account of his travels in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and ‘60s, and then in 1989-1991 during perestroika, he for once recalls not moving but being moved upon: invaded. It was 1939 and he was a child with his mother trying to get back to Pinsk, then in Eastern Poland. The Russians had begun pushing west even as the Nazis were pushing east: the child and the mother were pushed along roads choked with refugees, cars and wagons and dead horses that had to be dragged aside. It is the Kapuscinski touch to cut so directly to a child’s perception: “Dead horses are very heavy.”

We have many accounts of occupations and the shattering of worlds. Kapuscinski recalls the occupation and shattering of his alphabet. At school the children suddenly had to learn Russian Cyrillic. He writes: “We begin with the letter S. ‘What do you mean by S,’ someone asks from the back of the classroom. ‘It should be with A!’ ‘Children,’ says the teacher (who is a Pole) in a despondent voice, ‘look at the cover of our book. What is the first letter on this cover? S!’ ”

Like most of the Pinsk Poles, the teacher was soon deported west so that the town could be shuttled back once more within the borders of its giant neighbor. Kapuscinski writes well about deportations, hunger and destruction, but more or less as others have. Nothing else has the recollecting force of the broken alphabet; or of the sky-blue uniforms worn by the secret police in contrast to the Soviet army’s mud-drab: “If someone from the NKVD is coming there is an azure glow for a kilometer around him.” The bluebirds of terror.

Kapuscinski plucks such tiny strings to create a mysteriously out-sized resonance. He crosses the Chinese-Soviet border in 1958 aboard the Trans-Siberian Railroad. The passengers were meticulously searched, but the local Buryat tribesmen aboard got a particular going-over. Their small bags of kasha were emptied and the inspectors groped through them. Out of kasha, the author shapes the unforgettable image of a vast, robotic, leaden bureaucracy:

“The fingers of the customs inspectors allow narrow little streams of kasha to pass through them, sifting, sifting, but suddenly--stop! The fingers stop and become motionless. The fingers have felt a strange grain. They felt it; they sent a signal to the custom inspector’s brain; the brain responded--stop! The fingers stand still and are waiting. The brain says, Try one more time, cautiously and carefully.” It turns out to be a milling irregularity, he writes, and continues: “So, not contraband, not a trick, concludes the customs inspector’s brain, but it doesn’t give up yet. On the contrary, it commands the fingers to keep on sifting, keep on examining. . . .”

During the dismal spring thaw in Yakutsk when everything turns to mud, a wraithlike child named Tanya tells of the tunnels of winter. An ice-haze forms when the temperature gets to 40 below, and people leave wakes in it. You can tell who has passed by their shape and direction. The children’s tunnels are short and indistinct. The school principal’s is definite and squat. Some are zigzag and end suddenly. They belong to drunks who collapse and perhaps freeze to death.

Such high resonances are uncharacteristically rare in “Imperium.” Traveling to Moscow, the Ukraine, Siberia, Armenia, Georgia and the Trans-Caucasus, Kapuscinski can write perceptively and sometimes vividly. He finds weariness everywhere, with post-Soviet man depleted not so much by 70 years of repression as by the intense expenditure of means and energy in the repressing.

He attends a meeting of striking miners that rambles purposelessly until the director arrives, to everyone’s relief, to get things on the “right” track. He writes of the killing of the Aral Sea by a vast cotton project that has leached the soil and stolen the rivers. He writes a diverting story of flying into the closed-off Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh disguised as an airline pilot.

On the whole, though, he falls short of the admittedly extraordinary standards of his best work. Quite a bit borders on the routine, and a conclusion that he seems to have had little appetite to write is a dispirited exercise in Whither Russia.

At one point Kapuscinski notes Russians’ proud mystique of size. And, he observes: “It also serves to explain and justify all shortages, mistakes, poverty, and marasmus. It is too big a country to be reformed! explain the opponents of reform. It is too big a country to be cleaned up!--janitors from Brest to Vladivostok throw up their hands. It is too big a country for goods to be delivered everywhere, grumble saleswomen in empty shops.”

Perhaps it is too big for Kapuscinski, with his invaded heritage, to write about. Perhaps there is too much pain for him in the Imperium, and too little distance in it for his necromancy.