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4,672 words · no email, no account
No. 029 · Power & Politics · World Politics
The Bunker Selfie
a biography of Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelensky
What the book is
On a winter morning in Kyiv, a man who had spent his career making people laugh stood in front of a camera and told his country he was staying. The footage was grainy, the streets behind him empty. Within hours it would travel further than any sketch he had ever written.
Volodymyr Zelensky's path to that moment began in Kryvyi Rih, a Soviet steel city where a Jewish boy learned the timing of a punchline and the cost of being conspicuous. It moved through the late-night clamor of KVN, the Moscow comedy circuit that taught a generation of post-Soviet performers how to read a room and, eventually, a republic. It passed through a television studio where he played a high-school history teacher accidentally elected president — a role the country then asked him to play in life, by a margin of seventy-three percent.
Ostap Bilyk traces the arc from improv stage to wartime bunker with the patience of a biographer and the ear of a critic. Drawing on book-length studies and primary reporting in seven languages, she examines a man who has been variously cast as saint, salesman, and symbol, and asks what is left when the lights are turned off and the decisions are real.
What emerges is a portrait of a performer learning, in public and under fire, the difference between a part and a self.
At a glance
- Subject
- Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelensky
- Shelf
- Power & Politics · World Politics
- Written by
- Ostap Bilyk
- Chapters
- 19 across 233 pages
- Narrated by
- Edmund Hartley
- Editions
- Paperback · Hardcover · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
Contents · 19 chapters
- 01The Iron CityRead free
- 02The Language of Laughter4,764 words
- 03Servant of the People3,192 words
- 04The Campaign3,073 words
- 05The Presidency Begins3,202 words
- 06The Oligarch's Shadow3,344 words
- 07The Weight of the Office2,355 words
- 08February 245,084 words
- 09The Smartphone War4,719 words
- 10The Grind3,899 words
- 11The World Tour3,512 words
- 12The Counteroffensive3,496 words
- 13The Kursk Gambit3,553 words
- 14The Election That Did Not Happen2,994 words
- 15Trump Returns3,784 words
- 16The Energoatom Scandal4,035 words
- 17The Drone Diplomat4,180 words
- 18The Price of Endurance4,044 words
- 19The Man and the Myth3,574 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- Paperback · $19.99
- 6 × 9 in · 233 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback
- Hardcover · $24.99
- 6 × 9 in · 233 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block
- EPUB · $3.99
- EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books
ISBN 979-8-90470-024-9 - Audiobook · $5.99
- Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Edmund Hartley
ISBN 979-8-90623-005-8
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who is The Bunker Selfie about?
Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelensky. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Bunker Selfie — and the name goes on the line underneath.
02Is this an authorised biography?
No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.
03Can I read some of it before buying?
Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,672 words of the book.
04How long is it?
About 71,000 words, 19 chapters, 233 pages in the paperback.
05What is the printed book like?
6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf.
