Buddha's Little Finger

Viktor Pelevin · b. 1962 · Russia

Originally Чапаев и Пустота (Russian)

Why it matters

A poet mistaken for a Red Army commander in 1919 debates Buddhist emptiness with his own hallucinations, while a 1990s mental patient dreams he's living in 1919. Pelevin's genre-scrambling masterwork of post-Soviet unreality.

At a glance

Two braided timelines and dense philosophical digression on consciousness and illusion.