When Ryszard Kapuscinski died in January, at the age of 74, he was praised in dozens of languages as one of the best writers of the 20th century. He never received the Nobel Prize, despite the annual rumors, yet he attained a level of international fame that many Nobelists could envy. As a reporter for the Polish Press Agency, Kapuscinski traveled to the most dangerous and remote corners of the Third World — he claimed to have witnessed 27 revolutions, and to have been sentenced to death four times. After filing his formal dispatches to Warsaw, Kapuscinski filled his notebooks with the more private and elusive insights that he turned into his books. “The Emperor,” published in 1978, which documented the fall of the Haile Selassie regime in Ethiopia, was the first of his works to be translated into English. It was followed by other literary treatments of catastrophe, from “The Shah of Shahs,” about the fall of Iran’s ruler, to “Imperium,” a tour through the fragments of the Soviet Union.

What made Kapuscinski unique among travel writers, however, was not just his intrepidity and his literary gifts. It was his paradoxical status as a truth-teller in a communist dictatorship. His portraits of Third World tyranny and corruption were also, inevitably, portraits of the tyranny and corruption at home. “The Emperor,” in which Kapuscinski used interviews with Selassie’s court functionaries to tell the story of Ethiopia’s paranoid, doomed regime, deliberately nudged the story in the direction of parable, and it was instantly recognized as a warning back home. Like so many Eastern European writers under communism, Kapuscinski was an allegorist. Yet he would never have become so popular if he were not also a swashbuckling realist, always ready to board the rickety airplane, cross the burning desert, or confront the nervous guard at the checkpoint.

It seems like a kind of nemesis, then, that just months after his death, both pillars of his reputation — his political independence and his devoted realism — should come under attack. Last week, the cover story of Newsweek’s Polish edition was the disclosure that Kapuscinski had cooperated with the communist secret police. Between 1967 and 1972, he filed reports under the code names “Poet” and “Vera Cruz,” on impersonal subjects such as the political situation in Latin America and Cuban foreign policy.

While this story — the latest in a series of ugly discoveries to emerge from Poland’s communist-era archives — naturally caused a sensation in Poland, it would be unfair if it caused any lasting damage to Kapuscinski ‘s reputation. Kapuscinski, it appears so far, was not an informer or a collaborator — he never reported on any individual or gave the state any secrets. Instead, he seems to have written the kind of regional analysis that you could find in any newspaper. According to a 1981 document in his file, he “did not pass on any essential material the secret police was interested in.” In short, Kapuscinski, like everyone else under the communist dictatorship, was forced to pay symbolic homage to the regime, to make obeisance in exchange for his unusual privileges. The moral of the story is not that Kapuscinski sinned, but that a tyranny leaves its dirty handprint on even the best of its subjects.

The more troubling criticism of Kapuscinski has to do with his literary methods. In 2001, in a review of his book “The Shadows of the Sun” in the Times Literary Supplement, John Ryle summarized the long-growing complaints about Kapuscinski reportorial techniques. “The force of his writing,” Mr. Ryle pointed out, “depends to a considerable extent on an air of certainty, on the voice of experience.” Precisely because Kapuscinski went places nobody else could go, his accounts could not be fact-checked in the ordinary sense. You had to take his word for it, and because he wrote so beautifully and authoritatively, you were happy to do so.

But according to Mr. Ryle, this trust was not always earned. To native Ethiopians, for instance, the portrait of Haile Selassie’s court in “The Emperor” was unrecognizable. Kapuscinski wrote that Selassie never read books, since “for him, neither the written nor the printed word existed”; in fact, he was an avid reader who spent hours in his personal library. Kapuscinski shows courtiers referring to their king as “His Most Virtuous Highness,” “His Benevolent Majesty,” “His Sublime Majesty,” “His Charitable Majesty”; but these Ruritanian titles correspond to nothing in the Amharic language. It begins to seem that Kapuscinski was writing a fable, rather than a work of nonfiction.

Mr. Ryle went on to point out numerous other errors of fact and interpretation in Kapuscinski’s African books. His criticisms gained new attention in the weeks after Kapuscinski’s death, when Slate published a slashing article by Jack Shafer under the headline “The Lies of Ryszard Kapuscinski.” According to Mr. Shafer, Kapuscinski belongs in the same category as con artists such as Stephen Glass and James Frey, who also passed off inventions as fact: “Exactly how is Kapuscinski different from James Frey in practice if not in execution?”

For a good answer to that question, turn to “Travels With Herodotus” (Knopf, 275 pages, $25), the first of Kapuscinski’s works to appear posthumously in English. Published in Polish in 2004, “Travels With Herodotus” is clearly a work of Kapuscinski’s retirement — a hybrid of memoir and literary criticism, in which he remembers his earliest journeys and his developing sense of vocation. It can also be read as a defense — perhaps even a deliberate rebuttal — against the kind of criticisms made by Mr. Ryle in 2001. For if Thucydides is the founder of scientific history — the hardheaded analyst of power politics — Herodotus is the first great mythic historian, making room in his book for every kind of good story, whether it’s true or false. To write like Herodotus, Kapuscinski suggests, is not to expunge fiction from your work, but to find the higher truth that even fiction conceals.

Certainly Kapuscinski feels something more than mere literary admiration for Herodotus. “As time went by,” he writes, “I began to feel something akin to warmth, even friendship, toward Herodotus. … It was an affinity with a human being whom I did not know personally, yet who charmed me by the manner of his relationships with others, by his way of being, by how, wherever he appeared, he instantly became the nucleus, or the mortar, of human community, putting it together, bringing it into being.” As he braids his own stories with the famous stories of Herodotus, Kapuscinski fashions an elegant homage to his literary ancestor, whom he helps us to see as the original foreign correspondent.

Their bond began with Kapuscinski’s very first foreign assignment, in the mid-1950s. The junior reporter had begged his editor for the chance to travel, hoping for nothing better than a trip to Czechoslovakia. To his delight and dismay, he ended up being sent to India, a country about which he knew absolutely nothing. When his editor gave him the news, she also presented him with “a thick book with a stiff cover of yellow cloth. On the front, stamped in gold letters, was Herodotus, THE HISTORIES.” This volume became his companion in India, where he was dazed by the immensity of the world beyond his homeland; in China, where he chafed under rigid censorship and the endless invocations of Chairman Mao; and in the Congo, where he risked his life to cover the brutal war of independence. The pages of Herodotus offered the kind of dramatic stories and human meanings that were so hard to find in the real world: the Scythians defying Darius’s army, Xerxes lashing the disobedient sea, Themistocles urging the Athenians to fight for their freedom.

Kapuscinski does an excellent job of bringing these ancient stories to life. Educated by the atrocities of his own time, he refuses to let Herodotus’s ancient atrocities become distant and abstract. When he reads about Darius’s destruction of Babylon, he wonders: “But impaling three thousand men on the stake? How was this done? Was one stake set, as the men of Babylon stood in line, waiting their turn? Did each look on as the man in front of him as impaled? Were they bound to prevent their escape? Or were they simply paralyzed by fear?” Substitute machine guns for wooden stakes, and you could be in the occupied Poland of Kapuscinski’s childhood.

Yet “Travels With Herodotus” is hampered by the fact that it is, in the end, a book about reading a book — not a very dramatic activity. There is something deliberately anticlimactic about the way Kapuscinski will turn from, say, a glorious description of Ethiopian landscape — “One feels like the king of the world here” — back to his copy of “The Histories,” picking up the narrative where he left off in the previous chapter. In “Travels with Herodotus,” the great story-teller is not telling his own stories but retelling someone else’s. And the morals he finds in them can be disappointingly platitudinous: “His most important discovery? That there are many worlds. And that each is different. Each is important.”

If Kapuscinski ‘s last book is not a major work, however, it does shed light on his whole achievement as a writer. For in explaining Herodotus’s methods, one feels, Kapuscinski is also defending his own. Like the Greek, he is less a researcher than a voyager, who gets at the truth by talking to people and retelling their stories:

He was probably one of those chatterboxes who prey upon helpless listeners, who must have them, who indeed wither and cannot live without them; one of those unwearying and perpetually excited intermediaries, who see something, hear something, and must immediately pass it on to others, constitutionally incapable of keeping things even briefly to themselves. To be a conduit is their passion: therein lies their life’s mission.

Like Herodotus, Kapuscinski was not always an accurate reporter, but he was always one of those vital “conduits,” and that is why his books continue to live.

akirsch@nysun.com