zelensky biography review

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Volodymyr Zelensky behind the mask

Serhii Rudenko’s biography is a portrait of a wartime hero whose troubled past may return to haunt him.

By Lyse Doucet

“Good evening friends,” began Volodymyr Zelensky . It was five minutes to midnight. Ukraine’s wartime president, hailed the world over for his masterclass in leadership, now speaks every night to the people of Ukraine, and many beyond. But this address on New Year’s Eve 2018, on the independent TV channel 1+1, came as a surprise to everyone, including the then-president, Petro Poroshenko.

“Dear Ukrainians, I’m promising you I will run for president. And I’m doing it right away.”

Ukrainian social media exploded. Poroshenko supporters who’d been settling in, Champagne glasses at the ready, for the traditional interruption of regular programming for a presidential New Year’s greeting, were incensed. “Who? This clown?” they asked. “Who is he to run for president?”

That was the night Ukraine’s star comedian and actor – famed for his cheeky, at times crude, comedic routines – entered the political stage. Was it just a publicity stunt, people wondered – another Zelensky antic to promote his popular TV serie s Servant of the People produced by his media company Kvartal 95 Studio, in which his character, the history teacher Vasiliy Holoborodko, is catapulted into the presidency?

It was no joke. Poroshenko was soon crushed by a whopping 73 per cent of the vote by a fresh-faced, clean-shaven 41-year-old – the same guy who’d spent years making jokes about him. Now Zelensky was promising to end cronyism and stop a shooting war in eastern Ukraine where Russian boots first crossed the border in 2014.

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[See also: The Zelensky myth: why we should resist hero-worshipping Ukraine’s president ]

Now the world knows this Zelensky, his face bearded and lined, the supreme commander-in-chief uniting his compatriots, inspiring people the world over as he stands up to the shadowy figure of Vladimir Putin , bent on bombing and besieging Ukraine into submission. In those first breathtaking weeks after Russian tanks rumbled across the borders, the internet sparkled with every Zelensky gem. “Did you know he was the Ukrainian voice of Paddington Bear?” “He won Ukraine’s Dancing with the Stars in 2006!”

But today this conflict drags on with no end in sight; it’s everyone’s war now. The cost of the food on our tables and the power keeping the lights on in our homes connects to this barbaric conflagration in Europe’s far corner.

Zelensky now disrupts the world’s media landscape, addressing parliaments from Germany to Japan via video, popping up everywhere from the Grammys to Glastonbury . A consummate communicator, he hits all the right notes: in Britain, he channels his inner Churchill; in Germany, he invokes Ronald Reagan’s “tear down this wall” Berlin speech; in America, Pearl Harbour and 9/ll. One of the few rebukes came from Israel when Ukraine’s Jewish leader tried to draw history lessons from the Holocaust. A team of former top journalists and old TV buddies helps shape this stream. But the first and last word is said to come from Zelensky – a president who films his own video selfies, urging his nation to hold its nerve and berating Western allies to send ever more weapons in a war he’s fighting to secure their future too.

It was only a matter of time before a publisher rushed something into print about this man of the moment. The first, by the Ukrainian writer and commentator Serhii Rudenko, known for his political biographies , was initially published in Ukrainian in 2021, with a title that translates as “Zelensky without Make-Up”. Comprising 38 small chapters, some just a few pages long, the text has been updated with a preface, “Zelensky’s Political Oscar”, and an epilogue, “The President of War” – bookends of an extraordinary life story, which is still being written. Reading this biography now, in the wake of a war that upended our understanding of both Zelensky and Ukraine, presents his personal history in a new light.

It’s not a tidy chronology: Rudenko takes us back and forth in time, offering us Zelensky’s story as if it were a chocolate box, a morsel at a time. But this is no fairy tale. Some chapters tell of endearing childhood dreams. Of course, there’s a section on his entanglement with Donald Trump, who famously telephoned the unsuspecting Zelensky in 2019 looking for a little help to bring down his rival Joe Biden by asking for Biden’s son Hunter to be investigated. And there are the anecdotes of corruption, betrayals and break-ups – the unfinished business of Ukraine’s day-to-day politics that was pushed to the bottom of the pile once the task of fighting an existential war took over.

Every once in a while, the old stories creep in. This month, the European Commission’s beaming president, Ursula von der Leyen, dressed in the brilliant yellow and blue of the Ukrainian flag, announced Ukraine’s candidacy to join this European club. But behind the effusive statements, there are the whispered warnings. Although Zelensky pushed for the fast track for EU membership, Ukraine will be on a very slow road to rein in its oligarchs, crack down on corruption and build far more effective institutions of state. Cynics say it will never get to the end of that road.

“Ukraine’s packaging is great,” an international adviser in Kyiv recently told me. “But there’s not much beneath the president and all his advisers.”

Zelensky was born to Jewish parents in 1978, in Kryvyi Rih in southern central Ukraine, a “city of miners and metallurgists” and at the time one of the most polluted places in the USSR. Zelensky’s father wanted him to excel in sciences: a “B” grade in maths for Zelensky was “a day of mourning” in their home. But, in Rudenko’s telling, all his school teachers “without exception mention Zelensky as a diligent and intelligent child whose ambition was to be on the stage”. He studied law but dazzled in the KVK championships, a popular contest of comedy and song on Russian television.

But this book about the making of a charismatic communicator is also about his unmaking – at least until a war got in the way. Like the schoolteacher-turned-president he once played on the screen, Zelensky came to power promising “no to nepotism and friends in power”. But kumy – cronies or close buddies – soon turned up everywhere. They included staff from Zelensky’s production company. As Rudenko describes it, “a year after [Zelensky’s] election, the Poroshenko family was replaced by the Zelensky family – or, more precisely, by Kvartal 95 Studio”.

And it wasn’t just talented TV types. That 1+1 TV channel which broadcast Zelensky’s first election campaign speech on New Year’s eve was controlled by Ihor Kolomoisky, one of Ukraine’s wealthiest oligarchs. He had funded a private army to fight in the region bordering the Donbas in eastern Ukraine when Russian-backed separatists grabbed territory in 2014. Rudenko asks, but doesn’t answer, whether Kolomoisky (who happened to be Poroshenko’s nemesis) and Zelensky launched the TV series Servant of the People as a rehearsal for the real political party that eventually emerged and took the same name.

But Kolomoisky’s relationship with “his” president soon started unravelling, fuelled by his unsuccessful attempts to regain control, and compensation, for his nationalised PrivatBank. And now he is being investigated in the US for money laundering.

[See also: Putin and Zelensky offer contrasting visions of the future ]

In the book’s last pages we read how, the day before Russia’s invasion, Zelensky gathered 50 of Ukraine’s most prosperous citizens to urge them to play their part in the coming conflict. They’d been fighting another battle since last September, when Ukraine’s parliament passed a law directed at them. Zelensky had described the register, meant to be put in place this spring, as a way of resolving, once and for all, the relationship between the state and the oligarchs. “Or… more accurately,” as Rudenko puts it, “Zelensky’s own relationship with them.” Rudenko details how Zelensky’s team repeatedly tried to send Poroshenko to jail but concludes that “there are considerable doubts about whether Zelensky actually wants to put Poroshenko behind bars”.

The comedian who did everything possible to make Ukrainians smile had promised, “I will do everything possible so Ukrainians at least do not cry.” But now he is the nation’s consoler-in-chief as entire cities are wiped off the map, countless lives shredded, soldiers slaughtered. He keeps repeating his election pledge to do everything he can to end this conflict – including attempting talks with the man in Moscow.

Rudenko reveals that, in 2019, “Zelensky sincerely believed that, if he looked into the eyes of the Russian president he would at least see some sign of sadness about the 14,000 dead in the Donbas.” Even more, he “seemed convinced that his actor’s charisma and unique charm would work wonders”. No more.

Zelensky’s first, and so far only, opportunity to look into Putin’s eyes came in the December 2019 Normandy Format talks in Paris, which grouped together Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany. But when the fateful moment came, Ukraine’s novice “was noticeably nervous”.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, who is given a rough ride by Ukrainians for daring to hint at the need for territorial compromise, had struck up a relationship with Zelensky long before others did. In April 2019, between the first and second rounds of Ukraine’s presidential election, he invited both Poroshenko and Zelensky to the Elysée Palace. Again, Zelensky was “visibly nervous”. But Rudenko also notes that “Zelensky and Macron understood each other almost instantaneously”.

Fast-forward to June 2022 when Zelensky, in trademark T-shirt, confidently stands outside his office in the Kyiv sunshine to welcome the finely suited Macron, along with German, Italian and Lithuanian leaders. He extends his visibly muscled arms for firm handshakes and fraternal hugs. His visitors’ admiration is palpable. So many, including Putin, had misjudged Zelensky. They expected – even urged – him to flee on the first flight out of Kyiv in those early jaw-dropping days as Russian forces closed in. Ukraine’s military prowess was underestimated; Russia’s overestimated. War is the stuff of metal – and mettle.

It’s much the same on the home front. Critics, among them Zelensky’s close friends and senior officials who had turned against him within months of his electoral triumph, made snide remarks off camera about the president’s inexperience and understanding when I interviewed them in the run-up to Russia’s invasion. Now even the ex-president Poroshenko, who, like Zelensky, has taken to wearing military garb, has rallied behind his former opponent. He recently told me, “Our unity is our most effective weapon against Putin because he’s trying to undermine us from within.” “We’re all soldiers now,” he insisted as he stood in his sandbagged position.

And Rudenko, who watched Zelensky’s early political acrobatics close-up, also can’t resist the swell of patriotic feeling. In his updated biography, he hails a leader who came to power when “few if any believed in the fighting abilities of the president… who didn’t have a clue what the Ukrainian army was”.

He doesn’t take us inside Zelensky’s head; he just gives us the stories behind his presidency. “These tribulations showed us the real Zelensky,” is his conclusion after the invasion.

But now this performer turned president turned wartime leader speaks, visibly pained, of a new stage in a grinding war which is “spiritually difficult, emotionally difficult… We don’t have a sense of how long it will last, how many more blows, losses and efforts will be needed before we see victory is on the horizon.” This phase of the conflict may be Zelensky’s toughest test yet. He’s already shown himself to be less sure-footed as he veers from vague talk of compromises to save lives to vowing to take back every inch of Ukrainian land. As a leader who can read the room, he knows Ukrainian views are hardening in this miasma of Russian war crimes. But he also senses – and warns against – the “war fatigue” in some capitals; one day it will overwhelm his own. It’s the hardest of high-wire acts, even for Zelensky.

Zelensky: A Biography Serhii Rudenko Polity Press, 200pp, £20

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This article appears in the 29 Jun 2022 issue of the New Statesman, American Darkness

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Zelensky’s path from floundering president to wartime leader

Ukrainian political analyst Serhii Rudenko has written the first major biography of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to appear in English. In announcing the publication of “ Zelensky ,” Polity, which is putting out the work, translated by Michael M. Naydan and Alla Perminova, noted that Rudenko, who has written other works on Ukrainian politicians, is based in Ukraine and was “responding to emails from a bomb shelter.” Any review of this book must begin with the acknowledgment that its very existence — much like the transformation of a man from TV star to stumbling president to nearly universally admired wartime hero — is no small feat. There is, after all, a war going on in Ukraine , as there has been since late February.

This is more a biography of a presidency than of the president. Though the book spends some time on other moments in his life — the year of his birth, the launch of his acting career and his wife all have chapters — the vast majority takes place between 2018 and 2022, between Zelensky’s decision to run for president and his presidency thus far.

The book is not organized chronologically, making it somewhat hard to keep track of what happened when, and who was in and out of favor with Zelensky at various points. Nor is it organized thematically. Or rather, each chapter has a theme — Zelensky’s relationship to a given person, or a particular world event — but there does not appear to be much rhyme or reason as to why any given chapter follows another.

It should also be said that the book is somewhat awkwardly translated and that sometimes the author directly contradicts himself. “Those who took the actor’s performance to be a famous comedian’s joke had no idea that Zelensky had already decided to run for president a long time before,” he writes of Zelensky’s Dec. 31, 2018, televised campaign announcement. On the next page, he writes, “Zelensky himself, according to the former Head of the Office of the President Andriy Bohdan, didn’t make the final decision to participate in the presidential campaign until December 31, 2018.”

More concerningly, the chapter on Zelensky’s dealings with President Donald Trump contains a glaring factual error. “The American press urged Trump to put pressure on his Ukrainian counterpart to speed up the investigation into Biden’s son,” Rudenko writes. This is not what happened. Many believed that Trump pressured Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden’s son with the goal of hurting a domestic political opponent (namely, Biden); the American press then reported on it. Rudenko goes on to say that had Zelensky investigated the son, Biden, as U.S. president, might not have provided such staunch support to Ukraine. This seems to slightly miss the point, which is that Ukraine, a sovereign state, was being used for domestic political purposes. For American readers less familiar with the ins and outs of Ukrainian politics than Trump’s impeachment saga, such as myself, the Trump chapter casts doubt on the rest of Rudenko’s analysis.

Perhaps most frustratingly, although Rudenko often draws comparisons between the various crises of Zelensky’s presidency and the strength and resolve he’s displayed since Russia began its all-out assault on Ukraine, he spends considerably less time analyzing how the same person was capable of being all these things: TV star, clown, reported oligarchic ally, disappointing president and heroic wartime leader.

Toward the end of the book, Rudenko writes, “Everyone in Ukraine today, without exception, has just one enemy, the victory over which the existence of the Ukrainian state depends.” There is no doubt that the actions and choices of Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, have fortified and unified the Ukrainian people. “Zelensky is no longer playing the role of the president. He is the leader of a nation that, with weapons in its hands, is defending its freedom and independence.” But what was it that allowed him to transform from one to the other?

Despite all of that, there are some high points in the book. The chapters about Zelensky and members of his presidential team at various points of his administration are especially strong and read as crackling little political dramas. The chapter on Ihor Kolomoisky, the oligarch to whom the president is reportedly tied (though at some points more than others, as the book makes clear), is especially biting. It’s hard to think of a better opening to any chapter of any recent book than: “Legends abound about this person. One of them is that, at a business party, he cut off part of the tie of one of his top managers with a cake knife.”

Even with all the jumping back and forth across time and theme, certain truths emerge about Ukrainian politics and Zelensky: Ukraine has long been plagued by corruption and nepotism. Politicians have promised to do better and then have gone back to the status quo. And Russia, in threatening Ukraine’s sovereignty, has managed to unite Ukrainians and turn a floundering president into a leader.

But the war isn’t over yet, and neither is Ukraine’s history. Neither, for that matter, is Zelensky’s story. This book, for all its flaws, is a first picture of this person in this place at this time. One hopes that, in the not-too-distant future, the war will be over, the story will continue and there will be other books to join it.

Emily Tamkin is senior U.S. editor at the New Statesman. She is the author of “ The Influence of Soros: Politics, Power, and the Struggle for an Open Society ” and the forthcoming “ Bad Jews: A History of American Jewish Politics and Identities .”

A Biography

By Serhii Rudenko

Translated by Michael M. Naydan and Alla Perminova

Polity. 208 pp. $25

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by Serhii Rudenko ; translated by Michael Naydan & Alla Parminova ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 25, 2022

An admiring but not uncritical first look for English-language readers.

A fast-paced biography of an unexpected world leader.

In 38 short, zingy “episodes” that play on Zelensky’s TV career before winning the presidency of Ukraine in April 2019, Ukrainian journalist and political commentator Rudenko explores his subject’s life and important influences on the brash new leader, mostly before Russia’s invasion in February 2022. A popular actor prior to his candidacy—he was especially beloved for his role as history teacher Vasyl Horoborodko, who becomes head of state in the film and TV series Servant of the People —Zelensky was elected by a landslide largely due to his youthful charisma, promises to upend the corrupt, Soviet-style oligarchy of incumbent Petro Poroshenko, and desire “to become the president of peace.” Before his decision to join the campaign, the former comedian was not taken seriously. However, with help from his loyal backers at his TV production company, Kvartal 95 Studio, Zelensky proved to be an earnest, witty opponent who sounded themes of anti-corruption and pledges to find resolution in the Donbas war, concepts that resonated with the Ukrainian people. Although vowing not to get mired in the nepotism that plagued his predecessor, Zelensky surrounded himself with his trusted assistants from Kvartal 95 Studio, and as the author shows, during his rough first six months in office, he showed few signs of becoming a household name on the world stage for his bravery and dedication to his people. He had to navigate the entrenched bureaucracy of the prickly Ukrainian parliament, clean house, manage staff turnover, and survive extortion by then-President Donald Trump to dig up dirt on Hunter Biden. Though many of the people and events will be unfamiliar to non-Ukrainian readers, the author capably shows how Zelensky has displayed an astonishing transformation in the face of continued Russian aggression.

Pub Date: July 25, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-509-55638-0

Page Count: 220

Publisher: Polity

Review Posted Online: June 26, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022

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Zelensky: A Biography by Serhii Rudenko – a ‘quirky and fascinating’ book

Biography is ‘hastily written and translated’, but does capture a remarkable transformation

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When, on New Year’s Eve 2018, Volodymyr Zelenskyy “interrupted his own show” to announce on national television that he was standing as Ukraine’s president, “many wondered if it was a joke”, said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. After all, the comedian and actor was the star of a hit TV series, Servant of the People , in which he played a “history teacher who unexpectedly becomes head of state”.

Olena Zelenska: from screenwriter to Ukraine’s first lady Volodymyr Zelenskyy: from comedian to war hero

He was in fact deadly serious. Zelenskyy had formed a political party, Servant of the People, and in April 2019, he swept to power with a 73% majority in Ukraine’s presidential elections (six percentage points more than his fictional counterpart).

Today, of course, Zelenskyy is known as the “courageous wartime president” who “captured the world’s imagination” with his defiant to-camera speeches. This biography, by the Ukrainian journalist Serhii Rudenko, offers a “quirky and fascinating” portrait of a man who is perhaps the closest thing in modern politics “to a mythical hero”.

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Given Zelenskyy’s current status as a “Ukrainian Churchill”, it’s no surprise that a British publisher has rushed out an English-language version of Rudenko’s book, said Colin Freeman in The Daily Telegraph. “Expect to see it prominently placed on Tory MPs’ bookshelves during TV interviews.” Yet whether they’ll read it is another matter, for this is very much an “insider’s account”, aimed at a Ukrainian audience – and one that makes “no effort to polish Zelenskyy’s well-buffed halo”.

Rudenko records how, despite pledging to end cronyism, Zelenskyy packed his government with pals from the TV world: one, Ivan Bakanov, “went from producing sitcoms to heading Ukraine’s SBU security service”. And Zelenskyy soon gained a reputation for intolerance: “those who challenged him” were promptly sacked.

He proved inept in other ways, said Lyse Doucet in The New Statesman. In his early dealings with other world leaders, he was, Rudenko notes, “visibly nervous”. And his economics minister was recorded telling journalists that his boss had a “fog in his head” when it came to figures, said Andrew Anthony in The Observer. But none of this matters much any more. Zelenskyy is exactly what “Ukraine requires right now”: a brilliant rhetorician who can “motivate and mobilise a people under savage assault”.

Rudenko’s book is “hastily written and translated” – but it does at least capture Zelenskyy’s remarkable transformation, from someone who seemed like some kind of “postmodern joke” into a “modern David standing up to the brutal Russian Goliath”.

Polity 200p £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

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Zelensky: A biography by Serhii Rudenko

Book review: workmanlike telling of the ukrainian president’s story suffers from a lack of analysis of the broad forces that shaped his life.

Volodymyr Zelenskiy, centre, meets fellow European leaders, left to right, Mario Draghi of Italy, Olaf Scholz of Germany, Emmanuel Macron of France and Klaus Iohannis of Romania. Photograph: Ludovic Marin/Pool via AP

Had his presidency petered out six months ago, the political career of Volodymyr Zelenskiy would have been remembered as little more than a historical curiosity. The comic actor caused a sensational upset in 2019, when he unseated the incumbent Petro Poroshenko to win the Ukrainian presidency by a landslide, but exercising power had tested him more than winning it.

Almost two years into Zelenskiy’s term, his two campaign promises – to crack down on corruption and to end the military conflict with Russia in the east – were no closer to being realised. Aside from symbolic changes aimed at bringing his office closer to the people, such as reducing the long presidential motorcade to two cars with no sirens, his policy agenda remained as vague as it had been during his campaign. His own prime minister was secretly recorded saying the head of state had “a fog in his head” when it came to economics, and foreign diplomats who met him were struck by his intelligence but also by how much he had yet to learn.

On the international scene, Zelenskiy was perhaps best known for his unwitting cameo in the Trump impeachment. The then US president had withheld military aid to Ukraine while pressing Zelenskiy to pursue a baseless investigation into Joe Biden – a farce worthy of Servant of the People, the TV comedy in which Zelenskiy plays a history teacher who unexpectedly becomes president of Ukraine.

We know now, of course, that those two years will amount to little more than a footnote in the story of Volodymyr Zelenskiy. With Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the 44-year-old Zelenskiy has found himself at the centre of a world-historical crisis on a scale that few leaders ever face. Russia’s unprovoked aggression threatens the very existence of Ukraine; Zelenskiy is in charge of saving it. Instead of buckling under that pressure, he has risen to the moment in the most remarkable way.

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Offered a route into exile when Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine on February 24th, he opted to stay at the presidential complex to lead the country’s resistance. He defied threats to his life in the early days of the invasion by walking the streets of the capital, recording pitch-perfect videophone messages that sought to reassure and rally Ukrainians. His tireless diplomatic efforts have won him global admiration and forced world leaders into radical policy shifts at unprecedented speed. He has come to embody Ukrainian resolve, and is perhaps the world leader whose approval his counterparts covet the most.

But beyond this wartime persona and the key points of his unusual backstory, Zelenskiy is relatively little known in the West. The thirst for information about him explains the quick translation into English of a biography by the Ukrainian journalist and political commentator Serhii Rudenko. Originally published in Ukrainian in 2021 and updated to include the early stages of the invasion, Rudenko’s conversational narrative, written in a gossipy tone, chronicles Zelenkiy’s rise in short, staccato chapters, from his childhood in Kryvyi Rih, a centre of iron mining and metallurgy in the southeast, through his wildly successful career as an actor and comedian and his insurgent campaign for the presidency.

The book is good on the febrile atmosphere of Ukrainian politics, a world of blackmail and double-crossing, where members of a small business-political elite vie for advantage by means legal and otherwise. To understand the overweening influence of oligarchs in Ukrainian public life is to see why Zelenskiy won so emphatically in 2019. Running as a Ukrainian Everyman fighting the prevailing culture of hucksterism, he spoke to a deep yearning for a clean, principled politics focusing on ordinary people’s concerns.

Rudenko writes approvingly of his subject, although he is critical of the president’s limited progress in reining in the oligarchs and outright dismissive of his pledge to eliminate nepotism in government, showing how Zelenskiy filled key positions in his administration with allies from Kvartal 95, his comedy troupe. It’s also clear that Zelenskiy was indebted to one of those oligarchs, Ihor Kolomoisky, whose 1+1 TV channel aired Servant of the People and supported Zelenskiy’s presidential campaign.

Domestic audience

The book is written primarily for a domestic audience. Foreign readers will be interested less in the minor characters from Kyiv’s political scene than in the broader forces shaping Zelenskiy’s life and thinking. In its focus on the former, the book frequently loses sight of the latter. Rudenko in general eschews analysis, making clear in the preface that he will focus on facts over “moralising, prejudice or manipulation”.

But there are some facts that call out for deeper analysis, not least Zelenskiy’s relationship with Russia. He was raised in a Russian-speaking family in the east and became a star in Russia thanks to his television shows. On the campaign trail he was accused of being too accommodating towards Moscow – he promised a Ukraine that was neither “a corrupt partner of the West” nor “Russia’s little sister” – and too willing to believe that Russia would strike a deal to end the war in the east.

At some point, it is clear, Zelenskiy realised that Russia was negotiating in bad faith and began to turn more decisively to the West, but the book does not shed much light on that process. Also absent is any exploration of the role of religion or history in shaping Zelenskiy’s worldview. Putin claims to be out to “de-Nazify” Ukraine; Zelenskiy is Jewish, and many of his relatives were killed by Nazis in the Holocaust.

Zelenskiy emerges from Rudenko’s book as likeable, canny and idealistic. As the world has seen, he has charisma and a gift for communication. But, shifting all the time from one persona to another – comedian, actor, businessman, candidate, president – he is also rather elusive.

Ultimately, it is the one role he never chose – war leader – that will define him.

Ruadhán Mac Cormaic

Ruadhán Mac Cormaic is the Editor of The Irish Times

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Zelensky: A Biography by Serhii Rudenko review — provincial joker, defender of the free world

Volodymyr Zelensky announced his intention to run for Ukraine’s presidency with characteristic aplomb. At five minutes to midnight on December 31, 2018, the actor, comedian and studio director appeared on television. Viewers would have been expecting the president to give a New Year’s Eve address but instead of president Petro Poroshenko, Zelensky appeared in a white shirt, his sleeves rolled up.

“There are three paths that Ukrainians can choose,” he said in the gruff baritone now known to so many around the world. “The first is to live as before. The second is to pack up and go abroad. And the third is to try to change Ukraine for the better. And I chose the third path for myself. People have been asking me for

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Review: Thomas Adès Meets the Profound Beauty of Schubert

The Danish String Quartet returned to Carnegie Hall with its Doppelgänger project, pairing Schubert’s String Quintet and a premiere by Adès.

By Joshua Barone

Franz Schubert and Thomas Adès are two composers whose works are capable of touching the cosmos — in different centuries, and often in different ways.

The beauty of Schubert tends to be quiet and shatteringly calm, his postcards from the beyond written in lyrical melodies sometimes underlined with nothing more than a chord. Adès, particularly in the past decade, seems to have flung open the gates of heaven, unleashing forces that overwhelm and awe in their immensity.

Yet each has also done the opposite: Schubert, in his aptly nicknamed “Great” Symphony, with its Beethovenian heft, for example, and Adès in his hypnotic and weightless “ Paradiso ” section of “Dante.” At Zankel Hall on Thursday , the composers met somewhere in the middle as they were paired for the fourth and final installment in the Danish String Quartet’s Doppelgänger project.

One of the great pleasures of recent seasons, Doppelgänger has surveyed Schubert’s late quartets while commissioning new works that respond to them. Thursday brought perhaps the composer’s finest chamber work, the String Quintet in C; Asbjorn Norgaard, the Danes’ violist, joked from the stage, “We are the Danish String Quartet, with a Finnish cellist,” gesturing to their guest, Johannes Rostamo.

In previous Doppelgänger programs at Zankel, Lotta Wennakoski’s “ Pige ” homed in on the maiden of “Death and the Maiden,” and Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “ Rituals ” played with the repetitive nature of the “Rosamunde” Quartet. (Because of pandemic delays, the project will actually return next season , with Part I.) Each evening has ended with an arrangement of a Schubert song; on Thursday it was “Die Nebensonnen,” from “Winterreise.”

Adès himself behaves like something of a Doppelgänger. A master of the uncanny, he has arranged existing works and written homages to the likes of Couperin and Liszt in a slippery blend of reverence and surrealism. Here, in “Wreath for Franz Schubert,” he takes a single phrase from the second movement of the Quintet and riffs on it nearly beyond recognition, as in “ Darknesse Visible ,” his piano treatment of the John Dowland song “In Darkness Let Me Dwell.”

“Wreath” looks, and sounds, much simpler than it is. The players pluck or bow a two-note, upward phrase that continuously changes in its harmony and volume; each measure is different, transforming like the broken chords of Bach’s famous Prelude in C and settling into a meditative flow.

Once that happens, it can be easy to lose your sense of time. And that is baked into the score: “Wreath” runs “15-25 minutes” because neither its rhythms nor note durations are to be played as they appear. Adès writes “sempre molto rubato” in the first measure, a direction to maintain a constantly fluid tempo.

This is where the piece gets incredibly difficult, but also magical. The players are both independent and interdependent; if the violins are a central reference point, then the viola and cellos can be roughly within one measure of them in either direction. Their individual freedom requires constant attention to the greater ensemble, in a tricky balance of forward motion and patience. Often soft, ending on an extreme and mostly symbolic “pianississississimo,” the music takes on a perfumed haze.

It is gorgeous, more the Adès of “Paradiso” than the grandly rollicking “ Inferno .” And although it is inspired by the second movement of the Schubert, it is a fitting companion to the entire work, which even at its showiest is never far from profound beauty. The Quintet, as Norgaard said onstage, is “more than just a piece.” Like much of late Schubert, it seems to contain more than the heart can handle at once: mystery, grief, ferocity, joy, terror. Above all, grace.

All that was present on Thursday. The Danes — Norgaard on viola, Frederik Oland and Rune Tonsgaard Sorensen on violin, Fredrik Schoyen Sjoin on cello — are among the most skilled and intelligent interpreters of late Schubert and Beethoven, affecting but not overly emotional, organic and sometimes shockingly daring, but unified in their vision.

With Rostamo, the first movement’s opening chords had a reediness that gave way to lyricism with an underlying wildness that emerged, as the music developed, in swerving cello dissonances that felt as if they threatened to pummel the delicacy of the violins. The second movement unfurled as a lonely outpouring of ember intensity that, with a sudden blow, burst aflame. Specialists in folk music, the Danes brought a rustic bliss to the Scherzo and mercurial finale, in a juxtaposition of celebration and reflection, like the first party after the darkest days of the pandemic.

It can be difficult to talk about the Quintet without resorting to hyperbole. This is the kind of piece that you would take to a desert island, that you return to throughout your life and maybe even want to hear at the end. Not for nothing did Norgaard describe it as “legendary for a reason.” So it feels appropriate to say that Thursday’s excellent performance of it had the power to make you grateful for the very existence of music.

Danish String Quartet

Performed on Thursday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan.

Joshua Barone is the assistant classical music and dance editor on the Culture Desk and a contributing classical music critic. More about Joshua Barone

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Movie Reviews

'the beast' jumps from 1910, to 2014, to 2044, tracking fear through the ages.

Justin Chang

Gabrielle and Louis (Léa Seydoux and George MacKay) meet in 1910 Paris, 2014 Los Angeles and again in 2044 in The Beast . Carole Bethuel/Kinology hide caption

Gabrielle and Louis (Léa Seydoux and George MacKay) meet in 1910 Paris, 2014 Los Angeles and again in 2044 in The Beast .

There's no easy way to sum up the work of the brilliant and maddening French writer-director Bertrand Bonello. In recent years, he's made a zombie thriller rooted in Haitian voodoo lore and an unconventional biopic of Yves Saint-Laurent. His most controversial title, Nocturama , is a hangout movie about a group of French youth carrying out terrorist attacks around Paris. Bonello's films have a unique way of blurring the intellectual and the aesthetic: Their gorgeous surfaces are often loaded with troubling and provocative ideas.

His latest movie is called The Beast , and it's one of the best and least classifiable things he's ever done. It's a wildly original adaptation of the 1903 Henry James novella The Beast in the Jungle , about a man who dwells in a constant state of fear.

James' story is a cautionary tale about the dangers of being too cautious, of not embracing life and love to the fullest. Bonello takes this premise and spins it in several unexpected directions. First, he recasts the hesitant protagonist as a woman, named Gabrielle, played by the wonderful Léa Seydoux. Then he positions her in three different stories, set in three time frames, and suffused with elements of horror, mystery and science fiction. It's easier to follow than it sounds: Even when it's not entirely clear where or when we are, Bonello's filmmaking is so hypnotic, and Seydoux's performance so subtly mesmerizing, that you can't help getting caught up in the flow.

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The first story is the one that most closely resembles the novella. It's 1910, and Gabrielle is a renowned pianist who has a run-in at a Paris salon with a gentleman named Louis, played by the English actor George MacKay. In a setup that evokes the confounding 1961 classic Last Year at Marienbad , Gabrielle and Louis seem to vaguely recall having met before. There's a clear attraction between them, but Gabrielle, who's married, resists pursuing it. Her restraint will cost her in a climax that coincides with a real-life Parisian catastrophe, the Great Flood of 1910.

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The second story takes place in Los Angeles in 2014, and has some of the eerie menace of David Lynch 's masterpiece Mulholland Dr. Gabrielle is now an aspiring model and actor who's been housesitting for a wealthy Angeleno. Rattled by a violent earthquake one morning, she steps outside and runs into Louis, who's now a deeply disturbed incel who's been posting misogynist video rants online.

MacKay is utterly terrifying as this Louis, who's modeled on a man who killed six people in 2014 in Isla Vista, Calif. What makes this second segment so chilling is that, unlike in the novella, the protagonist's fear is not unfounded. The beast stalking Gabrielle is all too real.

The third story is the most elusive and intriguing. It's set in 2044, when the world is run by AI. Gabrielle plays a human who, to join the work force, must undergo a process that will rid her of her emotions. This segment, with its shades of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , explains the framework of the entire movie: It turns out that the 1910 and 2014 sections are remnants of Gabrielle's past lives, now being purged from her subconscious.

Bonello doesn't tell the stories one at a time; he jumps around and among them. He's tracking the sources of human alienation and anxiety through the ages, asking why, in every era, we find ways to disengage from life and the people around us. The movie is especially insightful about how technology evolves. Each chapter features an artificial human companion of sorts: a line of baby dolls in 1910, a talking doll in 2014, a robot friend in 2044. Along the way, Bonello also asks questions about the future of movies, a medium so overrun with CGI that it's become harder to tell what's real from what isn't.

As grim as The Beast sounds, it isn't entirely pessimistic about the state of the world. I left the movie feeling disturbed but also enthralled, and strangely reassured by Seydoux's presence in all three stories. The futuristic Gabrielle may have to divest herself of her feelings, but Seydoux's emotions are always within reach. The more unreal her surroundings become, the more hauntingly human her performance feels.

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A Message from Ukraine by Volodymyr Zelensky review – a winner in the war of words

The Ukraine president’s storytelling skills and sense of moral purpose elevate his war speeches in this compelling collection

“O ne day,” Volodymyr Zelenskiy told the UN general assembly in September 2019, “I would like this speech to be known as the 15 minutes that changed the world.” It’s quite a standard to set. You can’t say that if you are on just after lunch at the Investor s’ Chronicle conference on pension reform. But this is war and war changes what rhetoric can do. Hopes of a better world are elevated from platitudes. In this short and compelling collection, Zelenskiy is the first social media orator to enter the pantheon of war speakers.

Ukraine’s president travels the world by video link and flatters every audience he addresses. He always opens in the local idiom. When he speaks to the UK parliament in March 2022, he borrows locutions from Churchill. He takes a line from the Declaration of Independence to remind the US Congress of the importance of the pursuit of happiness. To the Bundestag he refers to the Nord Stream pipeline as the new Berlin Wall.

Like the veteran of television scripts that he is , Zelenskiy knows the power of a story. The career of Vasyl Slipak, a soloist at the Paris Opera, cut short while he was fighting to defend Donbas, is a parable for the wider struggle. He also has the gift of speaking in pictures. “The most terrible steel,” he says on Ukrainian Independence Day, “is not within missiles, aircrafts and tanks but in shackles.” And neither will I soon forget the earrings ripped from Ukrainian women as a prelude to their being strangled.

But none of these skills would be worth employing if they were lavished on trivial material. Zelenskiy, sad to say, has material that people have to die for. The contents page of this volume is a catalogue of rhetorical categories. Our Fight, Our Voice, Our Nation. All conflicts are simultaneously wars of communication and Zelenskiy tells the hard truths that war like no other circumstance permits. When he travels abroad, or at least when his virtual avatar does by video link, he is quite prepared to talk straight. At the Munich security conference in February 2022, for example, he is unsparing about the foreign policy failures of the EU. At home, Zelenskiy recalls Churchill in 1940, reporting the facts to the people, candidly but with determination intact.

Churchill crops up a few times in these pages and the sense of being close to him must be part of what drew Boris Johnson to Zelenskiy. There are, though, less obvious but more apt comparisons. The Ukrainian leader is, as Arkady Ostrovsky notes in his excellent preface, “an ordinary man thrust into extraordinary circumstances”. So he is, but what gold he makes of the predicament. “We are not heroes,” says Zelenskiy. “We do our job and we are where we are.” There is more than a hint here of the line Shakespeare gives to Antony in Julius Caesar – “I am no orator, as Brutus is”, which is about as oratorical as it comes. It also calls to mind Elizabeth I at Tilbury. She too faced the accusation that she was unworthy, in her case because the navy thought it absurd that a woman should be their commander. “I may have the weak and feeble body of a woman,” she responded, “but I have the heart and stomach of a king.”

Yet the leader who springs to mind most often in this collection is another creative man who was thrust, somewhat unwillingly, into the public realm. On New Year’s Day 1990, Václav Havel gave the ceremonial address in Prague as the first post-communist president of Czechoslovakia. Havel had spent most of his adult life in prison. In 1982, Samuel Beckett had even dedicated a play to him called Catastrophe . We have lived until now, Havel told his people, “in a contaminated moral environment”. Zelenskiy has the same impeccable moral clarity on every page, because he believes he is fighting a new version of the same fight.

Which is another way of saying that the fight, in war rhetoric, is always for more than victory. The trick of the war speech, which begins with Pericles celebrating the glory of the city of Athens in the Peloponnesian war, is to elevate the purpose of the conflict. This must be a war not merely for survival but for betterment. Lloyd George’s speeches during the great war try to pull this trick, as do Churchill’s 25 years later.

Zelenskiy regularly seeks to elevate this conflict from a territorial dispute into a fight for a moral idea of Europe. “Europe is here in the mind,” he tells the Ukrainian parliament in May 2019. “What is happening in my country is no longer somebody else’s war,” he informs the UN general assembly in September of that year. “This is the beginning of a war against Europe,” he says in an address to the people of Europe from Kyiv in February 2022.

The sense of moral purpose increases as the speeches unfold because the underlying strategic objective changes. When he speaks to the Ukrainian parliament in May 2019, Zelenskiy’s aim is to finish the war through dialogue. By the time of his Independence Day speech in August 2022, the ambition is greater: victory rather than peace.

The substantive question raised by these speeches is, of course, whether Zelenskiy is right. He claims that “a bloody reconstruction of nazism has taken place in Ukraine”. At the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, he tells the tales of four brothers, three of whom were shot by the Germans. The last man standing was his grandfather. It’s powerful, persuasive and irresistible – but is Putin really as bad as Hitler? It’s a reminder, if we needed it, that rhetoric always needs watching.

And yet in the end I yield to the words of the man who was once the voice of Paddington Bear and who is now the tribune of freedom. John Adams once said that the American nation was talked into being. Zelenskiy is the voice of Ukraine and, as he might say himself, our voice too.

Philip Collins was a speechwriter for Tony Blair and is the founder and writer-in-chief of the speechwriting company the Draft ( thedraftwriters.com )

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Zelensky optimistic on victory after approval of new US aid

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he sees "a chance for victory" against Russia after the approval of new US aid for his embattled country.

The US House of Representatives voted on Saturday to move a long-delayed aid package worth nearly $61 billion for Ukraine to the Senate, where it is expected to pass and be signed by President Joe Biden.

"I think this support will really strengthen the armed forces of Ukraine," Zelensky told US broadcaster NBC on Sunday.

"And we will have a chance for victory if Ukraine really gets the weapon system, which we need so much. Some really crucial weapon system which are hard to get ... I really appreciate that," he said.

Zelensky emphasized that Ukraine especially needs longer-range missiles. The fresh US aid approved with a bipartisan majority, includes urgently needed arms deliveries for defence against Russia.

The text also insists on the delivery of long-range ATACMS missile systems. Zelensky emphasized that Ukraine needs such weapons in order to lose fewer forces on the front line. His country also needs air defence. "These are the priorities now."

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NBA playoffs: Nuggets work over Lakers to pick up where they left off from last year

The Lakers have now lost nine straight games to the Nuggets.

Aaron Judge booed at Yankee Stadium after golden sombrero lowers AVG to .179: 'I've heard worse'

It's been a rough start to the season for Aaron Judge.

Former Rams and Eagles QB Roman Gabriel, 1969 NFL MVP, dies at 83

Former Los Angeles Rams and Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Roman Gabriel died at the age of 83. He was the NFL MVP in 1969.

Howie Schwab, star of ESPN's 'Stump the Schwab,' dies at 63

Schwab joined ESPN in 1987 and was best known for his role on the sports trivia game show.

Yankees' Nestor Cortés told by MLB his pump-fake pitch is illegal

Cortés' attempt didn't fool Andrés Giménez, who fouled off the pitch.

Jim Harbaugh keeps promise, gets '15-0' tattoo commemorating Michigan's national title

Harbaugh told his players if they went undefeated he would get inked.

The best Amazon deals to shop this weekend: Save up to 90% on home appliances, gardening essentials and more

A few of our faves? A Shark stick vac for just $100 and a vertical garden on sale for $34, plus sweet gift ideas for Mom.

Fraught but necessary: The money conversation when one half of a couple retires

Nearly half of couples haven’t figured out how they will recreate their paychecks in retirement. Talking about it is essential.

Former Houston Astros prospect Ronny García dies in traffic accident at 24

García signed with the Astros in 2016 as a 16-year-old international signing.

Here's what $1 million buys in today's housing market

Surging home prices made us wonder what $1 million buys in today's housing market. Here’s a sample of listings in cities across the country.