Article contentVolodymyr Zelenskyy was, of all things, a comedian. A man fluent in irony, not authority. He built a career on the sly recognition that power is mostly performance, then won Ukraine’s presidency with three-quarters of the vote against 30 rivals. It is tempting to read this as a joke that got out of hand, but it seems to be something closer to a national premonition. A people who chose a storyteller may have understood, before they could say so, that they needed someone who knew that nations are held together not by force, but by the stories they agree to believe about themselves.