VZ: Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Making of a Nation - Brossura

Bykov, Dmitry

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1960385399 ISBN 13: 9781960385390

Casa editrice: Open Letter, 2025

Riassunto

How does a comedian become the face of a nation's fight for survival? In VZ: Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Making of a Nation, celebrated Russian author Dmitry Bykov unpacks the extraordinary rise of Vladimir Zelenskyy—from a TV star to a wartime leader defying a global superpower. With wit and razor-sharp insight, Bykov dives into the moments that shaped Zelenskyy's improbable journey, revealing the man behind the headlines.

This is not just a story of one leader but of a nation on the edge, and the power of resilience in the face of overwhelming odds. Bykov offers a fresh, compelling take on Zelenskyy’s leadership, Ukraine’s struggle for sovereignty, and what it truly means to fight for democracy in the modern world.

For anyone eager to understand the making of a modern hero and the fierce will of a nation under siege, VZ is essential reading.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Dmitry Bykov 96 books, including 12 novels, 6 biographies and 25 collections of poetry. He has won "The Big Book" three times and Brothers Strugatsky Prize four times. He participated in the Russian oppositional movement and was a member of the Oppositional Coordination Council, was poisoned in 2019, but survived.

John Freedman is an American writer and translator who has translated 150 plays and edited the award-winning anthology A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War: 20 Short Works by Ukrainian Playwrights. He is Project Director of the Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings for Philip Arnoult's Center for International Theatre Development.

Estratto. © Ristampato con autorizzazione. Tutti i diritti riservati.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

 

Before describing someone else’s biography, you must at least briefly touch on your own. That is, you must explain why anyone should listen to what you have to say.

 

Throughout my literary life in Russia I have published approximately ninety books, among them several biographies, mainly of writers. But that is not why you must read what I have to say.

 

At present I am one of three authors in Russia who are included among the lists of hostile foreign agents and as a member of the fifth column. In other words, to use the current terminology, I am an enemy of the Russian people; in Ukraine my name is included on the Peacemaker website which lists enemies of Ukraine. I was blacklisted in Russia (meaning a complete ban on journalistic and pedagogical work) for speaking out against the government, and against the war, while in Ukraine I was singled out for calling Odesa a city of great Russian culture, and for calling nationalists fools.

 

As a hero of an old book once said, if they throw rocks at you from both sides of the road you are, most likely, on the right path.

 

This book will almost surely be met with friendly hostility in Russia, and friendly suspicion in Ukraine. In Russia, they will name the fantastic sums for which I agreed to write it, while in Ukraine there will definitely be those who will say it was the Kremlin that paid me these sums—for writing a bad book about Zelenskiy. All this is entirely de rigeur, and it would be much sadder for me if the book were not noticed at all. I put a great deal of effort into it, and I expressed in it many thoughts that are important to me. After all, Zelenskiy rehabilitated not just the creative intelligentsia—he defended the meaning of our entire life, everything that humanity, in principle, considers important. Putin reset it; Zelenskiy defended it. I wanted to understand how he did that, and how we all can be worthy of this era, which, regardless of the outcome of the war, will be known as the Zelenskiy era.

 

It seems to me that most books today are written as if by obligation. A writer worries and procrastinates for the longest time, then finally forces himself to sit down at his desk, struggles painfully with his own problems and complexes, abundantly spilling his own blood over clumsily heavy phrases in hopes that the reader will recognize in them some of his or her own childhood traumas, and on that basis will understand the text on at least the simplest of levels: Is it really like this for everyone? Back in the age of Enlightenment—long compromised by subsequent history—someone instilled in us the notion that reading is more prestigious than doing something, for example, slalom skiing or engaging in sex.

 

This book was written for entirely different reasons. The author sincerely wants to grapple with the primary mystery of the twenty-first century. Over its first twenty-two years, this century has offered us nothing more entertaining than Zelenskiy. Not COVID, nor the mass insanity of Russian citizens, nor the subversion of the Big Bang theory by recent observations (apparently the most distant galaxies are not flying off anywhere after all!) are capable of standing alongside the riddle of Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

 

Everything we know about Zelenskiy, including the gossip, preferences and quotes, could be retold in an hour’s time, and, to do that, you need not travel to Ukraine to meet with his colleagues and contemporaries. Paradoxically, he was precisely where he needed to be, but this is not only about him, it is also about the unique place that he occupies. The situation reminds us of some of the greatest twists and turns of history, the consequences of which are not fully evident even to distant descendants.

 

The actor and producer of a not-so-intellectual stand-up comedy show successfully led a nation opposing a fascist nuclear power. A fascist armed with nuclear weapons, the worst nightmare of the inhabitants of the twentieth century, who thought no beast was more frightening than Hitler, has been broken right before our eyes by a European country that is fifteen times Russia’s inferior, geographically speaking, and four times inferior in its population. This country, whose annual budget ranked fifty-eighth in the world (Russia was fifteenth), has, for twenty months, with the technical assistance of the United States and Europe, resisted the aggression of its neighbor which still possesses the largest territory in the world. This country whose army is nineteenth in the world in terms of size (Russia’s is fifth) has buried the myth of the invincibility and heroism of the Russian soldier right before our eyes. A jester defeats the devil, a comedian defeats the KGB officer, the actor (even if he is a buffoon, even if he is a circus clown) defeats the villain. Right in plain sight, Yevgeny Schwartz’s fairy tale about a Dragon, read and watched by all of Russia, despite all the Soviet prohibitions, is now in the process of coming true. A great empire is collapsing, trying to trap in its zone of influence its unloved stepdaughter, with whom it has cohabited for 450 years, since the time of the Pereiaslav Rada when Hetman Bohdan Khmelnitskiy led Ukraine into an alliance with the Russians.

 

There are actually two mysteries here: how Zelenskiy won the presidential race in the wake of the most serious political crisis in Ukrainian history, and how he stood his ground at the head of a nation that entered the most serious war in its history. How did David defeat Goliath once again? And how did this David, who composed psalms in the format of feuilletons, manage to remind the whole world of the inviolability of the great biblical truths—he, who just yesterday was amusing Russian leaders at corporate parties, or portraying a phallus playing the piano on his own show?

 

This is one of those divine miracles, about which legends are later composed. And although the miracle was forged by the people of Ukraine with their examples of heroism and self-sacrifice, the miracle bears Zelenskiy’s expressive Jewish face, Zelenskiy’s quick brown eyes, Zelenskiy’s familiar, husky voice. Whatever his fate, he was in the first half of the ’20s an instrument of that Absolute One, in whose existence the world, corrupted by its inability to distinguish between good and evil, and by the myth of ubiquitous corruption, hardly believes in anymore.

 

Could a writer have a more weighty topic? It is rather like a dinosaur emerging from the forest, and addressing you in a human voice.

 

And I would add: think as you will, but don’t pass this book by.

 

Dmitry Bykov,

Ithaca, August 2023

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Open Letter
• Data di pubblicazione: 2025
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1960385399
• ISBN 13: 9781960385390
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 499
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile