The many lives of Volodymyr Zelensky

Fate turned on a comedy show televised from Moscow in December 1997. In the grand final of kvn, an improv contest dating to Soviet times, a group of Armenian comics took on a team from Ukraine. The Ukrainian troupe brought together Volodymyr Zelensky, some of his future business partners and a writer of “Servant of the People”—the tv satire in which he would play a teacher who accidentally becomes president, a hit that was the launch-pad for his real-life election victory. If not for that night in Moscow, who knows?

So wonders Serhii Rudenko in “Zelensky”, the first book in English about Ukraine’s comedian-turned-president-turned-war leader. Along with such twists of fate, his account highlights the overlap between showbiz and politics, and, above all, the way the emergency of war can clarify people and priorities.