Plot Summary
The novel is written as a first-person narrative of Peotr Pustota (English: Petr Void) and in the introduction to this book it is claimed that unlike Dmitri Furmanov's book "Chapayev", this book is the truth.
The book is set in two different times - after the October revolution and in modern Russia. In the post-revolutionary period Pyotr Pustota is a poet who has fled from St.Petersurg to Moscow and who takes up the identity of a Soviet political commissar and meets a strange man named Vasily Chapayev who is some sort of an army commander. He spends his days drinking samogon, taking drugs and talking about the meaning of life with Chapayev.
Every night (according to his post-revolutionary life) Pustota has nightmares about him being locked up in a psychiatric hospital because of his beliefs of being a poet from the beginning of the century. He shares the room in the hospital with three other men, each with his very individual form of fake identity.
Until the end of the book it isn't perfectly clear, which of Petr's identities is the real one and whether there is such a thing as a real identity at all.
Read more about this topic: Chapayev And Void
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