Чапаев и Пустота

Peleven's critically acclaimed novel tells the story of a poet from St. Petersburg who finds himself caught in a temporal tug of war: on one hand, he's walking a tightrope between Reds and Whites during the Russian Revolution, and on the other, he's floating in and out of the bizarre world of a psychiatric hospital in 1990's Moscow. Pelevin offers up these parallel lives in such a kaleidoscopic jumble that it's sometimes easy to get lost. Yet those readers willing to follow the hero in his travails–to make, as it were, a leap into the Voyd–will encounter a hilarious, disturbing, and wildly inventive exploration of reality. IN RUSSIAN.