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Victor Pelevin. Buddha's Little Finger. Andrew Bromfield, tr. New York. Vi-- king. 2000. ix + 335 pages. $25.95. ISBN 0-670-89168-1.
FIRST APPEARING IN 1996 in Russian under the title Chapaev i Pustota (Chapaev and Emptiness), Victor Pelevin's novel has continued to evoke controversy among Russian readers and critics. On the surface, Buddha's Little Finger is a very readable work of postmodern popsa (pop art) that pokes fun at Soviet mythmaking, in particular the image of Russian Civil War hero Vastly Chapaev, whom the author transforms from good-natured simpleton into an unsurpassed master of the Zen koan (philosophical riddle). Yet the novel's agenda is far more ambitious and sweeping: namely, to capture the social chaos and psychological disorientation resulting from the disintegration of the Soviet Union. In pasting together the diverse fragments of post-Soviet reality into a world of Gogolian absurdity, Pelevin raises questions about the meaning of life and art itself.
The plot of Buddha's Little Finger meanders through the murky void between dream and reality. The hero, Peter Voyd (Pustota = "emptiness" in the original Russian), wakes up now in 1991 in a Moscow mental hospital, now as an officer serving in Chapaev's legendary army in 1919, where he sees no military action but engages in long debates with Chapaev about being and existence. That discourse, conducted in the language of Zen Buddhism and mirroring the traditional mentor/neophyte relationship, gives the novel a certain cohesiveness and, at the same time, pretentiousness.
As the novel unfolds, the reader realizes belatedly that Peter Voyd has an acute case of schizophrenia. To cure him of his 1919 delusions, the head doctor of the clinic, bearing the threatening name of Timur Timurovich Kanashnikov, subjects him to a battery of hallucinogenic drugs. Part of that treatment is group therapy. As each patient undergoes Dr. Kanashnikov's drug therapy, the others must listen to their fellow inmate's ravings. The psychedelic worlds...