Buddha's little finger

the long version

"We first encounter Pyotr Voyd, the hero of Buddha's Little Finger, during the Russian Civil War of 1919, when, through a strange sequence of events, he finds himself serving as commissar to the legendary Bolshevik commander Chapaev, and falling in love with his machine-gunner sidekick, Anna. But who is the Pyotr Voyd who finds himself incarcerated among a group of patients in a contemporary Moscow psychiatric hospital? And who is the Chapaev who issues maddeningly metaphysical dialogues on the virtues of the void and the illusory nature of reality? And where does Arnold Schwarzenegger fit into all this?"--BOOK JACKET.