Dreaming in Russian

What do we think about when we think about Russia? Caviar and vodka, certainly; gulags and ballets, perhaps. Victor Pelevin, one of the cleverest inkers to translate contemporary Russia for the likes of us, thinks about ax murderers. Raskolnikov, who solved rent hikes in “Crime and Punishment” with the blundering panache of a mid-19th century Anthony Perkins, is clearly the precursor of the hero of Pelevin’s latest novel, “Buddha’s Little Finger.” Perhaps this preoccupation is the punishment for being a Russian writer. “Damnation take these eternal Dostoevskian obsessions that pursue us Russians!” says the self-aware Pelevin early on in the book. “And damnation take us Russians who can see nothing else around us!”

In Russian, Raskolnikov translates as “split.” And indeed, Pyotr Void, Pelevin’s hero, is as neatly split as the head of Raskolnikov’s pawnbroker. In one life--a life set in 1920--Void appears to be a highly acclaimed poet from St. Petersburg who finds himself in Moscow in the second year of the Russian civil war. A chance meeting with an old friend thrusts him into committing a cold-blooded murder and becoming Commissar to the infamous Bolshevik commandante Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev.

Perhaps because of the murder, Void lives in a vivid dream world as well. Some of those dreams transport him to a Russian mental hospital in the mid-1990s, following the latest Russian civil war, where he is the patient of Timur Timurovich (whose dissertation, as it turns out, pace Raskolnikov, is entitled “The Split False Personality”). In the privacy of his padded room, this later Pyotr fantasizes that he is Petka, the aide-de-camp of the famous Chapaev, a real-life hero of both the 1919 revolution and one of the most popular, most insufferably Soviet novels of Soviet history, titled “Chapaev.” With splits of time as well as of personality, it’s little wonder that Pyotr’s psychiatrist is getting a Ph.D.

Dreams as vivid as reality--the concept is at least as old as Descartes and as moldy as Plato’s cave, and few philosophers above the age of 18 lose much sleep over it. So when the 1920s Petka says, “The Russian people realized very long ago that life is no more than a dream,” one breathes a sigh of relief when it is uttered as less of a philosophical statement than as a come-on to Anna, Chapaev’s short-haired seductive machine-gunner. And there’s a gratifying freshness to the air when one flies over the modern cuckoo’s nest with Pelevin and his Pyotr. Petka--at whichever end of the Russian century he finds himself--is a 26-year-old lost soul, a member, as the ranking psychiatrist of the hospital says, of “the very generation that was programmed for life in one socio-cultural paradigm but has found itself living in a quite different one.” That, after all, is a concept all of us century straddlers can conceive. For Dostoevsky is not Pelevin’s only obsession.

Contemporary culture from the West has been pulped and fed to Pyotr’s comrades. In the world according to Pelevin, Moscow gangsters chew psychedelic mushrooms and lift their lines straight from dubbed tapes of “Pulp Fiction” and Arnold Schwarzenegger talkies. “ ‘You remember our talk about the inner public prosecutor?’ ‘Yeah, I remember. The guy who can put you away if you step over the line. Like Raskolnikov when he topped that dame, and he thought his inner prosecutor’d let him go on the nod, only it didn’t work out that way. . . . Turns out all you gotta do is take out that inner pig of yours, and that’s it. Then no one don’t finger no one, get it?’ ”

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And speaking of fingers, the East appears in the form of a religious-military relic, the little finger of the Buddha Anagama, not to mention Buddhist meditations and Buddhist trips into a Buddhist afterlife, all of which play considerable roles in the philosophical bathhouse musings of Petka and Chapaev. “Buddha’s Little Finger” is full of enough philosophy, political and ridiculous, that translates perfectly well to the cities of America and the countries of the Americas as it does to Russia. “The most sensitive of scoundrels,” says Timur Timurovich, “actually adapt to change before it has even begun. . . . In actual fact, all the changes that happen in the world only take place because of such highly sensitive scoundrels. Because, in reality, they do not anticipate the future at all, but shape it, by creeping across to occupy the quarter from which they think the wind will blow. Following which, the wind has no option but to blow from that very quarter.”

Even the most ardent Western fan of Pelevin’s work (and his 1995 “The Life of Insects” is one of the most original parables to appear in any language in the last decade), however, is occasionally forced to admit that some of the stuff is more inside-Kremlin than borscht belt, with references to the Twentieth Party Congress and the vague feeling that the full flavor of the Chapaev jokes requires at least a five-year plan of propaganda and Stoli to be fully appreciated. “I had always prided myself on my ability to understand the latest developments in art,” Pyotr says toward the end of the novel, “and recognize the eternal and unchanging elements concealed behind the unpredictable complexities of form, but in this case the rift between my customary experience and what I saw was simply too wide to be bridged.” The hapless reader agrees.

And the little finger of the Buddha itself, which turns out to be a Dr. Strangelovely device commanded by the impossible Anna that might have looked good in, say, a Stanley Kubrick or Beatles movie of the mid-’60s, plays a little weak in the West at this late date.

Nevertheless, the occasional worn and parochial detail should not deter a single reader from either an introduction or a return peek behind the Pelevin Curtain. Who else these days has the wit to write novels in which the hero finally leaves a mental hospital and rides off into a Clint Eastwood sunset with a hope and this prayer: “I can write poetry, I can command a cavalry squadron. Something will turn up.”