In one of many neat scenes in this infuriating but powerful fictionalised memoir, the author goes to a shooting range with a friend during a business trip. He hits all the targets. Awestruck bystanders ask if he was a sniper. No, his friend replies, "He's just from Chechnya."

Beyond pictures of a devastated Grozny and horrendous statistics  hundreds of thousands of Chechens and tens of thousands of Russian soldiers dead  the world knows little about the Russian-Chechen wars of the 1990s, because the Chechen rebels and the Russian government kept reporters away. But the world knows even less about Chechnya as a place in its own right. This is the first Chechen-authored book to make it into English in recent history, and it's a welcome antidote to our collective ignorance.

Sadulaev left his home city of Shali in 1989, to study and later practise law in St Petersburg. This book is drenched with the rage, guilt and sorrow of "the war I wasn't in". Towards the end, he declares without discernible irony: "That's why my books are the best. The best books on war are those written by deserters." He is wrong  the best such book available in English is the brilliant and harrowing One Soldier's War in Chechnya by Arkady Babchenko. But Sadulaev's mission is different  he has the voice of a poet and the perspective of a "lone bird who has strayed from the flock". This is at once a requiem for Chechnya, a meditation on post-Soviet identity and one man's attempt to exorcise his homeland's ghosts.

And they are many. "For whom am I writing this book?"he asks. "For them. This is the book of the dead . . ." He is not exaggerating. The narrator's sister and father were critically wounded by weapons banned under the Geneva Conventions. Almost everyone he grew up with, listening to Led Zeppelin, is dead. The unremitting bloodbath of friends and acquaintances, innocents and civilians, leaves you stunned. The narrator draws intimate portraits of the kids and adults who peopled his youth, only to reveal that they too were killed.

Some of the best vignettes are from before the war: the bittersweet Soviet times when republics were equal and kids ran in strawberry fields now turned to minefields; the "romantic gangsterism" of the 1990s, with its black comedy of opportunism; the creepy emergence of "the beards" (Islamic radicals); people's disbelief as "the war came to us", "a war of all against all".

Sadulaev is brilliant when letting events speak. The stories are so raw and the sorrow of broken dreams so visceral that no embroidering is needed. Unfortunately, there is an awful lot of embroidering  nearly half the book shows no signs of having been edited. The clean prose of chapters such as "Tanks", "Bombs" and "Grozny" is choked by ponderous soliloquies where over-wrought metaphors are stretched beyond breaking point. Sentiments and images are repeatedly hammered home, and so are aggressive attitudes: Moscow is ruled by "bank fraudsters with Jewish surnames", women "smell of fish", non-fighting men are "women" or "whores", and the only woman who gets the time of day is Sadulaev's mother, indistinguishable from the motherland. At least we have an honest narrator. But not all the time  there is a problem with who is telling this story. The narrator fitfully assumes the voices of other characters and suddenly pops up  confusingly  in violent scenes. This undermines our trust in his integrity, if not in the events themselves, which we are morally compelled to believe. Instead of polyphony, we get cacophony.

In terms of narrative and style this "diary of a madman" is a mess, but it's a compelling mess. Sadulaev's voice is a volatile blend of love and hate, shame and pride, self-loathing and megalomania, fatalism and rage, the aftermath of death and the premonition of death. It is a painful book to read and it was clearly a painful book to write, and therein lies its power.

Kapka Kassabova's Street Without a Name is published by Portobello.