Chapayev and Pustota (Russian: Чапаев и Пустота), known in the US as Buddha's Little Finger and in the UK as Clay Machine Gun, is a 1996 novel by Victor Pelevin.

[1] It follows the dreams of three Moscow mental patients in the early 1990s, with the main protagonist imagining flashbacks to the Russian Civil War, in which he was enlisted by a legendary Bolshevik commander.

Buddha's Little Finger has been compared to the works of Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Bulgakov; it contains many satirical vignettes, and blurs the line between dream and reality.

After a head injury he has partly taken up the identity of "Simply Maria" – a character played by Victoria Ruffo in the soap opera Simplemente María which was very popular in Russia in the 1990s.

In his hallucinations he is a manly woman who meets Arnold Schwarzenegger and after flying together with him on a military airplane through Moscow Maria is hit by the Ostankino Tower.

She wrote that "while the protagonist’s search for authentic being and self-definition leads him to disregard the meaning others impose on his life, the novel recognizes the ethical problem of reducing the reality of others.

The work is built on the philosophy of Zen Buddhism, according to which "active penetration into the nature of things means discovering a new world, and at the intuitive level.

[6][7] Chapaev's armored car, in which Peter makes his escape into emptiness, has slits resembling "half-closed Buddha eyes" for a reason.

"[5] A reviewer for Publishers Weekly was highly positive, writing that the work "will surely cement the reputation of Pelevin [...] as one of contemporary Russia's leading writers."

[10] In The New York Times, Scott Bradfield argued that the satire is sometimes overkill, but claimed to admire the "genuine concern for the people who get lost in today's ideological battlefield".

The reviewer dismissed the satire on Western values as "clumsily transparent", but praised Pelevin's re-creation of Russia's early 20th-century literary culture.