Buddha's Little Finger by Victor Pelevin

Remember when the Soviet Union was one of the two most powerful states in the world -- an unmovable, unchanging monolith? the days when the clash of Communism and Capitalism was the most important theme of world history? Then one day it all went poof and disappeared, almost as if 80 years of history had never happened. Suddenly, the Soviet Union was just Russia, Leningrad was St. Petersburg again, and a resurrected "Duma" once again tried to invent a Russian version of democracy. Suddenly, the revolutionary movement that claimed its ultimate victory was the inevitable outcome of economic forces wound up on the rubbish heap of history. Imagine the Rip Van Winkle effects of living through such a time. What's real? What's unreal? Where am I? When am I?

Victor Pelevin's remarkable novel Buddha's Little Finger highlights the unreality of Russia today and its similarities to Russia in the days of the revolutionary by shuttling back and forth between the 1990s and 1918-19. In the 1990s, the main character of this first person narrative is Pyotr Voyd (the connotation "void" is intentional), a patient in a mental hospital. In 1918-19, this same person is Petka, sidekick of the Bolshevik commander Chapaev. In the present day, each of the patients, in a drug-induced hypnotic trance, tells about a critical moment in his inner life. Some of these tales would be intriguing short stories if published alone. (I previously read and enjoyed an extract from chapter 6 in Granta 64: Russia, the Wild East.) The disjunction from chapter to chapter and from one way of life to another highlights the dreamlike, almost insane unreality of contemporary events, and the difficulty of adjusting to it.

What for decades seemed real and immutable has been revealed as illusion. As Maria, one of the patients, puts it, " ... if you want to get out of here some time, you have to read the newspapers and experience real feelings while you're doing it. And not start doubting the reality of the world. Under Soviet power we were surrounded by illusions. But now the world has become real and knowable. Understand?" (p.108)

As the psychiatrist, Timur Timurovich, notes: "... nowadays almost everyone suffers from the same subconscious conflict. What I want you to do is recognize its nature. You know, the world around us is reflected in our consciousness and then it becomes the object of our mental activity. When established connections in the real world collapse, the same thing happens in the human psyche. And this is accompanied by the release of a colossal amount of psychic energy within the enclosed space of your ego. It's like a small atomic explosion. But what really matters is how the energy is channeled after the explosion." (pp. 32-33)

In other words, Pyotr Voyd's mental illness is not just a literary symbol for dealing with the illogical disjunctions of recent history. Within the context of the novel, the illness is in fact caused by the historical changes. This is an ironic twist on the doctrine of dialectical materialism. The physical/historical world shapes the consciousness of the individual; so when that objective world undergoes massive change in a very short time, as a consequence, the mental world of the individual explodes with energy.

In one sense, the Chapaev story is Pyotr's tale, which he dreams in the mental hospital and tells to his fellow inmates. In another sense, that story is a separate reality, and Pyotr/Petya is totally confused by the disjunction (moving from the one reality to the other abruptly like the hero in the old TV series Quantum Leap, but without any understanding of why and how this is happening to him). "It was painful to look at those men [the other inmates] and imagine the dark maze woven by the pathways of their fates. They had been deceived since childhood, and in essence nothing had changed for them because now they were simply being deceived in a different fashion... If I, just like them, am unable to understand, or even worse, merely imagine I understand the nature of the forces which control my life when I do not, then how am I any better than a drunken proletarian sent off to die for the word 'Internationalism'? Because I have read Gogol, Hegel and even Herzen? The whole thing was merely a bad joke." (p. 75)

Chapaev is an effective military leader when need be, but he is far more interested in philosophy and religion and the ultimate nature of reality than in the vagaries of the civil war. And the world in which he lives also has undergone an abrupt transformation, from Czarist to Communist rule.

Petya is inclined toward fatalism, a abdication of personal responsibility because he is at the mercy of forces beyond his control. "'... man is rather like this train. In exactly the same way he is doomed for all eternity to drag after hi out of the past a string of dark and terrible carriages inherited from goodness knows whom. And he calls the meaningless rumbling of this accidental coupling of hopes and opinions and fears his life. And there is no way to avoid this fate." (p. 84)

Chapaev, on the contrary, is a radical idealist (despite his role as a Bolshevik officer), and he repeatedly and creatively emphasizes man's ultimate freedom, regardless of the material circumstances. "'I wish to propose a toast,' said Chapaev, resting his hypnotic gaze on me, 'for the terrible ties in which it has been our lot to be born, and for all those who even in such days as these do not cease to strive for freedom.'" (p. 80)

Near the end of the story, Chapaev introduces Petya to a dead Baron, who then leads Petya to another plane of being or to a land of the dead and explains, "The world in which we live is simply a collective visualization, which we are taught to make from our earl childhood. It is, in actual fact, the only thing that one generation hands on to the next. When a sufficient number of people see this steppe, this grass and feel this summer wind, then we are able to experience it all together with them. But no matter what forms might be prescribed for us by the past, in reality what each of us sees in life is still only a reflection of his own spirit." (p. 235)

At times this idealism that Petya/Pyotr learns sounds like an echo of Emerson, "I used to do a lot of travelling, and then at some moment I suddenly realized that no matter where I might go, in reality I can do no more than move within a single space, and that space is myself." (p.283) (cf. the essay on Self-Reliance)

At other times, it borrows heavily from Buddhism, and plays with mystifying symbols and contradiction. "As soon as I know... I am no longer free. But I am absolutely free when I do not know." (p. 301) "Absolute emptiness is the homeland, the mother is the unborn." (p. 311) At those times, the spirit and style of the story seem to hearken back to the pre-revolutionary novelist Andre Biely, the symbolist poet Alexander Blok, and the mystical visions of philosopher/poet Sergei Soloviev, who foresaw the apocalyptic fate and redemption of Russia symbolically connected with the East.

And, indeed, while each piece draws the reader in, like interconnected short stories, the overall effect is more poetic and philosophical than novelistic. You are left with indelible images and puzzles rather than the quick fix of a plot that neatly ties up all the narrative issues at the end.

Other book reviews by Richard Seltzer

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