Buddha's Little Finger.

Mozur, Joseph P. Jr.

Victor Pelevin. Buddha's Little Finger. Andrew Bromfield, tr. New York. Viking. 2000. ix + 335 pages. $25.95. ISBN 0-670-89168-1.

FIRST APPEARING IN 2996 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 Vasily 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 rite 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 of the patients make up much of the novel. One of them, foolishly named Maria by his intellectual parents because they were fans of Erich Maria Remarque and Rainer Maria Rilke, has an alternate female personality madly in love with Arnold Schwarzenegger. His mind is cluttered with American pop culture and Mexican soap operas, much of which is easily recognizable to the Russian reader as derived from cheap foreign videos. A second patient in the ward, Volodin, is a new Russian gangster. His hallucination is set in the dark woods around a Chekhovian campfire, where the men discuss the meaning of life, relating difficult philosophical arguments to the criminal world of bribery, extortion, and killing. The horror of the group therapy propels Voyd over and over again back to his delusions of 1919. There, Chapaev, whom Voyd meets after he shoots up a bar frequented by the St. Peterburg intelligentsia, encourages him to recognize that the world is an illusion and to try to cure himself of his illness by writing down his dreams. The "real" realty of 1991 and the psychiatric ward are, in Chapaev's view, but a dream to the Voyd of 1919.

The 1991 therapy sessions alternate with the plot of the Chapaev campaign, which culminates in chapter 9 with Voyd's "return" to the mutinous Chapaev army. There the troops begin to rampage, incited to murder the officers by none other than Dmitri Furmanov, the regimental commissar and real-life author of the socialist-realist mythmaking novel on Chapaev. Yet Chapaev drinks in his room calmly and continues his discussions with Peter, remarking: "The entire world is a joke that God has told to himself. And God himself is the same joke too." The drunken soldiers break the door down, and Chapaev and Voyd flee. They escape the threatening reality by boarding Chapaev's armored car, where the machine gun turns out to be a gun with the encased little finger of the Buddha Anagama, which turns everything it points at into "nothingness."

When Voyd comes to again in 1991 in the hospital, Timur Timurovich congratulates him on his catharsis and full recovery. After giving him a final test, which Voyd passes by refusing to answer the absurd questions, the head doctor discharges him from the hospital. Voyd walks out the gates and rejoins the Moscow of 1991. He takes a cab to the same bar where in his imagination at the beginning of the novel in 1919 he and two Red sailors drive out the liberal intelligentsia. His cabbie turns out to be an old man familiar with Solzhenitsyn's famous political treatise Kak nam obustroit' Rossiiu? (1990; Eng. How Should We Reform Russia?). When the conversation turns to Russia and reform, the old man remarks that if every Russian were to do his part in making Russia a better place, there would be no need for such discussion. Peter responds with a Zen koan: "Every time the concept and image of Russia appears in your conscious mind, you have to let it dissolve away in its own inner nature. And since the concept and image of Russia has no inner nature of its own, the result is that everything is sorted out [reformed] most satisfactorily." The old man tells Voyd off, and in doing so provides a rejection of the whole Chapaev and Buddhist plot line: Pretending that you doubt the reality of the world is the most cowardly form of escape from that very reality. Squalid intellectual poverty, if you want my opinion. Despite all its seeming absurdity, cruelty, and senselessness, the world nonetheless exists, doesn't it? And all the problems in it exist as well, don't they?

The cabbie kicks Voyd out, and his short-lived return to 1991 comes to an abrupt end when he flees a brawl he causes in the bar. When he reaches the street, his hallucination begins anew and he discovers Chapaev waiting for him. The novel closes as Chapaev takes Voyd to safety in Inner Mongolia, where all the contradictions of life are resolved.

Buddha' s Little Finger combines the trivial and the serious to create a commercial blockbuster. There is something for everyone in the novel, from wordplay and comic incongruities to several recycled Chapaev jokes, humorously condemned by Peter Voyd as cheap slander of his Zen mentor. Yet it is Zen Buddhism that sets the novel apart from the more decadent postmodernist mainstream in Russia today; it is the food for thought that Pelevin offers his post-Soviet readers. But Pelevin is without the pretensions of a writer who is sure he has all the answers. Indeed, he allows an episodic character at the conclusion of his novel to condemn Voyd's newly gained Zen insight about the illusionary nature of reality.

Perhaps one of the reasons for Pelevin's fascination with Zen Buddhism in his prose fiction is Buddhism's central belief in the impermanence of all things. Impermanence and change are viewed as neither good nor bad but as phenomena that must be embraced as normal. Given the social, political, and economic upheaval that has rocked Russia for the past ten years, Pelevin's message to his readers seems to be to strive to view those changes with equanimity. No wonder his works are eagerly embraced by youthful readers and soundly rejected by the older generation.

Andrew Bromfield has done an admirable job in translating Pelevin's zany novel and has even mended some of the original's stylistic lapses and wordiness. Regrettable perhaps is only the practice of spelling out English obscenities in the speech of Pelevin's underclass characters, when in the Russian original the author generally resorts to euphemisms or abbreviations.

Joseph P. Mozur Jr. University of South Alabama